To understand this, and before explaining the liturgy of the Eucharist, we might best begin by reflecting on the term liturgy in relation to several other terms to which it is related. After all, if the service of Holy Eucharist is called the liturgy, where does this term come from and what does it mean?
Ritual
Let us begin by considering a generic term to which our question is related: that term is ritual. All religious traditions involve rituals. Indeed, ritualizing is something all human beings do, whether they consider themselves “religious” in the narrow sense or not. We relate to the world, convey what we think is most important, and make our way through the passages of life through various rituals. Some rituals are religious (depending on how one defines “religious”); many are civic, or social, or communal. Rituals are seen as a dimension of activities as diverse as American Thanksgiving meals, football games, weddings both within and beyond faith communities, New Year’s celebrations, and family gatherings of various kinds. Some rituals are loosely organized, like a Thanksgiving meal in which many of the same people will be involved from year to year; traditional foods are often (though not always) served; some (though not all) of the same family jokes and stories will be told; and the sequence of the day will be fairly predictable, though not rigid, involving, perhaps, elements of gathering and greeting; watching or playing of games; eating the foods associated with the ritual; and so on. Some rituals are more tightly organized and scripted, with specific words and actions, organized in a sequence that is invested with importance so that it does not change. Religious rituals are often of this more highly organized kind.
Our tendency to ritualize may at first be puzzling, or we may be tempted to dismiss the importance of rituals. In part this is because we have been taught since the sixteenth century or so to think of our identities as being centered in the thinking and willing part of ourselves—our souls or our minds. But we have bodies; in fact, we don’t just have bodies, we are bodies. We are embodied beings, whether one understands that to mean that we are souls in bodies as some of our Greek intellectual ancestors tended to do, or ensouled bodies, as religious traditions like Judaism tend to do, or bodies with consciousness, as contemporary neurobiology and neuropsychology do. However we understand ourselves as embodied, our embodiment means that we signal our important values and beliefs, and navigate our most significant life passages, by the whole-body activity of ritual. Thus, rituals involve not simply words and intellectual reflection but ceremony and gesture, movement and song, sound and smell.
Sometimes we use the term “ritual” to mean anything we do on a regular basis, like brushing our teeth in the morning. But rituals are not merely things we do repetitively. We may brush our teeth in roughly the same way every morning, but we could do so differently, so long as our teeth get clean. Brushing our teeth has a utilitarian purpose. Rituals in the full sense of the term are done with a certain amount of repetition because they are scripted, figuratively or literally. They have a normative structure that is considered significant to the values or realities that they are aimed toward, and those values or realities are themselves considered significant in an ultimate way. Rituals are not simply utilitarian; they don’t simply get something accomplished but situate the practitioners within a higher value or set of values that give life meaning. Ritualizing is centered on the beliefs or values that a particular person, group, or culture considers in some way central to their identity and flourishing. It is centered on them in the mode of practice, not simply by way of ideas.
Furthermore, rituals are not simply dramatic expressions of those central things we believe anyway or that happen to us elsewhere. While there are some exceptions, often enough rituals actually enact what we believe, bring to pass certain states of being. Everyone is familiar with a wedding or blessing of a lifelong relationship, and this is a good example of the way in which rituals enact reality. When a couple participates in a marriage or blessing ritual, they are not simply dramatizing a covenantal relationship that has already occurred, though certainly it has begun to take shape in the life of the couple. They are not just announcing something to the public in a particularly festive way. The couple cannot “believe themselves” into being married. Rather, in the course of the ceremony, the marriage itself is actually brought to pass. When the ritual begins, the couple has a relationship and an intention to make it covenantal and faithful and compassionate, but they are not married, no matter how much they wish or intend to be. Through the marriage rite, they become married; the ritual points to their relationship and their intentions for lifelong commitment, but it also brings to pass that to which it points.
Really, most rituals work in this way, and not just in Christianity, but there is a special term Christians use for rituals that bring to pass what they point to: sacraments. The line between rituals in general and sacraments in particular is not really absolute, but a sacrament is a core ritual and is used to refer to the materiality, the physical objects or signs through which ritualizing enacts identity. Sacramental materials are usually of an elemental nature: food, water, oil, for example. In some religious traditions, such as Hinduism, fire or other natural elements could be said to function sacramentally. In Christianity, in the ritual of Eucharist that concerns us in this book, the sacramental material is bread and wine. These are foods that, when used in the ritual of the Eucharist—handled, prayed over, and eaten in highly scripted ways—are taken not simply to remind people of Jesus, or even point to the risen Christ who gave his life as divine love for the world, but to make the risen Christ truly present in the lives of those who worship. The bread and wine are not divine; they are not Christ in a literal way; yet they are called the Body and Blood of Christ because in eating bread and drinking wine in this way, the Christ to whom the sacramental foods point is also made really present to the members of the Eucharistic community through the eating of those foods. Christians have had many ways over the years of explaining how the bread and wine convey the real presence of Christ. Here we will content ourselves with the observation that, ritually consumed, they bring to pass that to which they point: the continuing presence of the divine among the human community that desires God and seeks to live, like the young man in our story, in a way befitting the One we love—the One who first loved us.
Christians believe the sacrament of the Eucharist makes God present through Christ in this way we have described, not because the ritual itself contains some special power to do so, but because Jesus told his disciples, at the last meal eaten with them before his death, to eat bread and wine in this way in memory of him. The Jewish form of memory from which Jesus worked is one in which the past is not simply recalled but made present. So in the Eucharist, a ritual of thanksgiving to God (“thanksgiving” is roughly what the term Eucharist means), Christians offer praise to God, hear their sacred Scriptures read, make various responses to those scriptural words, and then eat bread and drink wine through which (by God’s grace) the Lord of the community is made present to them again. Eucharist, then, is a sacramental ritual in which something—God’s presence through Christ—is not simply recalled as past, or pointed to as important, but enacted, made real in the community.
Liturgy
But we still haven’t defined liturgy. Why do we call the sacramental food ritual of the Eucharist a liturgy? And how is the presence of Christ in that food ritual related to the way we ourselves become Christian?
Among Christian rituals, the Eucharist (or communion, or the Mass, etc.) has a pride of place. While it has been practiced in a variety of ways in different times and places, we have good evidence that this ritual of the Eucharist became very early the principal way in which Christians marked their gatherings weekly—perhaps even daily, in addition to other prayers—in which they understood themselves to be connected again to their Lord, who was risen and ascended but still present to