Communion

I am not a usually a church goer, but the other week I did go to church at a very nice place called Church of the Open Arms. They used inclusive language to talk about god, alternating male and female pronouns. I'm not saying this will turn me into a churchgoer, but I found it encouraging.

Here is something that I realized during the middle of the service. At the start of communion, the pastor raised up a loaf of bread with the traditional words, "take eat, this is my body." Suddenly, it was perfectly clear that this had nothing to do with Jesus. No icky and confusing concepts like transubstantiation or "real presence" are required to explain it. You just have to leap to the obvious conclusion that the bread is literally made from the body of the Earth, and that is the source of the connection with the divine. Another patriarchal reveral reversed.

I don't think Mary Daly ever directly addressed the subject of communion, but in the Wickedary she does define the patriarchal "absence of Presence."

 lack of content and purpose; the normal nothingness of bore-ocracy; the routinized rule in snooldom, absence of soul. Examples: negation of meaning in a conversation, lack of affection or intelligence in a face; nonresponse to a question or to an act of love

Which pretty much sums up what I saw and experienced when my mother used to take me to the Lutheran church when I was a little girl.