breath that drove him to the cross and awakened to new life by the gift that awakened him from the dead. Or so the liturgy of the eucharist promises.73
The promise is that in a living ecstatic sacrifice of worship a particular child held by his particular mother will have opened toward an eschatologically holy Trinity that in one life history places all claims to ownership under a crisis that crucifies/resurrects every worldly good (and evil), however tightly grasped. Indeed, to say “Trinity” is to say the “outside” of the “eschaton.” The Trinity occurs as the unspeakably exalted Father and the unspeakably abased Son are held apart and together by the unspeakably quick Spirit. (Thus the man who stands watch in the night of the Sonoran Desert prays—perhaps only because of his proximity to her74—to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, even if he would hardly admit that such words come and go with his heavy breath.75 He leans against a rock still warm from the day’s hot sun, and is drawn by the body of the friend of transgressors, who in their memory and hope is lifted up still.76 In that prayer in the darkness of the Sonoran Desert he is sent from the Father through the Son in the Spirit into the world that is bent on taking him out, along with the mother and child he had planned by now to have discarded. To him and to this woman and this baby a Mystery gently and lovingly calls out: “The Peace of God is coming and it is coming for you!”)
The liturgy of the eucharist is above all prayer.77 It is an eating and a working, but an eating not about getting full and a working not about getting paid.78 In the liturgy of the eucharist a people eat a very particular performance of the will of the Father. Crucifixion/resurrection is their food and drink whenever they recline or sit upright at a table or lean in cross-legged on bare ground before an open fire, whether there is much or little on their plates, in their bowls, or steaming in their calloused hands.79 As their throats open to this food and drink, far from centering on itself, their work (leitourgia) flies away as a petition that all they do may have been gifted with gratitude and joy (eucharistia, charis, chara).80 To eat and drink the performance of the will of the Father is to pray that we would be inscribed into the particular story of Jesus. It is indeed to hunt and gather, to build and sculpt, to speak and think—all week long. It is to breakfast, dine, and sup. But as written into this story, a week’s meals and work become free acts of abandon. One carries them (“carries oneself”) to that altar at which a gathering of people is taken into the history that on Good Friday is totalized to death and on Easter Sunday is loosed to life. We might call this history, which is simultaneously crucifixion and resurrection, “a living sacrifice.”81
Thus, every proud discourse, experience, and belief is invited at the ecclesial assembly again and again to be given away. In their prayers the fabric these people weave all week long unravels outward to a world made new, an outside, an eschaton, an eschatos,82 that is to liberate what was and is—in the future of the particular body of redemption in whose name they pray. The telos of work is here no longer the “goal” of Greek teleology, the stately oak already hidden in the acorn.83 A new bright, sunless dawn breaks in on and thus dis-closes all 360° of every work-horizon. In time the geometric circle, as such, encloses only dead water. It is as it is spilled that water lives, i.e., that circles, coming to their end, empty what they might have contained, in deferral to the host, the guest,84 who kindly refuses both the offer to property rights and the threat of eviction. These liturgical prayers declare that there will have been “perfection,” “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” “abundance,” “maturity,” “sanctification.” Even now, it is said, there is a donation of that eschatological teleios. Yet it will have happened only because it will have come; “so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:9). It is a holy circle, one precisely as many partake ecstatically85 in that elusive Holy Trinity that will forevermore occur, gratuitously, as a kind of “other-ing,” partake enhypostatically, not in every respect unlike the glorified mutilated body of Jesus Christ—that is to say, to love in a certain way.86
The liturgy of the eucharist is gift. It is given with the particularity of the name Jesus,87 a name with a baptismal history, a name washed in the coming of the Reign of that Holy Father who opens among and to one after another “little one” of this world and speaks there in the wingbeat of the dove: “this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.” This corporate work is no healing act, i.e., not as the institution of a closed integrity, a “wholeness.” It heals only as sacrifice,88 standing out prayerfully into the faithfulness of the Holy One who comes to dwell in the work of these people—without ceasing to be holy. It is a healing act in the way that the evocation of Abram from his Chaldean home, never to return, was a healing act, viz., as a journey of promise (Gen 12:1). It is a healing act in the way that the march of Moses into Egypt from the backside of the desert was a healing act, viz., carried by the shout of the unimaginably free God: “Let my people go!” (Ex 5:1; cf. 3:14). It is a healing act in the way that the raising of Lazarus was a healing act, viz., as a call issuing out of the coming Reign of God to “come forth” (John 11:43). It is a healing act in the way that the resurrection of Jesus was a healing act, viz., as the emptying of a tomb by the egress of a body still wounded—gloriously open and inviting (Luke 24:39; John 20:27). It is that healing act that breaks through “what is” from a future never to be cordoned off by the locked arms of a company of guards.
(Let us say that a Brazilian mother and her little baby make their way across the Sonoran Desert, elude the watchful eye of Homeland Security in the Imperial Wildlife Refuge, find kindness among strangers, are given transport across Imperial County and beyond, and at long last find a place to bathe and sleep and eat in South Central Los Angeles. One Sunday morning she, perhaps, makes her way with her baby and the man with the wide face, with broad shoulders and huge hands, who from all appearances could never have begun to finance such a long, long pilgrimage north, to this little church. Let us say that she and they sit just across the aisle from a politically sensitive and intellectually curious man who, because he could, has driven into the neighborhood from across town to attend a vigil at South Central Farm. Let us say that he and they rise together one moment, fall together into one line, walk one after the other toward the front of the church, and together kneel side by side at one altar rail to receive the one crusty bread and drink the one sweet wine. When that bread and then that wine touch their tongues, with what have they been fed? How are they now nourished to live, to respond, to pray?)89
1. Mark 2:22: “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.”
2. Jenkins, Next Christendom, 2–3, 90–105; and Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, 8–10. Cf. Senior, “‘Beloved Aliens and Exiles,’” 27–28: “Contrary to human wisdom, those who are comfortable in place, fortified with the security of land and possessions and food, are also in danger of delusion about ultimate reality. In the overall landscape of the
