I like Thanksgiving. It provides a time for me to regroup after the SBL meetings every year. Now it's a bit more precious because the four kids gather with us together. We withdraw into the nuclear family for a few moments before the pace picks up with the end of the school semester and the Advent season. I usually grade and read and sleep a lot.

I'm reading an interesting book by Steven Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Trasnformation of American Social Order, 1730-1840. I'm trying to get a detailed picture of the role of the Masons in the formation of the United States -- basically as a means of the institutional transmission of enlightenment political thought and its relationship to Christianity. When I finish, I'll summarize the book and its significance.

Yet what has caught my eye today is the overlap but caricature of historical Christian rites by the freemasons. After the writing of the Constitution, the participants in the Masons saw little distinction between masonry and Christianity (itself an interesting phenomenon). Masonry might be called the first civil religion of the American Republic:

"On September 18, 1793, President George Washington dedicated the United States Capitol. Dressed in Masonic apron, the president placed a silver plate upon the cornerstone and covered it with the Masnic symbols of corn, oil, and wine. After a prayer, the bretheren performed 'chanting honors.' Volleys of artillery punctuated the address that followed. Like the entire ceremony, the silver plate identified Freemasonry with the Republic; it was laid, it stated, 'in the thirteenth year of American independence . . . and in the year of Masonry 5793" (p. 137). The Capitol still stands architecturally as a monument to masonry and the de-ecclesialized form of enlightenment Christianity that it represents.

Which brings me back to Thanksgiving. It is good to be thankful -- but for the right things and the right times with the right intensity. To be happy for the suicide bomb explosion by the US military vehicles outside a hospital in Iraq today shows that one is very malformed. It's good that the society that inhabits what is called the United States takes a day out to be thankful. Yet it is also interesting to note the relationship of this to the Christian celebration of thanksgiving, that is the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper.

What takes place on Thanksgiving is the movement of a Christian virtue, embedded in the practice of the church, into leisure time provided by the state, in order to "give thanks". It then is celebrated by the gathering of an extended family around a table where a prayer of blessing is given, and then the food is consumed. This meal looks very much like what Christians practice in the Eucharist -- a thanksgiving without the presence of Christ.

It is interesting in these days that it has become fashionable within certain Protestant, and even some Roman Catholic circles to see the Eucharist in a similar light. The consecrated bread and the wine represent a certain type of sociality, a type of economic order, a symbol that re-presents the kingdom of God that Christ taught. The Eucharist is to form a certain type of 'community' that takes Christ's presence into the world. The formation of 'community' is the significance of the Eucharist -- much like a Thanksgiving meal. As it forms this non-globalized, anti-capitalist economic system symbolically, the "Christ" then becomes present wherever such a communal system takes form. The Eucharistic table represents the call to embody Christ's teachings, and therefore, to manufacture Christ's presence through engaging in this certain type of 'community'.

This understanding reacts against the pietistic, individualistic form of sacramental piety, both in Protestant and Roman Catholic forms. Rather than the individual pole formed by the liberal society represented in the pietistic form, the emphasis shifts to its communal pole, the form of a civil society for benevolent action in the society -- ie, like a Masonic rite. The Eucharist is emptied of the real presence of the body and blood of Jesus in which the believer participates in God through a personal encounter with Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. The Eucharist, thanksgiving, becomes distinct from the presence of Christ. Christ's presence must be generated by works, rather than a gift of God by the Spirit.

This is why the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, the real thanksgiving feast, the true Eucharist, is so important. Here the supernatural takes on the natural in the elements so that we human beings might participate in the very life of God by the Spirit through the bodily presence of the Son. It is a gift of God, lest anyone boast.

I have been thinking about this as it intersects with the life of our congregation. The center of our life must be the Eucharist, that is, the personal encounter by faith with the body and blood of Christ in the elements of the bread and the wine, an encounter that sends us out to do good works in the world, the works of mercy and devotion together as a people. By enfolding us in Christ, the Eucharist indeed forms the church -- but only because of the gift of Christ's presence by the sanctifying power of the Spirit. Christ is the center. The Eucharist is our true thanksgiving feast, celebrated on the day of the resurrection of our Lord as the church.

Benedict XVI noted this same tension in his introduction to de Lubac's book, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. He wrote:

"It is now almost forty years since, in late autumn of 1949, a friend gave me de Lubac’s book Catholicism. For me, the encounter with this book became an essential milestone on my theological journey. For in it de Lubac does not treat merely isolated questions. . . . He shows how the idea of community and universality, rooted in the Trinitarian concept of God, permeates and shapes all the individual elements of Faith’s content. The idea of the Catholic, the all-embracing, the inner unity of I and Thou and We does not constitute one chapter of theology among others. It is the key that opens the door to the proper understanding of the whole.
What is most engaging, however, is that de Lubac is not expressing his own private opinions, which would fade as they had blossomed, but lets the Fathers of our Faith speak so that we hear the voice of the origin in all its freshness and astonishing relevance. Whoever read de Lubac’s book will see how much more relevant theology is the more it returns to its center and draws from its deepest resources. . . .

It was not only for me that de Lubac’s book marked such a turning point. It fascinated theologians in the fifties everywhere and his fundamental insights quickly became the common patrimony of theological reflection. The narrow-minded individualistic Christianity against which he strove is hardly our problem today. Everyone is teaching about the social dimension of dogma. Nevertheless, even today this book is much more than a witness to a constellation in the history of ideas that has now been surpassed. For the very spread of his ideas in popular theological thought has unfortunately led to their being considerably simplified and flattened. The social dimension which de Lubac saw rooted in deepest mystery has often sunk to the merely sociological so that the unique Christian contribution to the right understanding of history and community has disappeared from sight. Instead of a leaven for the age, or its salt, we are often simply its echo.
If previously there was a narrowing of the Christian vision to an individualism, we are now in danger of a sociological levelling down. Sacraments are seen merely as celebrations of the community where there is no more room for the personal dialogue between God and the soul – something many greet with condescending ridicule. And so there has been a kind of reversal of the previous individualism that itself has fundamentally constricted the theological perspective and has also spread from central theological themes to the most concrete and practical applications" (pp. 11-12).

It is interesting that Bullock speaks of the tension between individualism and the commom good in masonry, a tension that ultimately led to its implosion. Yet we must remember that individualism vs. communalism form a tension only within liberalism. "You (pl) are the body of Christ, and individually members of it". This requires a commitment to the Good that is the Triune God, a commitment that allows us, by the Spirit, to order our goods.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving as we prepare for the new year -- to begin this Sunday on the First Sunday of Advent.