Most forms of Judaism seem good at encouraging people to socialise. To find kinship and spirituality and community in the conversation, in the shared home space, in the food. Shabbat, for a start. Where or when did Christianity lose the concept of simply getting all one's family and/or friends together once a week for a meal? Is it because, when Jesus told his disciples that the Seder bread and wine were henceforth to be regarded as his body and blood, the sanctity or sacramentality of the event seemed so overwhelming that it needed a place of worship rather than a home, or a male priest rather than a woman cooking to contain and officiate at it? Or is simply because Christians have this earnest guilt thing going that says they need to be doing "important" things, rather than just sitting eating? Or is it even more simply that Christians have lost touch with the importance of time and relationships?
Can anyone out there explain this , either historically or theologically?
Can anyone out there explain, phenomenologically, pastorally or otherwise, why getting friends and family together in such a way, usually even without any explicitly declared faith content, just seems to work?
Does anyone else ever invite people round for food on a regular basis and think about what it says or reveals about God and community in it all?
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5 comments:
I don't think the tradition is lost entirely. In churches that are organized by small groups or by "house churches," the custom of getting together for meals on a semi-regular basis still thrives.
Interestingly, in some cultures, sharing hospitality with a person then obligates you not to be hostile toward them later. It must go back to the basic struggle for survival. In a subsistence economy, if you share your food with someone, you have invested in their survival (and risked your own by giving away some of your supplies). It would make no sense to turn on that person later unless they really gave you substantial cause.
I don't know . . . I'm just thinking as I type here.
Is part of the problem that we tend to invite family and friends for meals, but that we don't always like the people we worship with? At home we have friendship, in church we have fellowship.
It's one of the great strengths of church that it can draw widely different people together and shape them into a community.
It's one of its weaknesses that, ultimately, we remain "Sunday only" separate.
I have been in much more hostile "house churches". It is a different type of conformity. The guy with the piercings and tatoos doesn't fit in...
What Erika said!! [The word] Fellowship is a bad thing as it has no commitment beyond church and onto a personal level. Friends who go to church offer me [and I offer them] much more than the people who have "fellowship" with me - ie tell me off "in love".
Robb
We're meant to eat and we're meant to love.
"We're meant to eat and we're meant to love"
I suppose that's it. And can we love one another enough to invite the one-anothers we struggle to even like? And not just invite but welcome, talk to and really get to know? I always really struggled with the enforced and contrived nature of the "fellowship" efforts of some churches, too (it's why I can't bring myself to serve quiche.) Can we love one another enough to invite the one-anothers we struggle to even like? And not just invite but welcome, talk to and really get to know?
Can we? I'm not sure...
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