Abstract
Living in a time of urgent ecological crisis, Christians need outdoor ritual experience of their faith: of what is wild, of the living Earth, stranger faces of the divine: taking eco-alienated people out of the building and into the streets, the river, the forest. Moving liturgy outdoors makes possible an opening to both human and more-than-human strangeness on their own terms, in actual, present, sensory experience. It also opens worshipers’ experience of the Christian sacraments into the disconcerting realm of our bodies’ physical edibility to other creatures: the possibility of our own flesh becoming food. Using the work of Val Plumwood, David Abram, and Eric Meyer, this paper examines Eucharistic ritual language and theologies of resurrection as these contribute to a worldview that maintains a human versus food dualism incommensurate with biological processes. Ultimately, the paper calls for Eucharistic practices that allow participants to pray being prey.
Highlights
Being EatenIt is not a minor or inessential feature of our human existence that we are food: juicy, nourishing bodies.Val Plumwood, “Meeting the Predator,” in Eye of the Crocodile. 10.For some time, I have been exploring the question of what happens when Christian liturgy moves outdoors, into engagement with the more-than-human natural world
Somehow surviving three death-rolls before managing to break free and crawl miles to rescue, Plumwood experienced her normal perceptual world collapsing violently into the primal physicality of her body being taken as food for another animal
Instead, denying our really and truly dying and becoming food, represents the exact category error Plumwood names so powerfully? What if, Sunday after Sunday, even the most ecologically minded communities are unwittingly reinscribing this untruth on one another’s psyches in ways that, across the global humanity Christians still dominate, contribute to the mass denial of our individual vulnerability to other creatures and paradoxically, accelerate our species-wide vulnerability to extinction in the unsustainable alienation this denial has created? I challenge Christian communities to rethink the assumption that resurrection theology will miraculously defeat biology, and start exploring much more seriously and playfully how the core fact of our being food could pray—can we pray being prey?—constructively, Eucharistically
Summary
It is not a minor or inessential feature of our human existence that we are food: juicy, nourishing bodies. Somehow surviving three death-rolls before managing to break free and crawl miles to rescue, Plumwood experienced her normal perceptual world collapsing violently into the primal physicality of her body being taken as food for another animal In subsequent years, she reflected deeply on the raw shock of that: how she, like most contemporary humans well buffered from the natural world, had unconsciously defined herself as transcending the risk of predation—we are those who eat but are never to be eaten—and. She reflected deeply on the raw shock of that: how she, like most contemporary humans well buffered from the natural world, had unconsciously defined herself as transcending the risk of predation—we are those who eat but are never to be eaten—and Her posthumously edited collection of essays, The Eye of the Crocodile (Plumwood 2012), presents this material powerfully. This paper is part of a larger project more fully addressing these questions and their theological and anthropological implications, to be titled Jesus in the Earth; so, just a sketch here
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
