The Eucharist: ceremony, doctrine, and the real presence

Following up on my previous reflection on finding Christ in the church—which is to say, in the Eucharist—I want to ask four questions in this post:

1. Is every attempt at celebrating the Eucharist valid—that is, just in virtue of making the attempt?

2. If not, then what constitutes eucharistic validity?

3. What is the relationship between the ritual ceremonial features of eucharistic celebration and a given tradition’s eucharistic doctrine?

4. Is it in any way wrong—offensive, unkind, or uncharitable—to suggest that those traditions and churches that deny the real presence in their celebrations of the Eucharist are in fact correct about their own celebrations, if not about others’?

The first question is easily answered: No. That is, merely the desire to celebrate the Eucharist is not and could never be sufficient as a criterion for valid celebration. I am not aware of any Christian tradition that says so; it is ecumenical and perhaps unanimous in church history that more is required than the sheer intention to do it right. You’ve also got to, you know, do it right.

How to do it right, though? This second question raises a whole host of further questions. I like to put these questions to my ministry majors, most of whom come from non-denominational Evangelical backgrounds. They include but are not limited to:

• Who can celebrate, that is, preside at the Supper?

• Is ordination a condition of celebrating? Is baptism? Is belief in Christ?

• What elements must be used?

• What prayers, if any, must be prayed?

• What Scriptures, if any, must be read?

• What petitions, if any, must be made?

• What invocations, if any, must be uttered?

I have students who, on first blush, are willing to say that anyone may preside, any elements may be used, and no prayers or Scriptures or other ritual prescriptions are either necessary or sufficient for the meal to be validly celebrated. I know adult Christians and pastors who agree. (Above I said I knew of no Christian traditions that claimed such a thing; I know plenty of individuals who do!) Let’s say that such a position is one pole on the continuum.

The other pole is high catholic ecclesial traditions. For these, a valid Eucharist must be celebrated by a validly ordained priest—ordained, that is, by a bishop in succession from the apostles—using only precise elements (fermented wine and either leavened or unleavened bread) and following specific liturgical ritual rubrics, which require certain Scriptures, prayers, and invocations to be performed as components of a larger ritual complex, wherein symbolic deeds are just as important as the words spoken.

Naturally, a number of approaches to eucharistic celebration lie along the spectrum between these poles. You will notice, on a moment’s reflection, that the “higher” a tradition’s doctrine of what occurs in the Eucharist, the “higher” its ritual celebration of the meal. That is, the closer you are to affirming the real presence or transubstantiation, the more likely you are to seeing ordination, liturgical rubrics, and carefully orchestrated rituals as the most fitting (and, indeed, necessary) manner of celebrating the Supper. And vice versa: the further you are from affirming the real presence, the less ceremony attending your celebration of the ritual—as well as, in literal terms, the frequency with which you celebrate it, and the amount of time you set aside in public worship in order to do so.

To my third question, then, consider the following image:

This is my rough-and-ready plot graph meant to illustrate the trend I have in mind, namely, that eucharistic doctrine and ceremony are yoked together: the more of one, the more of the other; the less of one, the less of the other.

Notice that I’ve created four quadrants, and that two of them are empty. There simply aren’t large-scale Christian denominations or ecclesial traditions marked by (#1) high eucharistic ceremony wedded to low eucharistic doctrine or (#3) high eucharistic doctrine wedded to low eucharistic ceremony. It’s easy to understand why. If you believe that in this sacramental meal the living Christ, risen from the dead and reigning from heaven, is bodily present under the sign of bread and wine, then as a matter of course you will restrict its celebration to certain people (and not others), under certain conditions (and not others), by means of certain specified rituals (and not others).

On the other hand, if you believe that nothing happens to the elements—indeed, if you believe that the meal, while instituted by Jesus and important to observe, neither communicates grace to participants nor, in terms of divine action or presence, serves as the site of anything unique by comparison to other Christian practices like prayer, singing, and reading Scripture—then you will be less anxious to prescribe the who, the what, and the how of the meal’s celebration. At the outer limits, a populist form of public worship underwritten by a democratized priesthood of all believers will ultimately result in no rituals, conditions, or criteria whatsoever for the celebration of the Supper. Not only can anyone do it; they can do it whenever and wherever and however they please.

As I wrote in my first post, this is neither caricature nor slander. I’ve known people and churches that use cupcakes and soda or Cheez-its and apple juice. As I noted in the spring of 2020, the great question facing “low” churches—not all churches, mind you, for the majority of churches require at least an ordained pastor and a gathering of believers in person—was whether to encourage or discourage believers from self-administering Communion under lockdown. Alas, nearly all such congregations not only encouraged self-administration and “private celebration” (sine populo!) but presupposed without question that to do so was both possible and salutary.

For this reason, among others, my students (including the future ministers among them) take for granted that I, a layperson alone at home, streaming Sunday worship from my couch or bed, may and ought to rummage around in my pantry for plausibly suitable elements to administer to myself while the people on my laptop screen celebrate the Supper. Perhaps this strikes you as a beautiful adaptation of God’s people to the digital age, whether in extremis (under conditions of a global pandemic) or in ordinary circumstances. Either way, that is not how it strikes me, nor how it would have struck any premodern Christian, including Protestants.

Be that as it may, the point here is that “low” eucharistic doctrine underlies this “low” approach to celebration. And that doctrine teaches: nothing happens. That is, there is no eucharistic miracle, there is no consecration, there is no real presence, there is no transubstantiation. These are symbols; not less, but also not more. God instituted these symbols and therefore they are important in the life of the church. But they are not sacramental in the superstitious sense; they are not (eyes roll, hands wave) the body and blood of Christ; they are not changed. They are food and drink and remain so. Hence the relaxed approach to their observance.

We come, then, to the last of my four questions. Is it unbecoming to agree with churches that deny the real presence that their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper are merely symbolic? I do not see how it is. It is an odd sort of imposition to inform Christian traditions that explicitly reject the doctrine of eucharistic change that God, in spite of their states belief and practice, changes the elements anyway. They don’t ask him to, and they don’t believe he does it. Even if God were willing to grant their petition, surely they have to ask?

I hope my tone doesn’t sound facetious. It’s anything but. When I talk about the theology of the Eucharist with low-church folks a few things tend to occur, usually in conjunction:

1. General reaffirmed agreement about the propriety of “low” eucharistic ceremony, i.e., approval of few or no restrictions on who can celebrate or how.

2. General openness toward a “higher” view of eucharistic doctrine, up to and including a full-bore Lutheran or Orthodox or Catholic view of the real presence. (John 6 all by itself does a lot of work here.)

3. A wary sense of unease or offense at the notion that #1 and #2 don’t or can’t go together, especially the implication (logically entailed) that churches whose teaching and practice overtly repudiate the real presence do not enjoy the real presence in their eucharistic celebrations.

4. A vague and sometimes debilitating anxiety that a believer in quadrant #4 who wants the real presence may need to join a tradition in quadrant #2 to find it.

To be clear, the first two of these come joined at the hip, and then the next two become options at a kind of ecclesial-spiritual-doctrinal fork in the road. Because the fourth option is so existentially threatening, the third is more common; but then, most people, being honest with themselves, can admit the discrepancy that lies at its heart. Which leaves them stuck if number four is a nonstarter.

The upshot of all this, for my purposes in this post, is fourfold.

First, not everyone believes in the real presence. It is therefore not an unkindness, either from a “low” or from a “high” perspective, to suggest that (at a minimum) certain attempts at celebrating the Lord’s Supper do not enjoy or realize the real presence. Once, years ago, I was attending a church in which the Supper was being celebrated. Something was said about the body and blood of Christ. A child near me (not mine) asked a minister near him whether the bread and cup really were Jesus’s body and blood. She laughed and told him, “No, it’s just crackers and grape juice.”

(Old Flannery is turning over in her grave.)

Second, doctrine and practice go together. Both theologically and practically, “high” doctrine (=real presence) requires “high” ceremony (=ordination, rubrics, prayers, etc.). Likewise “low” doctrine always and everywhere involves “low” ceremony. This is a matter of description and prescription alike: the one because the other. Christian division makes the connection here crystal clear; no one is in disagreement about the meta-point, only about which quadrant is the right one.

Third, low-church traditions cannot bootstrap themselves into “high” eucharistic doctrine. It can’t be done. To move from memorialism to real presence necessitates massive doctrinal, liturgical, pastoral, and ecclesiological transformation: in effect, a comprehensive reversal of the many Christian revolutions initiated in the sixteenth century. To do so would mean moving wholesale from quadrant #4 to quadrant #2. But that would be to “revert” from low to high, from biblicist to confessional, from congregationalist to episcopal, from evangelical to catholic. It would be to change traditions. Traditions don’t change in that way, though. Either they die or they (their members) join some other, preexisting tradition. There’s no third way here.

Fourth, subjective desire alone cannot change the elements. I’ve known more than a few folks, whether friends or students, who accept what I’ve laid out here yet who remain dissatisfied—stuck in the third “option” I outlined above. What they resolve to do is cut the Gordian knot through sheer force of will. That is, they choose to believe, in spite of their church’s teaching and practice, that the elements of the Supper in which they partake are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Even though no rituals are observed, even though relevant prayers are not offered, even though anyone at all might be presiding, even though the person presiding might say out loud that these are nothing more than symbols—nevertheless, the individual in question chooses to believe that, at least for him or her, the elements have been consecrated; that they communicate grace; that in them Christ himself is really and truly present: body, blood, soul, divinity.

There is a grave irony in this posture, understandable though it may be at the emotional level. It is a kind of private magic. It turns the old Protestant accusation against the Mass (“hocus pocus,” hoc est corpus meum) on its head. I alone, in the confines of my own skull, have the power, through nothing but mental intention, to make (an attempt at observing) the Lord’s Supper into a valid celebration of the blessed sacrament of Christ’s real presence—at least for me, the individual communicant.

Surely I am not alone in wanting to avoid this posture at all costs. No such power exists. Either God in Christ instituted the Eucharist to be the perpetual sacrament of his real presence, his body and blood, or he did not. Either the meal rightly celebrated makes Christ available in that way or it does not. Either we celebrate it accordingly or we do not.

Regardless of one’s answer (or the answer), as the illustration earlier showed, there really isn’t a middle ground. The church is the locus of this marriage of doctrine and practice, not the individual. Which is why, in my original post, I framed the whole matter with a single question phrased in two ways: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist? Each of which turns out to be synonymous and therefore convertible with a third question that, for so many pilgrims of faith, governs both: Where can I find the church, the body and bride of Christ?

As I insisted there, so I repeat now: It’s a worthwhile question, one of the most important you can ever ask in this life. Even in the confusions of ecclesial division and brokenness, it’s worth pursuing with the utmost seriousness.

Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the Eucharist?

I take these two questions to be (a) the most urgent theological questions one can ask and (b) synonymous. They came to mind as I read Jeff Reimer’s essay published in Comment last year, titled “How Not to Be a Schismatic.”

That was more than eight months ago, and for eight months I’ve been working up the nerve to read the essay. I expected it to be painful, and it was. It was like looking in a mirror. I knew Jeff’s wilderness wanderings would be similar to my own, and I frankly didn’t want to put myself through the ringer.

I did, though, and the first thing to say is that the essay is beautiful. I can’t wait to assign it to students and share it with friends. It puts into words so much that so many people I know have gone through or are currently going through. It’s a melancholy story of genuine spiritual suffering, even if he wouldn’t want to put it that way. It is a special kind of mental and emotional torture not to know where you are meant to be and to feel ecclesially homeless as a result.

The essay is also self-critical and mordantly funny; the opening bit is pitch perfect. How many young (now approaching middle age) men with a dash of theological education does Jeff speak for? Sometimes it feels like most of us, though I know that can’t be true.

Here’s the one and only critical or unpersuaded question I want to put to the essay, sourced in the one and only unsatisfied reaction I had to it.

Jeff and I agree about the blessed sacrament. The Eucharist not only communicates grace to the baptized, it is the fount and apex of the faith. It is the heart of the liturgy. It is where Christ meets us, body and soul, in the flesh and blood of his real presence.

Jeff’s journey, like so many others, was about “finding the right church.” He ended up arriving at an uncomfortable Protestant position: in this life, there is no “right” church to find; that’s a matter of hope for the next life. So he comes round full circle, remaining in an evangelical Protestant congregation/tradition because, in the end, he just wants Jesus, and he can’t expect a historical institution run by human beings to be perfect.

Jeff is right to want Jesus. The question is where to find him. And the turn in the final part of the essay seems to me to beg the relevant question. This question is put one of two ways, as the title of this post has it: Where can I find Jesus? Where can I receive the sacrament of his body and blood? No Christian believes the answer is “anywhere you want.” Jeff doesn’t think that, nor do I. The answer also can’t be “wherever people say they have Jesus.” There are communities that truly believe they are a church but aren’t. Indeed, and by the same token, there are communities that sincerely mean to celebrate the Lord’s Supper but fail to do so.

Don’t suppose that I’m representing either sectarian or Catholic views here. This is a matter of ecumenical consensus. Ask yourself: What constitutes a faithful or successful celebration of the Eucharist? Are there any minimum conditions to be met? If there are—and it should go without saying that there are—I can point you to communities that call themselves churches that fail to meet them. Communities that celebrate without wine, or without unleavened bread, or without bread at all, or without any thought at all about the elements, or without an ordained celebrant, or without prayers, or without Scriptures, or without any ritual component whatsoever. Convert the disjunctives to conjunctions: I know of a mainstream church that invited an unbaptized non-Christian to “lead” the Supper. I’ve been present for one in which the name of Jesus wasn’t spoken, the cross went unmentioned, Scripture wasn’t read, and no prayer was offered. In all of these occasions, it hardly needs adding, the notion of the real presence was and is explicitly rejected, even laughed at and mocked.

Am I really supposed to believe that a “cupcake and Mountain Dew” Lord’s Supper, administered by oneself to oneself while home alone streaming Hillsong, is the genuine article? The question answers itself. There are failed attempts at Holy Communion. There are false churches. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I know that Jeff agrees with me on this. But I find that most of us—friends, colleagues, pastors, theologians—need the reminder. To say “I’ll stay where I am, because all I want is Jesus, to be fed by his body and blood” is already to presume that Jesus can be found “where I am” and that “his body and blood” are there with him, too. But for many, perhaps most, wayfarers today, that is the very question they are wondering: they don’t know the answer prior to investigating it. They aren’t trying to find the perfect church or even the “one true” church to the exclusion of all others. They just want Jesus. They therefore want to be confident that the meal they are joining is in fact the Eucharist, not a failed attempt—and since we’ve established that attempting the meal is not the same as successfully celebrating it, this is a legitimate desire that should not only be affirmed but should be able, in principle, to be fulfilled. Not with eschatological rest, but with a lack of simmering anxiety, a measure of peace that puts one’s pestering worries to bed for good.

In other words, the ecclesial journey narrated by Jeff is not an integralist fever dream, not limited to shouting commenters on Protestant apologists’ YouTube videos or to Orthodox theo bros convinced that Saint Luke was the first iconographer. Nor is it the purview merely of guys like us, theologically trained eggheads and liturgical devotees. It’s the journey of every single Christian on earth. Not to find the heavenly Jerusalem here below. Not to rest serenely in the arms of Mother Church, spotless and faultless and utterly pure and benign in all her ministrations and dogmas. Jeff is right to spurn such quests as bound to result in failure, denial, or a schismatic, sectarian spirit—wherever one lands.

No, the proper and faithful quest is to find, in one’s actual neighborhood or town, a gathering of the living body of the living Christ. You can’t have one without the other; you must have both. And since there are plenty of dead ecclesial bodies around pretending to a vitality they lack—corpses posing as Christ’s body when they have no life in them—the quest is at once necessary and universal. It belongs to all of us. Granted, it may sow doubt where there was none before: wondering, now, whether one’s church is legitimate, whether its Eucharist is valid. But it’s better than living in ignorance of the truth.

I for one want an answer to that question. I don’t expect to rest until I find it.

Protestant subtraction

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” of secularism. A subtraction account describes secularism as simply removing, say, belief in God from the equation; hence, a secular age is the same world minus outmoded ideas about an all-powerful man in the sky. Against this, Taylor argues that secularism is in fact the proposal of something positive, something new and substantive that was not there before—regardless of its truth.

Now apply the concept of subtraction to the story of Christian division over the centuries. I first thought of the following exercise as “playing the Protestant game.” Most of my life I have been surrounded by people who believe, usually explicitly, that most of what the church did and taught from the apostolic fathers through the eighteenth or nineteenth century was erroneous. Here in west Texas, that’s still true. Sometimes this view is made out to be allied to the reformations of the sixteenth century, though typically in ignorance of the fact that, for example, the magisterial reformers did not abolish creeds or infant baptism or ordination or Christian government or other phenomena low-church American evangelicals take for granted as capital-C “Catholic” (and therefore bad).

At the same time, there seems to be a creeping openness among these very people to more and more of “the tradition”: to the church calendar, to saints and monks, to sacramental practice, to creeds and councils, to patristic and even medieval wisdom. This is part of the “loosening” I’ve identified before, which is non-ideological and thus works in every which direction—sometimes toward reclaiming sacred tradition, sometimes toward pursuing charismatic gifts, sometimes toward relaxing social conventions (regarding alcohol or gambling, for example), sometimes toward liberalizing long-standing teachings (regarding sex or male ordination, for example). There’s no one way this loosening is happening. Much is being shaken at the moment; how things will settle won’t be clear for decades, or so it seems to me.

But return to the notion of subtraction. Below I have formulated a list of fifty doctrines or practices that were more or less universally accepted and established by the time of the late middle ages. Many of them underwent serious development in the medieval period; most of them have roots in the church fathers; some of them are basically present in toto before Nicaea. So it wouldn’t be fair to say that the list is just “whatever the church believed from 100 to 1500”—though parts of the list do fit that bill. It would be fair to say that all, or nearly all, of these things described the church just before the Great Schism, and that all, or nearly all, of them continue to describe the faith and piety of two-thirds of the global church today.

So here is the exercise. Ask yourself: When do you hop off the train? When do you say, Yes, I reject items x through y, but no more from here on out? And what is the logic that informs your decision? Is that logic disciplined? arbitrary? a matter of preference? a matter of upbringing? of local social convention? Are there concrete, nonnegotiable biblical or theological reasons to hold back your Christian neighbor from striking through the next item on the list—or the next ten?

Let’s say that the Orthodox have questions about the first three items and that the Anglicans, at least the higher-church among them, have modest questions about a handful (but no more) in the first twenty. Say that, depending on whom you ask, Lutherans and Calvinists want to reject the first twenty to thirty (maybe thirty-five) items on the list. Say that American evangelicals are uncomfortable with every item through forty-five. Say that primitivists and restorationists have more than occasionally set a question mark next to forty-six and forty-seven, and that Protestant liberals have done the same for the final three items.

Where do you stand? Where does your church? Where does your tradition? Why? And, perhaps most important, what is the doctrine of divine providence, wedded to what doctrine of the church, that makes sense of God’s people having gotten so much so wrong for so long? What else have Christians gotten wrong over the millennia? How can we know? Is there a limit?

And if, as I’m less than subtly wanting to suggest, this sort of indefinite unrolling logic of subtraction is neither wise nor defensible; and if, as I mentioned earlier, there is a spiritual hunger behind the “loosening” we are witnessing, a hunger for unwinding these subtractions in favor of reclaiming what was lost—then what should be reclaimed, and on what basis? Call this last query an exercise in addition, even in restoration.

But I digress. Here’s the list. See what you make of it.

1. Papal supremacy

2. Roman primacy

3. Purgatory

4. Intercession of saints

5. Canonization of saints

6. Intercession of Mary

7. Veneration of Mary

8. Mary as Theotokos

9. Icons

10. Relics

11. Holy sites

12. Monasticism

13. Vowed celibacy

14. Vowed poverty

15. Masses for the dead

16. Private masses

17. The Mass

18. Eucharistic transubstantiation

19. Eucharistic adoration

20. Eucharistic change

21. Eucharistic real presence

22. “Deutero-canonical” books

23. Priestly absolution

24. Priests

25. Bishops

26. The sacrament of holy orders

27. The sacrament of marriage

28. The magisterium

29. Dogma

30. Signs and wonders

31. Miraculous healings

32. Exorcisms

33. Baptismal regeneration

34. Confirmation/chrismation

35. Infant baptism

36. Sacred tradition

37. Liturgical calendar

38. Creeds

39. Extra-congregational polity

40. Ordination

41. Liturgical order

42. Baptismal efficacy

43. Eucharistic presence

44. Regular observance of the Eucharist

45. The necessity of baptism

46. The doctrine of the Trinity

47. The divinity of Jesus

48. The inerrancy of Scripture

49. The infallibility of Scripture

50. The indissolubility of marriage

Four tiers in preaching, denominations, other…

Two brief reflections on my post a month back about four tiers or levels in Christian/theological publishing.

First: I think the tiers/levels I identify there apply to preaching as well. But because preaching is different from writing and especially from the genres and audiences each publishing tier has in view, the levels apply differently. Put another way, it is appropriate and good that there is a scholarly level of writing that very few can or ever will read. It is neither appropriate nor good for there to be preaching like that. Perhaps, I suppose, a chapel connected to Oxford or Harvard could justify that sort of preaching—but even then, it should drop down to a level 3 or even a pinch lower.

The exception proves the rule, in any case. Preaching, in my view, should never be above level 2; and the best preaching hovers between levels 1 and 2. Preaching should not assume a college degree; should not assume much, if any, background knowledge; should not assume much, if any, familiarity with popular culture; should avoid jargon; should avoid mention of ancient languages; should not name drop authors; should not make erudite allusions to great literature. Instead, it should be intelligible, accessible, and immediately relevant to a high school dropout in her 60s who never reads and doesn’t watch much TV, whether Netflix or the news.

Does that mean such a sermon will lack substance, heft, weight, meat, sustenance? No. But it does mean faithful preaching, week in week out, is very difficult indeed.

Second: A friend sent me a link to someone on Twitter—his name is Patrick K. Miller—riffing on my four tiers in relation to both church conferences and church traditions/denominations. I don’t have a Twitter account so I’m not able to look at the whole thread, but (a) the conference tiers seemed both apt and funny, while (b) I don’t think the ecclesial analogues quite worked. Here’s why.

It’s true, in 2023, that American Christians self-sort into churches based on education, class, wealth, and culture. That’s a sad fact. Protestants with graduate degrees like high liturgy; whereas evangelicals on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to attend charismatic, storefront, or prosperity churches. Granted.

The author’s implication, however, is flawed. I take Miller to be suggesting that the market comes for us all, churches included, and it’s best we accept this self-sorting and (for eggheads like me) avoid condescension. Agreed on the latter, less so on the former. Why?

Because this self-selection by class is neither inevitable nor universal. It’s contingent. It’s a product of a very particular moment in a very parochial ecclesial subculture. Catholicism and Orthodoxy and Anglicanism are all flies in the ointment here (I often group these together as “catholic” traditions). Both past and present, these traditions encompass high and low, rich and poor, over- and under-educated. Nothing could be “higher” liturgically than these communities, yet the type of person who regularly attends them is not indexed by income or number of diplomas.

It isn’t natural, in other words, it isn’t just the way of the world for well-off folks to go “high” and less-well-off folks to “low.” In fact, this very distinction doesn’t exist in many parts of the world. Go to Catholic Mass or Anglican liturgy in Africa and you’ll see charismatic gifts alongside smells and bells. Eucharistic liturgy is the common inheritance of all God’s people down through the centuries, not just the sniffy or effete. We err when we take our current passing moment as a kind of timeless law. Infinite sectarian fracturing, by doctrine and stye and personal preference, is not the rule in Christian history. Religious liberty plus capitalism plus consumerism plus the automobile plus evangelicalism plus populism plus seeker-sensitivity-ism plus so many other factors—all contingent, all mutable, all evitable—brought this situation to pass. We need not accept those factors. We can reject and oppose them, seek to overturn them.

We are not fated to the present crisis of Christian division. Our churches should not cater to it as a given, but fight it as an enemy. Self-sorting by class is only one way this enemy manifests itself. Let’s not pretend it’s a friend. Expel the evil from among your midst.

East/West Christianity: an unfinished love story

My brother texted this to me the other day, and he gave me permission to share it here. It’s about the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e., Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism (or: Catholicism East and West). I’ve made a few modest edits. Enjoy.

*

Been reading lots on history of East–West divide lately, so here’s me thinking out loud and writing down my thoughts. My analogy that helps me think about the stormy relationship between East and West (obviously from my Orthodox-sympathetic viewpoint, though one that yearns for union!):

100-850 – Honeymoon period. East nods to “headship” of West; they have their differences, but nothing that love doesn’t cover; as Christ died for the church, the West leads through service and love

850-1050 – First big fight. Starting to grow apart; realizing they meant different things by “headship”; East losing trust in West

1054 – West files divorce papers. East says “so be it,” but doesn’t really mean it in her heart

1100-1400 – Trial separation. Ignore each other to avoid fighting; when they interact, it’s only words spoken in anger; in 1204 the West does something the East might one day forgive, but will never forget.

1400s – Marriage counseling. The East needs the West more than the West needs the East; while the East wants an apology and compromise, the West expects submission; the Easts grants it on paper, but doesn’t mean it and takes it back as soon as the West is out of earshot.

1450-1869 – Diverging paths. The West prospers; the East goes through hell.

1870 – Divorce finalized. Irrevocable words and actions taken by the West, followed by the East.

1870-1965 – Fallout. East descends deeper into hell; West also suffers while flourishing in other ways; whether fast-evolving changes count as maturation or backsliding remains to be seen.

1965-present – Second thoughts. Both lovers have regrets; the West realizes it may at times have overstepped its bounds and misses terribly the beauty of the East; the East realizes she’s really missed the West’s leadership of and organization for the family; they rip up the original divorce papers; they exchange meaningful gifts; they go back to counseling; could they make this work again?—they realize that in really important ways, the same candle has always burned in both their hearts; they’re even aligned more than ever in their worldview and beliefs; but they also discover their personalities and eccentricities make each of them feel foreign to the other; the East has had a really rough go of it since they separated and feels that the West sometimes took advantage of her weakness instead of reaching out to help; some words spoken by the West can’t be unspoken; can the East live with them? can the West soften them? can the East forgive and forget? can the West remember and reclaim its first vows? can the West compromise? can the East submit?