Spiritual Hiccups - Eat Me

I receive a daily meditation via email from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded something called "The Center for Action and Contemplation" in Albuquerque, NM.  (If you are interested you can sign up to receive these emails by clicking here.) In last Friday's meditation, he used some very provocative language, drawing on St. Bernard of Clairvaux's  commentary of Song of Songs. 

He said that we are the mutual food of one another, just as lovers are.  Jesus gives us himself as food in the Eucharist, and the willing soul offers itself for God to “eat” in return: “if I eat and am not eaten, it will seem that God is in me, but I am not yet in God” (Commentary 71:5).  I must both eat God and be eaten by God, Bernard says.  Now this is the language of mystical theology, and is upsetting to the merely rational mind, but utterly delightful and consoling to anyone who knows the experience.

This is strange language to my ear, but not really any stranger than the language Jesus uses in today's verses from John.  "Those who eat my flesh  and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the  last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." 

Neither "eating" nor "abiding" are the sort of thing I learned growing up in the church.  Of course I heard both words used in terms of the Lord's Supper and in terms of God present to us by faith, but this never had the visceral sort of feel I get from hearing Jesus or Bernard.

Modern Christians in the West have often made faith a mostly head thing.  This is even more true of  Presbyterians.  So where do we encounter God on a more visceral, incarnational level?  For us "from-the-neck-up" Presbyterians, how do we worship in a way that helps people meet a God who doesn't remain a disembodied concept, but who, in Jesus, gets involved in the mundane, profane, messiness of human existence? 

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