“But for those of us to whom urban life is necessary and who cannot forego eating men, it is to our advantage to frequent the countries where one finds the most of them.” -Rousseau
At All Saints Anglican in Honolulu, where I serve as rector, it has been our practice from the beginning to share a potluck meal every Sunday after the conclusion of the Lord’s Service. It has been a logical consequence of the words of the Dismissal, “Let us go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit!” To which the people respond with “Thanks be to God!” and a trinity of ‘Alleluias.’
The meal is just as central to our mission as it is to our worship, and follows a biblical precedent, as we understand it in our parish:
- In the liturgy, we, the fold and flock of God, have feasted at the Lord’s table. Now, in mission, we feast at the folding tables of man.
- In the liturgy, we have loved the Lord our God with all our hearts. Now, in mission, we love our neighbors as ourselves as we look across the table at them, eating and trying to get their children to eat.
- In the liturgy, we participate in the Service of the Table. Now, after the dismissal we carry-on the ministry of table service to the widow and the orphan.
- In the liturgy, we have received the shewbread from our High Priest. Now, we share that gift with our brothers-in-arms, in the bonds of peace.
- In the liturgy, we have ascended to the Mountain Citadel to commune with YHWH. Now during the potluck we descend carrying the peace of the Heavenly Jerusalem back into the earthly city of Honolulu.
Before government regulations placed limits on our singing due to COVID-19, limits were first placed on mealtime. The corporate sharing of food, as it cannot be done with masks and demands a great degree of biological exchange, was identified as a hazard. And this was not just true of our church’s potluck, but of all mealtime gatherings in the state, even picnics out-of-doors. A potluck now represents a more radical protest to secular authority than a march on Honolulu Hale.
The meal seems to have become a very political thing in the past 6 months. But it only seems that way.
The meal is by nature political. It is the ordering principle of the polis that partakes in it. The meal is the measure of the city. From the feasts of Ancient Greece, where bios and zoe could be measured by one’s social proximity to the dinner, to the lunch-whistles of the industrial revolution, cities are ordered by their eating.
Marcel Henaff, in his essay “The Cannibalistic City: Rousseau, Large Numbers, and the Abuse of the Social Bond” suggests that, for the “cannibalistic cities” of Adam, “the fete is the mediation between the generalization of political principles and the uniqueness of experiences which brings together-in a specific place-bodies, faces, stories, feelings” (22). He notes the way that, for Rousseau in particular, the public feast is a kind of catharsis, a temporary stay against the otherwise devouring and cannibalizing forces at work in the city. For Rousseau then, the feast-meal of the city presents the citizens with a sense of intimacy, while maintaining the social distance required to subvert the rivalry between them. The rule of mimetic rivalry is that I want what others have, and that they are the thing that stands between me and the having of it. They are the reason for my lack. The fete offers my fellow citizens and I something to share besides our mutual antipathy. Without the meal we cannot be fellow-citizens.
This makes Biblical sense: The politics of Eden as the pre-city, was sustained in what Schmemann refers to as the cosmic eucharist. Adam as the priest made a meal of the world, offering up all of creation to YHWH as thanksgiving. The politics of the Fall, and the cities of man, needed, likewise, a sustaining meal. But how, now that the world was divorced from the eternal life of its creator and the erstwhile priest made a house-slave in the dominion of the Satan, can such a meal be prepared?
Cities demand that the children of men dwell in proximity to one another. But that proximity incites violence as the presence of our neighbor exposes our frailty, our death; confronting us with the image of the God against whom we rebelled. Bonhoeffer notes with profound insight in his Ethics that the “peculiar fact that we lower our eyes when a stranger meets our gaze is not a sign of remorse for a fault, but a sign of that shame which, when it knows that it is seen, is reminded of something that it lacks, namely, the lost wholeness of life, its own nakedness…” (24). The rule of the city of men becomes “your life or mine.”
This impending violence, as Henaff notes above, can be seemingly delimited as long as something is placed between the ‘sons of disobedience’ on which their mutual antipathy can feed (cf. Eph. 2.1-3).
The logic of such a city, to quote Henaff, is that: “When one eats something with others one is not tempted to devour them. A meal puts the world between men and pacifies them” (22).
But what about when the Adamic meal that seeks to pacify the inhabitants of the city of man, is suspended? What about when limits on public gatherings foreclose this kind of communal fete? Cities become smorgasbords of cannibalistic consumption: economically, socially, legally, and culturally. Saint-Preux, in Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise, reflects upon such cities: “One is almost sorry to be a man when one thinks of the unfortunates whose blood one must eat” (II, 603; as quoted in Henaff, 19).
Perhaps much of the unrest we are witnessing in the contemporary west has more to do with the gradual disappearance of mealtime and public festival (and now, especially in some places, the outright prohibition of them), than other factors more popularly discussed. If Rousseau and Henaff are right, the fete is the thing sustaining the political order of the world of Adam. And so, when the fete disappears from the cities of men, “they devour each other” (23). This, Rousseau explains, is why, especially in times of social revolution, “everyone flocks to Rome, Paris, and London” for “[i]t is always in capitals that human blood is the cheapest. (Julie, or The New Heloise, IV, 831; as cited in Henaff, 19).
It is no act of prophesy to suggest that the long suspension of fete from the civic life of secular western culture will only acerbate the decay of neoliberal order, doing so in a deeply paradoxical gesture: that precisely by seeking to arrest its deletion, the secular state enacts its own erasure.
The City of God, however, is an everlasting city. Not because the worlds it inhabits never die, but because this City is a resurrected City. A City for whom “death is not end, but beginning,” as Peter Leithart has put it . Of course, the City of God, like other cities, finds its political order in a meal. However, because this is the True City, the civitas civitatum, the meal which orders this polis is the True Meal.
But the meal-centric nature of God’s Kingdom does not begin at the Last Supper. It is a principle of God’s covenantal dealings even from the barring of the gates of Paradise.
At the eastern edges of those gates, the Lord makes coverings for Adam and Eve. A boundary between their bodies which achieves that Rousseauean “sense of intimacy” without the Bonhoefferian “recognition of shame.” Also in this action by God, we may surmise, is the introduction of the sacrificial meal: The flesh of the animals used for coverings became the stuff of that first sacrificial meal. Likely they were clean animals, to cover the ‘unclean’ nakedness of sinful human flesh. (For further development on this theme, see Leithart’s “Epidermal Theology”).
So even as the seeds of the rebellious cities of man are sown amidst the brambles of the world, God extends the promise of his covenant faithfulness by putting something bloody between himself and his citizens, as well as between his citizens and one another; something other than each other for Adam and Eve to devour in the world of death.
The sacrificial meal, likewise is placed by God “in between” Abraham’s blade and Isaac’s life just as a sacrificial meal is set between the Angel of Death and the household of Israel in Goshen. Perhaps, though this may be nothing, there is some terrible mystery at work in Abigail setting herself between David’s red wrath and Nabal’s folly, she hazards the potential “devouring” in order to set the men at peace.
The Meal offered in the City of God, does not merely repress the mutual antipathy of humanity. It resolves it. In this Meal our eyes are lifted from the rivalrous gazes of Cain and Saul and Ahab, as we “look upon Me, the one whom they have pierced” (Zech.12.10). In this Meal there is an “effusiveness poured-out upon the church” (to borrow language from Richard Bledsoe’s Biblical Horizons lectures on Girard) to weep as all of our violence falls on the flesh of the Suffering Servant. In Him our rivalry is not obfuscated, it is swallowed-up. The rule of the Table of the Kingdom of God “your life for mine, my life for yours.”
The graces of the Table of Our Lord, moreover, extend in the direction of mission to the tables of our homes, our coffees, and our potlucks. The grace of the Eucharist extends to become the hospitality of the numerous tables and meals of the parish; flaming-out “like shining from shook foil” to imbue our eating with the charity of the “city that is at unity with itself.”
Ours is a time when the fete of the polis of neoliberal order has been suspended, in which the eyes of the unbaptized are lifted hungrily from the place on the table which the meal used to occupy to the lives of their neighbors and rivals. Our neighbors and our cities will be, therefore, looking for something —or, as Rousseau suggests, somebody— to devour.
Though much rubbished and ridiculed, though trivialized by church-growth models, though exhausting and possibly chaotic (especially if your church is peopled with lots of young children), and though difficult, even risky perhaps, in our current health crisis, the Christian practice of eating together (at the Table, and at one another’s tables) is one we should be slow to jettison. For the tables of the parish are nothing if not signs and pointers to the greater Table of Our Lord; little festal remembrances of the promise that the City of God will resurrect the cities of men.
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.