flying.farther

Thus, the ritual memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not Christian unless it is veri-fied in an existential memory whose place is none other than the believers’ bodies… To wash one another’s feet is to live existentially the memory of Christ that the Eucharist makes us live ritually.

It is precisely because the ritual memory sends us to the existential memory that the sacraments in general, and the Eucharist in particular, constitute a “dangerous memory,” in the words of Metz. It is dangerous for the Church and for each believer, not only because the sequela Christi (”following Christ”) leads everyone onto the crucifying path of liberation (as much economic as spiritual, collective as personal), but because this “following of Christ” is “sacramentally” the location where Christ himself continues to carry out through those who invoke him the liberation for which he gave his life. The ritual story at each eucharist, retelling why Jesus handed over his life, sends all Christians back to their own responsibility to take charge of history in his name; and so they become his living memory in the world because he himself is “sacramentally” engaged in the body of humanity they work at building for him.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 260-261.

The memory of the past thus makes the present move; it puts back on their feet, in view of a new beginning, those who are prostrate in the silence and oppression of exile.

Of course, there is memory and memory. There is the memory that is nothing but the simple act of the memorization of static events one pulls out from the past the way one takes some yellowed photos out from the back of a drawer. Such a memory, imaginatively idealizing the past as “the good old days when things were so much better,” is counter-productive; instead of mobilizing energies to take on present tasks it plunges one into the lethargy of a dream-past. Shrunk to the size of an anecdote, this past, from which one has washed away whatever there was of suffering, struggle, promise of a future, has no more history: it is a simple memory, as J.-B. Metz has said, that has been robbed of its future.

But there is also the memory that is a living act of commemoration. It is in this act of communal memory a people or a group regenerates itself. The past of its origins is snatched out of its “pastness” to become the living genesis of today. This today is thus received as “present,” as a “gift of grace.” It is thus a process of revivification, where the memory of sufferings experienced, of oppression undergone, and of the fight undertaken to liberate oneself play an essential role: tomorrow will better than yesterday; and the present is full of this living hope. Every project concerning the future seems rooted in the awakening of such a tradition: humanity has a future only because it has a memory. Totalitarian governments know this well; their strongest weapon is rubbing out the collective memories of the groups they oppress, beginning, where this is strategically possible with their language. For a group sees its identity being erased insofar as it loses its collective memory or insofar as this memory is no longer the anticipatory carrier of a possible new future. “Revolutions” show this: whenever it is declared that the future is realized, whenever it is declared that eschatology is fully present, it is urgent to invent a new utopia under pain of dying.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 233-234.

And for the best quote yet:

Just as empirical writing is the phenomenal manifestation of an arch-writing that constitutes language as the place where the human subject comes into being, so the sacraments can be appreciated as the empirical manifestation of the “arch-sacramentality” that constitutes the language of faith, which is the place where the believing subject comes into being. this arch-sacramentality is a transcendental condition for christian existence. It indicates that there is no faith unless somewhere inscribed, inscribed in a body — a body from a specific culture, a body with a concrete history, a body of desire. Baptism, the first sacrament of the faith, shows this well: the plunge into water, together with this “precipitate” of the Christian Scriptures, which is the mention of the names of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is a metaphor for being plunged into the body of signifiers — material, institutional, cultural, and traditional — of the Church: assembly, ordained minister, sign of the cross on the forehead, book of the Scriptures, confession of faith, remembrance of Jesu Christ and invocation of the Spirit, paschal candle… All these are symbolic elements that are inscribed on the body of every baptized person, his or her scriptural body on which they are bestowed as a testament. One becomes a christian only by entering an institution and in lettering this institution stamp its “trademark,” its “character,” on one’s body.

The faith thus appears to us as “sacramental” in its constitution, and not simply by derivation. Our existence is Christian insofar as it is always-already structured by sacramentality, better still, as it is always-already inscribed in the order of the sacramental. It is thus impossible to conceive of the faith outside of the body.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 154-155.

But these two poles in dialectic tension belong to two different levels of exchange. The logic of the marketplace (under the form of barter or money) is that of value; it belongs to the regime of need which seeks to satisfy itself immediately through the possession of objects. The logic of symbolic exchange is of another order. For what is being exchanged through yams, shells, or spears, as through a rose of a book offered as gifts in our own culture, is more and other than what they are worth on the open market or what they may be useful for. It is more and other than what the objects are in themselves. One is here outside or beyond the regime of usefulness and immediacy. Rather, the principle which rules here is one of super-abundance. The true objects being exchanged are the subjects themselves.

… Therefore, theologically, grace requires not only this initial gratuitousness on which everything else depends but also on the graciousness of the whole circuit, and especially of the return-gift. This graciousness qualifies the return-gift as beyond-price, without calculation — in short, as a response of love. Even the return-gift of our human response thus belongs to the theoligcally Christian concept of “grace.”

… Grace must be treated as something outside the boundaries of value, according to the symbolic mode of communication, and in the first place communication of the word. Rather than being represented as an object-value that one would “refine” through analogy, the “treasure” is really not separable from the symbolic labor by which the subject itself bears fruit by becoming a believer.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 106, 108, 109.

In its role as hermeneutics, theology has the job, not of retrieving an original meaning, but on the contrary, of producing, starting especially from the text of the Scriptures, new texts, that is, new practices which foster the emergence of a new world. Its truth is always to be made; it resides in a future constantly happening. “Thus, the Christian truth is not,” Geffré emphasizes, “an invariant core that is passed on from century to century in the form of a frozen deposit. It resides in a continual advent exposed to the risks of history and of the Church’s interpretative freedom under the Spirit’s inspiration. In regard to the content of the faith, it is manifestly inadequate to always speak of a rapport between some invariant core and variable cultural expressions. One must guard against the illusion of a semantic invariability which somehow subsists beyond all contingencies of expression; to believe this is to retain an instrumental and vehicular conception of language. Rather, one must speak of a relation of relations.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 69.

Theological discourse, even in all its rigor, must therefore touch the quick of the subject. The critical thrust in Christian theology is precisely this in our opinion: to show the conditions which render possible a passage — a passage which must be continually undertaken — from the attitude of a slave toward a Master imagined as all-powerful, clothed in the traditional panoply of the attributes of esse, to the attitude of a child toward a God represented from differently because this God is seen always in the shadow of the cross, and thus to the attitude of a brother or a sister toward others.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 43.

Because of its exclusive fixation on the being of entities, metaphysics is to be placed at the level of a “technique of explanation of reality by means of ultimate causes.” The god it posits appears only in the perspective of a causality working as a foundation. The entire discussion is distorted by the passion to master the truth. Such an ambition inevitably degrades the truth into an unfailingly available foundation, a substantial permanence, an objective presence. This need for a reassuring plenitude is symptomatic of a visceral anthropocentrism: the need to begin with the certitude of the self, with the presence of the self to the self, by which everything else in the world is ultimately to be measured. In this manner, everything “is ordered,” everything is justified, everything has good reasons to be and to be there as present. From the notion of being-as-substance as present permanence to the notion of the subject-substance as permanent presence, it is the same logic at work, a logic of the Same unfolding itself: a utilitarian logic which, because of fear of all difference of what is by its nature permanently open, and finally of death, reduces being to its own rationality and, unknowingly, makes of it the glue that bonds a closed totality.

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 28.