Gifts often obscure the giver, when we are more interested in what we are receiving.  This is never more clear than in our lives of faith, when we celebrate the grace and gifts of God, but often we never move back toward the giver.

Can we learn again to say, with Tagore,

…raise me from
the still-gathering heap of your gifts
into the bare infinity of your uncrowded
presence.

Here is the entire poem (by Rabindranath Tagore [trans. from Bengali], in Fruit Gathering, XXVIII).

Time after time I came to your gate with raised hands, asking for more and yet more.

You gave and gave, now in slow measure, now in sudden excess.

I took some, and some things I let drop; some lay heavy on my hands; some I made into playthings and broke them when tired; till the wrecks and the hoard of your gifts grew immense, hiding you, and the ceaseless expectation wore my heart out.

Take, oh take–has now become my cry.

Shatter all from this beggar’s bowl: put out this lamp of the importunate watcher: hold my hands, raise me from the still-gathering heap of your gifts into the bare infinity of your uncrowded presence.

Last week I was in LA at the Wesleyan Philsophical Society.  I presented a paper on “Christ in Circulation: The Eucharist and Money.”  The abstract is below and then after the break is the paper.  If you are interested then you should definitely also check out Jason A. Coker’s post on a similar topic: The Begging Bowl, Toward a Kingdom Economy of Gifts, Power, and Justice.

Abstract:
This paper explores the convergence of the Eucharistic gift and the theory of money.  It will argue that the gift of grace enacted in the Eucharist actualizes an alternative economy to that of the dominant exchange of commodities via money, otherwise known as capitalism.  This convergence will proceed between the realms of sacramental theology and political economy, represented by the French sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet and the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani.  Specifically, this convergence will move between Chauvet’s ‘sacramental reinterpretation of Christian existence’ centered on the symbolic exchange of the gift of grace, and Karatani’s critique of the trinity of the capitalist nation-state and its circulation of money.  It will show how Chauvet deploys the anthropological notion of the symbolic exchange to explicate the formation of Christian identity enacted in the Eucharistic.  Through the symbolic exchange of the Eucharistic participant are transformed into graced subjects through the circulation of the historical, sacramental, and ecclesial Body of Christ.  Set alongside this circulation of Christ, this paper will offer a reading of Karatani’s understanding of the four modes of exchange and the circulation of money, and how one might practice resistance to the capitalist nation-state.  In this way Karatani’s explication of the modes of exchange will enhance, by explicitly politicizing, Chauvet’s understanding of symbolic exchange, even while showing that Karatani’s project is untenable without the gracious and gratuitous circulation of Christ in the Eucharist, forming graced and gratuitous subjects.

Paper posted after the break.

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One can never look directly at one’s own body.  All we see are fragmented parts, disconnected limbs, but never the whole.  We only come to understand our bodies, and therefore ourselves, as a whole units, as a totality, through other bodies, even if reflected in a mirror.  Jacques Lacan speaks our need to find mirrors, our need to see idealized reflection of ourselves, to show us that we really are not just these disconnected limbs, that we really are not just broken, fragmented people, and without the “mirror stage” the process of subjectivity and the production of an ego is halted.  It is only through other people that we imagine ourselves to be whole, and only through other people can we know our own bodies.

It is the same for the church.  We can’t directly gaze at the unity of the church, the unity of the body of Christ.  We can only see it through others, through the discernment of everyone.  The body of Christ is not something available to be pointed out, “Hey.  There’s the body over there!”  And things are complicated because this body is not merely a physical body gazed at indirectly, but a social, even spiritual body, requiring more than sight. We need spiritual insight linked to the practices of confession, repentance, forgiveness, speaking truth in love, humility, compassion, and mercy.  Isn’t this what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 11 when he speaks of discerning the body of Christ at the Table?  That we must discern the unity of Christ in/through others as we discern his body at the Table?

But I’m not just saying something banal like, “It takes a community to know yourself.”  That is patently true.  But Lacan’s points is also that is takes a community to utterly misrecognize yourself, as you project on to it your hopes and dreams, and what you think you are as you lie to yourself about yourself.  But the true body of Christ is always broken, it is never whole, and we can never claim to be whole until we follow Christ to the cross (the above image of Christ on the cross is interestingly called “Tree of Life”).

So, can you see your body?  The body of Christ?  Are you even looking in the right place?  Are you finding unity as a defense against something else, or are you finding unity in the broken body of Christ?