eucharistic coconuts

 2 March 2024

 

Two other things from my interaction with Jyoti that I forgot to mention. 

 

One of the things that occurred to me this time at Shantivanam––and I do not mean this as a criticism, just an observation––was that the use of the puja stone for the altar for me harkens a little too strongly to the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist and does not give much if any indication of a meal, only a kind of prasada, the food and drink offered to a deity during puja that, it is believed, the deity partakes of, thereby consecrating it, and then returns––the offering being distributed and eaten by the worshippers. (The other thing I missed this time was very little intercessory prayer.) Hence, the use of altars that more resemble tables (pace the detractors––the Vatican II documents talk about the two tables of the Word and Sacrament). And so I asked Jyoti about this in the context is wondering what of the Vatican II liturgical reform, besides inculturation, particularly influenced their work on the liturgy in India. He thought for a moment and then, not completely answering the question, said that, similar to other cultures I suppose, the Indian culture would have a particular revulsion to the idea of eating human flesh and drinking human blood. He then told me about a Hindu man, who never became an official Christian but started an ashram dedicated to Jesus. Instead of bread and wine he did a kind of a eucharist with a coconut. It is broken open, the flesh is consumed, and even its water is consumed. Once it is broken open (how I love this image!), it gives all of itself, like Jesus, for others. The suggestion being, I assume, that in spite of being historically representative of what Jesus did on that last day with his disciples, maybe bread and wine are not the only or the best eucharistic symbols for every culture.

The other thing was this. It’s taken from the second article of his that he asked me to read. We only touched on this briefly as well as on his own study of Aurobindo (via Fr. Bede, again, like myself). I was suggesting that the mystical, the apophatic does not have to be seen only as the ending point of the journey but, in keeping with my own theme of “from the ground up: rediscovering the divine,” maybe it’s the starting point for a new art (music, dance, painting), new forms of worship. Here is where the mystical intuition is not necessarily opposed to the artistic one, another debate that Bede had with Jyoti. Jyoti wrote this is the essence of Aurobindo’ integral yoga (and this of course opens up a whole ‘nother conversation; I got this more from the Mother than from Aurobindo himself): “… it is not only an ascent, as in the concept of attaining to higher states of being: it is also a descent, a way of going into the very material reality of the opaque world in which we live.” This is why it’s safe to say that the liturgy and sacramentality in general is so Tantric: it sees that material reality can be a conveyor of the divine. 

 

This launched into my whole theory that in the Protestant Reformation these things go together: distancing from liturgy, the contemplative life (and monasticism) and an anthropology that views the human condition as hopelessly fallen in need of being completely covered over by grace (taking Augustine to the extreme), like snow over a dung heap. As opposed to Thomas Aquinas’ famous, which could be on my own coat of arms, gratia non tollit naturam sed perfecit––“Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” This attitude, or lack of it, affected all of our missionary work as well as interreligious dialogue––again, or the lack of it––for centuries. In the other article Jyoti suggests, in keeping with this theme, that being sent on mission ought to be more like a pilgrimage than a campaign, an encounter with the sacramentality recognized as already there. At the risk of putting words into his mouth, this means meeting Christ already present in beauty, truth, and goodness already in the culture, Jacques Dupuis’ pro-Christian, not just pre-Christian. As Jyoti put it, “By recognizing that what is sacramental is a shared ‘common land’ we can come to this space in a spirit of dialogue and mutual respect.”*

 

It rained this morning here in Delhi, and it’s a cool 65 degrees. I slept very well and had a quiet morning in my hotel room doing all the things I do left to my own devices, waiting for my ride to Haridwar at noon.

*“Elemental Signs of the Sacramental: Sacramentality, Visual Arts, and the Earth,” Jyoti Sahi in Sacraments and Sacramentality, 110.