True Food and True Drink
The following is a comment in response to Fr. Aidan Kimmel's article on "flesh in the devastation", which you can read here. I find in this comment uncommon insight and beauty as it gives us a glimpse of our salvation and how it pertains to the very way by which we live:
Grant on 9 May 2019 at 4:34 pm
What is interesting to think of with this, that in the Devastation, as Griffiths terms it, all flesh made and of it’s nature to be porous to the other and both to take it in and at times give out, can mostly only do so in entrapped dominion of death, an ‘ecology of violence’. When anything takes in something else, for growth, life or sustenance it is to the harm or death some something else, and this is no less with ourselves with any food we eat and so on, is determined by the death, killing or destruction of something else. And this would be something we can see going back in the history of life of this planet through the billion or so years life has been around here.
And this I think gives a deeper understanding of ‘by death He has defeated death’, as we understand it to have defeated death’s hold on us. But this reminds that this takes it much deeper, that Christ’s Incarnation and giving of Himself has entered the very fabric where death has been woven into warping how death has affected the very nature of our lived existence, and of all life, as well as showing just how much we really were under the enslavement of death. And we can see this new world realized in the Eucharist, there does Christ offer Himself in His Body and Blood to be feed on and taken in, yet there is no destruction, hurt or death but the opposite. There we see what true food and drink is, and a beginning to truly taking and sharing in the life of something as it should be, where there is no violence, no killing, no destruction of the other, but a union and giving of life in love, of creation and interaction founded in the self-giving of love, founded in the Son of God’s self-giving Himself. And thinking on that and further, we can see in the Eucharist the truth to come of the vision of the lion lying down with the lamb, and being to get a vaguest idea of what the true life and ecosystem is and should be, and will be in the Age to come already here in the Eucharist comes in full. And thus when Eastern Christian says ‘by death He has conquered Death’ we can dimly see just with relation to Griffiths above, just how powerful that statement is, nothing really is or will ever be the same again, as well as St Paul reminding us in Romans that all creation groans as if in birth pangs, yearning to be released from futility by the revealing of the sons of God.