Turning away from the Eucharist, the Source of Life, and going my own way, I now enter the world of zombies, bewitchment, and dark spells.
Leaving The Banquet Table …
As a writer, there is a correlation between working and receiving Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. When I am away from the Divine Liturgy, I feel myself losing strength, focus, as if I’ve fallen prey to Kryptonite or something …
My participation in the act of writing and my participation in the act of partaking of the Divine Nature in the Eucharist are deeply intertwined. Not unlike Tolkien or Flannery O’Connor(link) or other writers and artists who saw that their liturgical lives were necessary for their writing lives.
But it’s been weeks …
In fact, I can’t recall the last time I was at liturgy. Things just dropped off for me and I got wrapped up in life and, well, just didn’t attend.
Even now, trying to write is really hard: there is no energy for it, no vigour; the pen I’m writing with feels like a hundred pounds in my hand, so much so that there is a clumsiness to the writing as if I am drunk and ordered to walk a straight line. I have left the Life Source and, like the prodigal son in Christ’s parable, cashed in my inheritance to wander around doing whatever I bloody well want.
See, it’s about more than just writing–it’s that I’ve left the Source of Life Himself and wandered out on my own, or at least am under the illusion that I am alone.
I don’t know who I am anymore outside of this relationship to Christ–I don’t want to “do it my way,” and yet I’m living as if that song is the new liturgy of my life.
I don’t know who I am away from Him, from Jesus Christ, and apart from my seat at the banquet table I am just a body without a soul. The body then becomes my identity and I become its prisoner. I have come just a kind of automaton, or worse yet, a kind of zombie!
Becoming Zombies
John Vervaeke …
The most common reason we refer top someone asa a zombie is that he doesn’t seem fully conscious. he is not aware of himself. He does not notice the world go by.
The zombie lacks an interior life, an interior presence of mind that is commensurate with thought, intention, and direction. The zombie’s inner vacancy is symbolized by a blank state and shifting movement, driven by unreflective, sub-human cravings. The lack of interiority means that the zombie cannot connect to the world, it cannot affirm its own realness …, and it cannot affirm the realness of its environment (Zombies in Western Culture, 21).
The zombie existence is what we are resurrected from in the waters of baptism, the starting point of regaining and returning to one’s true humanity. The Holy Eucharist is the re-baptism, the re-union of our bodies and souls with Christ: purification, illumination, deification. But because the fallen world is a zombie apocalypse, we can easily become infected and corrupted, our souls made sick which impacts our minds and bodies.
Vervaeke …
The zombie apocalypse is a representation of the ultimate domicile. The zombie is homeless and the exhaustion of the apocalypse renders the world unnameable. Instead of fitting together, the agent and the arena are inseparably out of joint. Consequently, the world of the zombie apocalypse is a diseased world in perpetual decay (ZWC, 40).
The Life Of Fallen Magic
The anti-Eucharistic life, the life away from the Fountain of Life Himself, is death, it is to be perpetually homeless, to be “out of joint” and disconnected, fragmented from the world we have been created not just to enjoy but to cultivate, steward, offer to God, mediate, and transfigure. The home we’ve been given we become hostile towards: we consume it, wipe our mouths, and consume more. we descend into corruption and thus rise up in our enmity towards the world. We see the world only through the jaundice of our corruption.
Bruce Folz …
Ceaselessly saying the Jesus Prayer as he walks across Siberia, the Russian pilgrim finds that all creation is transformed. “When I begin to pray with all my heart,” recalls the Russian Pilgrim, “all that surround me appeared delightful to me: the trees, the grass, the birds, the air, and the light (The Noetics of Nature).
This is the true orientation to thew world, the authentic and authentically human response to the world: all creation transformed int he midst of our prayers, in the proper alignment of our souls and bodies towards God. But, Foltz continues, how quickly we can fall out of alignment when we lose our way (sin) and become misaligned …
But how easy, almost inevitable, it is for the wave or sand piper, the clouds or the little clumps of seaweed, that one heartbreaking shade of blue, or the last savour of fried shrimp that lingers enticingly and endearingly on the tongue and in the memory, not to mention [as I’m sitting on the beach in Miami] the sleek, nearly naked young bodies lounging confidently, indulgently here and there on the sand, to entice and captivate the gaze, to short-circuit the loop from creature to Creator back to Creator back to creation, and instead fix our increasingly avid perception within the sorcerer’s mindset, promising the possession of some alluring, indefinite treasure (The Noetics of Nature).
The life of anti-Eucharist is the life of sorcery, of fallen magic that short circuited the natural order between man and creation and God, that attempts to overturn the hierarchy–or gives the illusion of an overturned hierarchy that places man at the pinnacle to be saved and worshipped. Not unlike the inversion of the Garden of Eden at Babel: that man was placed at the centre of the garden become a god through loving union with God, but instead built a garden and another god to worship in place of the one true God. Evil is always the inversion of what is True.
Anti-Eucharist As A Kind Of Bewitchment
Foltz …
St Athanasius … says that idolatry begins not when we turn toward the beauty of creation–which to the pure heart everywhere sings of the beauty and the goodness of the Creator-but when we turn away from it and fall instead into our own desires as if they were a cave or a pit. So that climbing out, we still seem them unawares, but now projected back onto creation–which by that fact comes thick and opaque and ultimately darkened, while the gaze loses its nimbleness and lightness as it becomes congealed around some bewitching nodal point (The Noetics of Nature, xvi).
Again, the anti-Eucharist as the place of (fallen) magic, of bewitchment: making reality vanish and another, an illusory one, appear that somehow seems as real as the real one. And illusion, that illusive ‘power’, corrupts us as all fallen, black magic does.
Foltz …
The beheld creature is uprooted form the wisdom and beauty of the Creator, even as the fading half-life of the divine glory that w have tasted and seen and that still lingers like an aura around the things of perception now persuades us that these are themselves the true objects of adoration after all–that this is what it means to be “true to the earth,” even as the earth darkens under the idolatrous gaze and each repeat performance satisfies less, making us jaded and lusting for novelty (xvi).
I love the eucharistic language and imagery–the real magic that resets the hierarchy of Being and leads us into participation of the sacrifice that is the ceremony, the ritual, of the resetting: “the beauty of the Creator,” the “life of divine glory that we have tasted and seen, and that still lingers like an aura …”
To live outside of the Eucharist is to live in an enchanted world of one’s own making, an illusory world, a chimera, of the real world–truly a world of simulacra and simulation.
And it is that chimera that one sees oneself as God and the world purely for one’s own consumption; but that chimera while a distortion, is still mapped onto a real world that is damaged and distorted by our actions.
We don’t see the harm we’re doing to ourselves and others because we are under the spell of our own passions and disconnection from God and the real world. The only return is the Eucharist.
Returning To The Banquet Table
Foltz again …
As Dionysius the Areopagite puts it, the sensuous character of the Liturgy–the fragrance of the incense, the warm luminosity of the candles, the splendours of the iconography, the sonorous loveliness of the chanting, and at its culmination the very taste of the Eucharistic Bread and Wine on the tongue–all are meant to strike the senses as noetic emanations, as gifts of immaterial light, and ultimately invitations to an ontological participation in the metaphysical locus of Beauty, in Christ Himself, with Whom the believer becomes one in the Eucharist. Moreover, this iconicity extends to the entire cosmos (NN, 235).
The monk who rhythmically strikes the stick prior to the Liturgy to call the spirit animals to return to the ark, and then rings the bell as invoking the opening of heaven on earth … That I have not partaken in this act of realignment and return and rebirth for longer than I can remember fills me with such horror and disbelief and great remorse; these “noetic emanations,” “gifts of immaterial light, and ultimately invitations to an ontological participation in the metaphysical locus of Beauty … Himself”! And that this iconicity, this participation in the Divine Nature extends to the entire cosmos, indeed realigns me to all creation! And I’m not entering? I’m out there disconnected like that astronaut floating through space?? This is what I’ve chosen?
How terrifying!
And the sad and terrifying reality is life apart from the Eucharist is not only no life at all, it’s worse: It’s an illusory life that is bewitched and idolatrous!
Lord have mercy on me a sinner, and
save me through Your great
compassion O’ Lover of mankind!
Receive me back at Your
Banquet Table as the prodigal
son that I am that I may
enter into Your ineffable
Love once more!
