Like flower buds unfurling one by one

Four vignettes on the Eucharist by Waithera Sebatindira. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. In today’s essay, Waithera Sebatindira reflects on the erotic and emancipatory potential of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist.

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Like flower buds unfurling one by one

Four vignettes on the Eucharist by Waithera Sebatindira. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

1.

The Eucharist is a meal tinged with failure.

Each week, I join millions of people worldwide who gather for this meal in the shadow of the memory of the Last Supper, and in anticipation of a future in which everyone will be fed and injustice banished. In this juxtaposition of the mystical with the material act of eating, the symbolism is clear: it should be impossible to rehearse a future in which all are fed without thinking about the injustice of hunger and other forms of deprivation.

Indeed, radical theologians across the world – from Father Tissa Balasuriya, the activist Sri Lankan priest, to the artistic community in the Solentiname Islands who devised the Nicaraguan Peasant Mass – have developed an emancipatory theory of the Eucharist in which the ritual is viewed as an instruction: feed the hungry and abolish the structures that sought to starve them in the first place (a directive that many institutional churches, conversely, have failed to abide by). Thus, the Eucharist becomes a source of spiritual nourishment for Christians looking to build heaven on Earth.

Yet this is a project that is doomed to fail. There is no political ideology that can hope to achieve the perfect future of total satiation and absolute lack of need that is practised during the Eucharist, no revolution that would promise such a world.

There are, of course, good arguments against striving for this unattainable perfection. But for the tens of thousands of Christians worldwide who are seeking to build a liberated future and do not see the need to choose between a life of dignity and a life of faith, any effort to (re)symbolise the Eucharist – to draw out the clear political commitments it can set upon us – is valuable when used alongside the many other tools leftists have developed for imagining the world otherwise. There is also value in setting out on the path of revolution with a real understanding of the inevitability of failures as you go; that way, when setbacks occur, they do not need to precipitate immobilising despair – they are simply par for the course.

Setting the horizon at eternity can also inoculate against dogmatism. History is littered with the efforts of activists wedded to inflexible political theories that they refused to outgrow – particularly when such growth would have entailed a relinquishment of power (the stubborn persistence of ‘white feminism’ in the gender-liberation movement is a prominent contemporary example). I, for one, align myself with communism as the route to liberation, but never lose sight of its historical contingency, its purpose as an organising tool and not an end in itself, and the fact that I must be concerned not simply with my liberation but also with everyone else’s.

The meal of the Eucharist, then, can remind us of the centrality of food to political vision. It is a space where not only the material and the mystical meet, but where spirituality and revolution become natural bedfellows.

2.

I hesitate to say I love my church. I love its commitment to social justice. Located in the heart of Piccadilly, a stone’s throw away from BP’s headquarters, its congregants regularly develop eco-liturgies that place climate justice at the heart of the Christian mission. And I love how it strives to be an oasis of radical welcome by performing the usual charitable functions of many Anglican churches – such as feeding people experiencing homelessness – while also serving as a site of theological knowledge-production for how to build a world without poverty.

But to say I love my church as a whole feels foolish. As is the risk with all communities, the further I embed myself within it, the greater the opportunities for disappointment (including my own capacity to disappoint others). Also, it’s a predominantly white church, so some of the disappointments that come can feel particularly humiliating.

As I watch this church struggle to model what it could mean for people with vastly different politics and backgrounds to live well together, I root for it, I actively participate – but I also refuse to let myself feel anything so vulnerable as love.

I do cook for it, though.

I’m told there’ll be a ‘bring and share’ meal in the church hall on Easter Saturday before the final evening prayers. In preparation, and with one vegetarian congregant in particular on my mind, I open my notes app and engage in the first joy of cooking: planning a menu.

Easter Saturday

• Black pepper tofu

• Halva chocolate brownies

On Easter Saturday afternoon, my kitchen feels hot even before I start to cook. A passing comment from one of the clergy has led me to suspect she has a gluten intolerance. I’d walked a little further to the big Tesco to find gluten-free soy sauce, and I’d had to lightly jog home to ensure I had enough time to make everything.

As I melt an ungodly amount of unsettlingly yellow Flora for the tofu, I consider some of the other palates that might be in attendance. After thinking about one congregant’s tolerance for heat, I withhold one of the three red chillies in my hand, then chop the remaining two and slide them, seeds and all, into the pan – I have a feeling that he’ll surprise me with his ability to take a kick.

Another congregant gave up sugar for Lent, so I chuck an extra teaspoon into the tofu as a treat, before considering that her tolerance for it might have lessened over the past forty days, and that she might not appreciate the added sweetness.

As I coat golden cubes of tofu in their sauce, I think about this thing that is not love, but that nevertheless involves committing to memory or otherwise anticipating people’s dietary requirements, imagining palates based on personalities, with the hope of feeding and bringing pleasure to as many of them as possible. The entire congregation is suddenly with me, squeezed into my kitchen, shuffling patiently as I stir and taste.

This thing I won’t call love is what I feel when we all gather together at the Eucharist. The ritual is, perhaps, perfectly designed to hold ambivalence: a meal at which a wafer can be both unleavened bread and the body of God, where death and eternal life appear side by side, and where disappointment and hope commingle. 

Each Sunday morning, this thing I won’t call love is generated by our gathered bodies around the altar, and stays with me even after we have gone our separate ways for the week. Fondness is the topmost layer – simple enough. The second layer is something like solidarity – a tie between us that is irreducible to desire, that is rooted in something bigger than all of us. The third is the suspicion that I’m unlikely to ever leave these people. In any other context, these are ingredients for love. For now, I focus on tofu and soy sauce, halva and chocolate. 

3.

I notice it the very first time I attend this church: something strange is happening with the celebrant – the priest who presides at the Eucharist – while they prepare the table.

As they recite the liturgy, a palpable swell of emotion rises up within them and begins to emanate with an intensity that is somehow bigger than their body, pushing against their skin from the inside. At one point, they bow and pause in silence. In that quiet, I understand that they are communing with a presence, and that this connection is deeply intimate. That such an intimate exchange should be carried out in public and in service of all of us watching strikes me as almost recklessly vulnerable.

I’d received Communion many times before, in many other churches. There, the Eucharist was either heavily gatekept by rules that struck me as obscure, or was presented as purely symbolic with no mystical content. Both approaches led me to view the ritual with an anthropological detachment. But at this church, everyone is invited to participate, and there is no expectation about what experience anyone is having when they consume the host. This openness makes me pay attention to the Eucharist more deeply than I ever have before, and so I come to notice this strange thing happening week after week with different celebrants – this radical vulnerability that takes place after the priest invites the congregation to approach the altar to be fed.

It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘Uses of the Erotic’. Lorde rejects the reduction of eroticism to sexual excitement, describing it instead as ‘a resource within each of us … firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling … a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings’. Eroticism is radical because it is a depth of openness, of feeling, that we are collectively discouraged by patriarchal culture from expressing or seeking. Yet it is expressed in this church without a hint of self-consciousness or performance. Sometimes I have to look away, for fear I’m intruding.

I experience it myself when I eat the bread and recognise the ways in which spit, teeth, gullet, and digestive juices are made essential in a sacred act. In rendering the body a site of holy memory, the illusion of the divine’s estrangement from its creation is shattered. And in time, I see it in the congregation too – how, in anticipation of receiving the Communion wafer, their palms open expectantly, like flower buds unfurling one by one in response to the tender touch of incipient rays of sunlight.

To watch desire unspool itself behind and around the altar, channelled but not tamed by the sacrament, fundamentally changes how I see it. I think about how easily this shift comes, from the detached to the erotic. How I’ve allowed myself to be pulled into that current as if I were powerless, the immediate certainty that I would one day surrender to it, as I watched others surrender that first Sunday.

4.

One of my housemates is estranged from her mother. Sometimes, when her sister comes to visit, she brings a gift their mother has insisted be delivered: a small plastic container of Communion wafers and a bottle of (non-alcoholic) Communion wine. My housemate never knows what to do with these gifts, and so they’re left on the kitchen counter.

One evening, I come home from work to find my girlfriend and my housemate cooking together, as they often do. Something delicious is simmering on the hob and, to sustain herself as she waits for it to cook, my girlfriend is distractedly polishing off the wafers as though they are a moreish snack.

Another housemate emerges from their bedroom. They note how good it is that the wafers are finally being put to use. Over the course of our conversation, I realise they’d assumed all this time that the wafers and wine were mine, that for some reason I’d brought them home from church. I disabuse them of this belief, but reflect on how there’s love in their acceptance, with neither judgement nor comment, of what I know they would have considered a strange eccentricity.

The wine remains unopened for now, but I have plans to cook with it. I rarely cook for myself, so it will likely go into a stew or ragù to share with others. I think about it sometimes, while waiting for the kettle to boil or the microwave to ping, fantasising about the dinner parties in which it will play an unassuming role.

Unconsecrated and outside their liturgical context, these hosts only gesture towards their intended purpose as signs of the divine. But the openness of that gesture, like an outstretched arm, creates space for new, yet familiar, symbolism: the dull grief of estrangement, nourishment for communal living, sustenance while waiting, grace, service, and intimacy. In our small kitchen, I learn that the Eucharist draws its power from the steadfast miracle of human love as much as from the mystical.

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Credits

Waithera Sebatindira is an East African writer based in London. They are the author of Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry, among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.