Taste and see...

[Bob Kelso]

So how do you all interpret this?

I interpreted this as a dirty race: Picture it, Sicily, 1922... er, sorry, I've been watching Golden Girls again.



Anyway:

"T. S. Elliot said in the Four Quartets, "[Human]kind cannot bear very much reality."

Right out of the gates with an old religious tone-setter that denigrates humanity at large.



There are weak minded people that turn to religion because they can't handle what life dishes out, sure, but it's an egregious generalization to throw every religious person under that hat.

What humans often prefer are highly contrived ways of avoiding the real, the concrete, the physical. We fabricate artificial realities instead, one of which, I'm sad to say, is religion itself. So Jesus brought all of our fancy thinking down to earth, to one concrete place of incarnation--this bread and this cup of wine! "Eat it here, and then see it everywhere," he seems to be saying. (Munch it, chew it, gobble it.)

Here we see Christianity trying to break away from the competition, with an unsportsmanlike smokescreen.

I'd ask if the author had any self awareness but I feel that I have a good guess already. The Eucharist does nothing to set Christianity apart from other "highly contrived ways of avoiding the real, the concrete, the physical" as it was put earlier. Unless you count the creepy pretend cannibalism factor, 'cos that's just fucked up.

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If it's too idealized and pretty, if it's somewhere floating around up in the air, it's probably not the Gospel. We come back, again and again, to this marvelous touchstone of orthodoxy, the Eucharist. The first physical incarnation in the body of Jesus is now continued in space and time in ordinary food."

As for this bit? Just some mumbo jumbo gobbledygook.