Sacred Threads

Often, when I prepare dinner for friends or for the family gathered for a special occasion, I become conscious of the sacredness of the meal, especially when it is attentively prepared and genially shared. I also become aware that the spaces in which it is prepared and in which it is served have become sacred. When this happens, the meal itself transforms into a ritual, one that recalls and commemorates the ever-present sacredness in our lives.

In her recent presentation for FutureChurch’s “Women Erased” series, feminist Biblical scholar, Carol Meyers, emphasized that in ancient times the household was the most essential economic, social, cultural, and religious unit of the community, and it was women who were central. In fact, the bread which they created, baked, and served had such a major role in sustaining life in the community, it, over time, became sacred in itself. And those who generated it – women – were elevated and revered as the essential practitioners in the households’ religious rituals.

Of course, as the post-Biblical age world saw economic changes in which, for example, bread could be bought in shops rendering individual producers less critical, and philosophical influences in which, for example, the world was split into good and bad, superior and inferior, indispensable versus inconsequential, included and excluded, women lost crucial sacred power and sacred value. Stories of their significant roles in religious rituals were hidden and then buried … unless we continually remember and resurrect them.

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom unearths the significance of women and ritual and the interconnectedness of us all in the past, present, and future:

Judaism considers food a visible manifestation of the covenant between man (sic) and God. There is a special way to prepare the food as well as special dishes on which to eat specific sorts of food; special blessings to be said over the food and over the cooking. In the life of a woman who prepares food in this way and maintains the kosher kitchen with all its ritual complexity, God can become almost as tangible as the stove.

She tells the story of a non-observant Jewish woman who wanted to please her Orthodox Jewish sweetheart by helping his mother prepare a Passover meal for forty people. The young woman quickly, however, found herself overwhelmed in a kitchen which had four sets of dishes, pots, and utensils, one set for daily meals containing milk, another for daily meals containing meat and then two more special sets, one for milk and one for meat, used only during Passover. All the different sets had to be sealed away from each other. Suddenly she was alone in the kitchen given the task of storing the everyday milk dishes and finding no empty shelf anywhere to seal them away. What to do?

Her distress grew until:

“…suddenly I was not alone. I had a very real sense of the presence of the many women who had ever asked themselves this very ordinary question, thousands and thousands of them, some young, some old, in tents, in villages, in cities. Women holding dishes made of clay and wood and tin, women dressed in medieval clothing, in skins, in crudely woven fabrics and styles I had never seen. Among them were my own grandmothers who had lived and died in Warsaw before I was born.”

She felt herself in company with women in the future, too, looking so different from her perhaps, but with the same dilemma. Almost simultaneously, she felt the same kind of unity with women at that very moment all over the world asking the same question:

The irony of our Church forcefully and heartlessly breaking that historically sacred thread by not allowing women to participate fully in the sacrament of Eucharist, a ritual meal, for Heaven’s sake, is infinitely heartbreaking. Unlike the woman in the above story, we are truly alone in the kitchen, only this time it is a Church. We have been cut off from the tapestry that celebrates and continues women’s holy magnitude from ages past to futures yet to come.

We can, of course, continue to be fully a part of the sacramental ritual in our own homes, in Churches led by women and other gendered, in our small Eucharistic communities. But those choices, while satisfying our inner needs, still leave a vast, vast number of others out.

It’s why – alas – weary as we might be, we cannot give up this quest for total inclusion in leadership and ministry. We cannot stop championing the power of all people to bring forth magnificence, illumination, and transformation through a sacramental ritual meal. We cannot let the thread be broken.