I am reading the Eastern Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas, Being as Communion, as part of a project with a student that also involved Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, and Jean Rousseau, The Social Contract. We are exploring how the concepts of "individual" and "community" relate to each other depending upon one's politics and concept of God and beings -- in sum, how liberalism and classical Christian orthodoxy differ. It seems to me that contemporary individualism and communitarianism are two sides of the same coin in which individual and community are seen as oppositions in which one must overcome the other. Christianity has a truthful understanding of the relationship between the individual and community that refuses this dichotomy: "you (pl) are the body of Christ and individually members of it."

Zizioulas attempts to return to an early Christian understanding of the church and the Eucharist -- he is part of the Eastern Orthodox ressourcement, and thus has interesting parallels to Henri de Lubac's work. He wants to point to "the decisive importance of the eucharist in ecclesiology" (p. 20). He argues that "the celebration of the eucharist by the primitive Church was . . . both the manifestation and the realization of the Church. Its celebration on Sunday . . . as well as all its liturgical content testified that during the eucharist, the Church did not live only by the memory of the historical fact -- the Last Supper and the earthly life of Christ, including the cross and the resurrection--but it accomplished an eschatological act. It was in the eucharist that the Church would contemplate her eschatological nature, would taste the very life of the Holy Trinity; in other words she would realize man's true being as image of God's own being" (pp. 20-21). Zizoulas says nothing here that is not found in the Church of the Nazarene's call to the table: "This is a memorial of Christ's death and suffering and a token of his coming again; Remember that we are one, at one table, with the Lord." The Christian thanksgiving feast is God's gift to the baptized to participate by faith in the whole drama of God's redemption in Christ by the Holy Spirit, lived out as part of a particular/catholic congregation in the world today. As Zizoulas states, "the eucharist had the unique privilege of reuniting in one whole, in one unique experience, the work of Christ and that of the Holy Spirit. It expressed the eschatological vision through historical realities by combining in the ecclesial life the institutional with the charismatic elements" (p. 21).

Very importantly, he argues that "the eucharist was not the act of a pre-existing Church; it was an event constitutive of the being of the Church, enabling the Church to be. The eucharist constituted the Church's being" (p. 21). As de Lubac argued, the eucharist makes the church -- thanksgiving to God the Father for the gift of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit in which we participate in the body and blood of Jesus to our souls comfort and joy. Christ's historical, present, and future reality come together to form a gathered people into the body of Christ in witness to the world as a foretaste of the eternal spiritual reality that is to come.

If the eucharist is not "the act of a pre-existing Church" but an event in which the church is made, then important practical implications follow. At the level of catholicity, we understand the importance of Christian ecumenical dialogue to overcome the exclusion from the table that prohibits the church catholic from being truly catholic today -- the contemporary fragmentation of the body of Christ that has grown so deep that the present body of Christ does not witness adequately to the future body of Christ that will be apparent in Christ's coming. Ironically, it seems to me that much of this fragmentation is today completely unnecessary, but fed instead by institutional inertia and sociological and historical differences that no longer pertain, or at least, are no longer insurmountable. Without a common Eucharist, God cannot constitute the church catholic in its local congregations, nor can the local congregations fully witness to the church catholic.

At a local level, Zizoulas reminds us of the importance of the Eucharist (Christian thanksgiving) to make a particular congregation the body of Christ through participation in it by faith. Congregations that refuse to practice the Eucharist regularly will eventually lose their present witness as part of the present body of Christ constituted by God because they sever themselves from the historical body of Christ and the future body of Christ, becoming isolated in a present that cannot nuture and sustain them.

Moreover, believers who refuse to participate in the Eucharist, those who refuse to give thanks for God's gift of Christ in the Spirit, because of their moral dissatisfaction with the life of a congregation, mistakenly assert that the church constitutes the Eucharist. The kingdom does not come about through God's gift, but instead arises from human activity in the present age. They thereby call into question God's past, present, and future redemptive work in Christ, ironically cutting themselves off from participating in this redemption at its very core. By making the church a strictly charismatic reality -- a reality of the Spirit's work today -- they de-legitimate the church's institutional life -- the life that comes from that ordered by Christ. To work for a present/future separates one from the past/present future. Such teaching and practice asserts that a valid Eucharist arises out of human works, rather than the gift of God's reconciling work in Christ in the past, participated in the present, for the fullness of God's redemption of all creation in the future. In excommunicating others by refusal to participate in the common life in Christ, except for reasons of personal penance, such practice denies that God constitutes us together as one church in anticipation of the future. Such well-meaning but misguided teaching turns the Eucharist into a type of protest activitism rather than learning to live life out from the very thankfulness that comes by faith that God the Father has wrought our future salvation through the past work of Christ through the present work of the Spirit.

To remember that the Christian thanksgiving is the Eucharist and that the Eucharist is the Christian thanksgiving, re-frames our whole life. We learn what really to give thanks for -- that God has created and redeemed us, and called us to live and enjoy God forever and ever, thus giving reason to give thanks for all of God's gifts today. Through such thanksgiving, the Spirit can re-form us into a holy people as holy persons, living joyfully even amidst the fallen sinfulness of the present age, a people of faith, hope, and love of God and neighbor.

Always have a joyous Eucharist!