More on 'A Dual-Sex Eucharist'

...I can add that to accept the communion elements from my own child was an experience I shall not soon forget either...

...Although this idyll may at first seem too sweet and idealized, it is in fact just the right induction to the film that follows...

...Just as the people in Sara's life are all really Sara, so Sara herself is really Jeanne Moreau...

...Consequently in this congregation the reaction is that any member, young or old, ordained or unordained, can be empowered by the church to participate in leading the communion celebration .and distributing the elements...

...By being both things at once, Lumi~re invests itself with a certain conflict and urgency...

...At the very beginning of Lumi~re, even before that bedroom scene in Sara's film with which the plot of Moreau's film begins, there is a prologue in which Sara and the other women in her life are living communally at a country house...

...Since both male and female celebrants are in charge, the worshipper's imagination can be more selective and flexible...

...Attending an awards ceremony at a hotel, she ends up in bed with a new lover, Heinrich (Bruno Ganz), in his room...

...At first some people felt that this cooperative role should be enacted only by ordained deacons or deaconesses...

...Maybe then we will be able to see our way toward a redefinition of ordination not as the setting apart of a clerical caste but as the recognition and celebration of the immense variety of gifts with which Christ has blessed the People of promise...

...17] encourages me to report on the eucharistic practice in one congregation which has struggled with this issue over the past five years...

...The eucharist begins to symbolize, as I think it should, that the bread and wine of Christ's presence enters into our lives through all sorts and conditions of men and women...

...But no image is complete, and every theological use of imagery must take account of the limitations of that imagery...

...It has also reintroduced into our worship---very explicitly at times--more attention to Mary the Mother, and has enlarged the religious sensitivity of both men and women members of the congregation...

...Novak closes his article by saying that he envisages a time, "perhaps generations from now . . . when the Eucharist will commonly be celebrated by two central figures, equal in symbolic power although different in their relation to one a n o t h e r . . . " It is possible that our liny congregation has already begun to foreshadow this practice, and that time may come in Catholic churches sooner than Novak expects...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, .JR...

...Yet at the same time that LumiOre is about a world of total illusion, a dream world, it is also a documentary...

...One woman visitor wept during the communion service a few weeks ago and told me afterwards that never, in a Protestant church, had she felt so close to the female side of the divine mystery...

...Clericalism will be no less clerical when it is a female as well as a male clericalism...

...What is interesting and theologically significant about this "dual-sex eucharist" (although of course we do not use this term) is that although the man and woman participate co-equally, the result is not an androgynization of the symbolism...

...My own seventeen-year-old daughter, whose first opportunity to lead in this way came during Advent, told me that it was a moving and unforgettable experience...

...Also, the actual experience of serving communion to someone else is, without being in any way cheapened, is made available in this way to a wider variety of people...

...To apply the image of Christ and the chur,'h as husband and wife to the internal structure of the church tends to explain the community as basically institutional, to reinforce the subordinate status of women and to distort the meaning of the Eucharistic communion which is not between Christ and the church but between God and humanity in Christ...

...18 February 1977:114...

...It was made possible, though not any easier, in our congregation since the prayers and formulas used in the liturgy can be recomposed by the congregation itself with no necessity for episcopal approval...

...There she receives calls and letters, makes and breaks dates, and rehearses her fines...

...Each one grew out of the congregation's recognition that the equality of women HARVEY COX is Victor Thomas professor o/ divinity at Harvard Divinity School...

...Male dominance and clericalism feed on each other...

...There is no scriptural evidence of any theological significance to the masculinity of Christ...

...Holy Communion is now celebrated much more frequently than it used to be...

...This is what gives it its density and singularity as a film...

...His most recent books are The Feast of Fools and The Seduction of the Spirit...

...Let us indeed move on toward a "dual-sex liturgy" both for its own sake and because, when it becomes the common practi~e, a non-caste, declericalized liturgy is sure to follow soon...

...In the French film-making of the last twenty years, especially that of the New Wave in which Moreau rose to stardom, there is an acute awareness of the paradox by which all filmmaking is a documentary of a fantasy, a record and realization of someone's imaginings...

...MARY ROSE D'ANGELO MORE ON 'A DUAL.SEX EUCHARIST' HARVEY COX The proposal for a "dual-sex eucharist" made by Michael Novak in this journal a few weeks ago [Dec...

...As she and Laura lie on her bed chatting about their lives, another young star who is a friend, Julienne (Francine Racette), is also at home chatting about her life with a woman, a journalist doing an interview...

...This mode of communing is actually very old in the Christian tradition and is technically called "tincture...

...We discovered, in Novak's own words, that 'laymen are no more potent in the liturgy, or in the authoritative church, than are women...

...Novak...

...Moreover, the stories of most of the other characters in Lumidre, which are cross-cut with Sara's own story, seem vaguely parallel to the life she lives in bed...

...This may sound tedious...

...This process is carefully supervised by a worship committee set aside by the deacons' council...

...I would suggest to those who wish to implement Novak's suggestion that the visible presence of a woman serving communion along with a man will make some of the words now ordinarily used seem odd and unacceptable...

...In fact it has involved the entire congregation in a memorable theological discussion over almost every item in the creeds...

...It gets us to accept Sara, and perhaps even Jeanne Moreau, on her now, complicated, self-regarding terms...

...2. In every celebration of communion, at Old Cambridge Baptist Church, a woman and a man preside over the celebration together...

...The Pauline image of Christ and his members avoids all of these...

...What is wrong with a mass celebrated by a single male celebrant with a single male attendant is not that there is no woman to represent the sexual aspects of communion (contra Mr...

...Like that old friend of Sara's that commits suicide, Gr~goire (Francois Simon), a cancer researcher who discovers he too is now infected with cancer, Moreau's film studies the very sensibility with which she herself is afflicted...

...By playing o~ documentary against fantasy in this way, Moreau makes of this journey into herself a labyrinth where she can keep a healthy distance from herself...

...The words "my body" and "blood" along with gestures of feeding, when spoken 18 February1977:112 and done by women, assume for all sexes a richer range of associations and therefore of potentially religious significance...

...For it not only stars Jeanne Moreau, but is about her as well, and was written and directed by her...

...No matter where she goes, she seems to remain, like one asleep, in bed...

...In this church the entire congregation, which is small, files by the centrally placed communion table in two lines, one on either side of the table...

...They share in the repeating of the prayers and formulas, handle the bread and wine together (usually with one breaking the bread and the other pouring out the wine...

...Other traditional words will of course take on newer and deeper meanings...

...male pronouns, of course, for Jesus...

...In any case, I report them here in the hope that Christians now facing the challenge of adequate symbolism in the eucharist, especially vis d vis men and women, might profit from our experience...

...can we not learn to say: "because God chose to become incarnate, the most appropriate bodily and cultural symbol for the humanity to whom the Word is united is the human person...

...By and large we have tried to use entirely inclusive language for "humankind" (not "mankind...

...Its dreaminess is appropriate to the rest of Lumi~re, and at the same time it makes Sara's story into something other than a dream...

...How does it function in practice...

...When Sara wants to break off with a lover, Thomas (Francis Huster), she has him into the bedroom too...

...Later, the night that Sara has Thomas up for a meal in her bedroom in order to let him down gently, Julienne is eating a meal in a bedroom as well, a hotel room where she has been lured by an American actor (Keith Carradine) whom she is now, like Sara, trying to evade...

...Although restricting the leadership at communion to deacons seemed sensible to some, it seemed even more important to represent symbolically the Gospel insight that all Christ's people are priests to one another...

...In the Baptist tradition, women have always been accepted for ordination but the general male dominance of the culture at large has operated both to minimize the number of women ministers and to perpetuate male rule in most churches...

...Surprisingly the current practice looks very much like one of the models he advocates, but with other dimensions that, although they might appear to be too "experimental" to some Christians, correspond to other ideas in his article...

...All of this does not preclude the use of feminine imagery for the church, or of sexual imagery for the union between God and the lover of God...

...This has not been an easy task, as anyone who has tried to "dechauvinize" religious ritual knows...

...The flashback it creates makes her story into a memory as well, a documentation of what actually happened rather than a mere dream of what might happen yet...

...As the women--and men--of Old Cambridge Baptist Church became increasingly aware of the theological wrongness and human injustice of the situation, three changes were instituted...

...and mainly female designations for the Holy Spirit...

...Like many churches outside the Catholic tradition, Old Cambridge Baptist Church has been assigning an increasingly important role to the eucharist in worship over the past ten years...

...As one begins to disappear in the central symbolic act of Christian worship, the other will inevitably be weakened too...

...The fact that the man and woman who celebrate customarily feed each other the bread and wine after they have fed the congregation strengthens this sign...

...But the office had become trivialized, especially with the emergence of a more and more "professional" clergy among Baptists...

...The subsequent story of Sara's sleep and awakening is then posed as a flashback that commences here, where Sara has been recovering from the breakdown Gr6goire's suicide caused...

...female metaphors and male symbols for the Creator God...

...And when Sarah must finally he gotten up in that penultimate scene, it is to he told that the only man capable of a lasting relationship with her has shot himself...

...1. The first change involved the careful rewriting of the prayers and other liturgical elements of the communion service to emphasize inclusive language...

...Then shortly before the end, Sara gets up again in the morning and returns once more to the set...

...The woman-and-man celebrant arrangement derives its symbolic power in part, ironically, from its very lack of explicitness...

...In effect, then, coming to light between the time Sara goes to bed and the time she wakes up, all these other characters in the film are figures in a dream...

...They have also assisted, in minor ways, in the distribution of communion...

...It's as if the whole of Lumi~re has taken place overnight, while Sara slept, even though we know that in reality a year has passed between those two scenes just mentioned...

...While Sara lies in bed one night rehearsing some lines, yet another friend, Caroline (Caroline Cartier), is actually in bed too having a "scene" of her own--an argument with her boyfriend about whether she can act...

...From a dual-sex eucharist it seemed a logical step to a eucharistic practice in which lay as well as ordained people shared in leading the celebration of communion...

...When it does, however, when the Holy Communion is commonly celebrated by a man and a woman, then the laity-clergy question, the whole vexed issue of what ordination means anyway, will no longer be subject to postponement and avoidCommonweal: 113 ance...

...Again I can report that in my own spiritual development, and in that of many of the fellow-members with whom I have spoken, this symbolism has become almost as revelatory as the dual-sex leadership...

...Psychoanalysts would no doubt have their own explanations for this, but I prefer to see it as indication that the same variety of spiritual symbolizations of male and female we find in the Bible--and in other religious literature--is still there to be called upon in the modem psyche if we were only willing to do so...

...This paradox hasn't been lost on Moreau, either, having participated in it so often...

...It is observed every week during such special seasons as Advent and Lent, about twice a month the rest of the year, and occasionally at special parish events...

...3. As Old Cambridge Baptist Church moved into a eucharist celebrated by a man-and-woman it became increasingly evident that the laity-clergy barrier is also a symbolic obstacle to the full realization of God's presence in the communion...

...This news does indeed come like a rude awakening from the long night's sleep which has lasted almost the entire film...

...it is that there is no community--or barely a sufficient community--for there to be a communion...

...When her friend Laura (Lucia Boze) comes to town, Sara visits by flopping down on the same bed with her to chat...

...I personally find, for example, that I sometimes want to actually receive the bread from the man and sometimes from the woman, while at other times it does not seem to matter...

...When, for example, an older woman and a younger man are paired in the leadership, or people of different skin colors, the possibilities for symbolizing the "diversity of gifts" and the variety of persons through whom Christ comes to us are extraordinary...

...This is why she is able to experience them, as one always does the people in a dream, without ever leaving her bed...

...Each person then receives a piece of the consecrated bread and dips it himself or herself into one of the two cups of wine standing on the table before eating it...

...in both church and society requires the equal visibility and presence of both sexes at the highest symbolic moment of Christian worship, the celebration of the Lord's Supper...

...As is suggested by the oblique, veiled parallels their lives seem to have with her own, they are all manifestations of herself, embodiments of her own desires and anxieties...

...Since, in our congregation, one's turn to lead comes only once or twice a year, this occasion becomes a deeply significant one for the leader...

...In the Baptist tradition, men and women have been set aside for this office, often for life, usually to lead the spiritual side of the churches' life...

...FACE8 OF EVE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Shortly after the beginning of LumiOre, film star Sara Dedier (Jeanne Moreau) winds up a day's work on the set of her current movie and goes home to bed...

...and cooperate in the distribution of the elements...

...Rather the differences in voice and manner and appearance of the celebrants convey a vision of mutuality...

...Perhaps what makes the illusion of a single night's interim so strong is the fact that Sara almost never leaves that bed...

...Even before she comes home to bed that first night, she is already in bed, doing a bedroom scene at the point where we pick up her story on the set of her new film...

...I can testify that my own religious imagination, or perhaps even "analogical imagination," to use Novak's phrase, has been so vastly enriched by receiving communion in this manner over the past years that I feel something is just plain wrong when I try to take communion in churches where it is still presided over entirely by men...