Together, the Ritual Studies Unit and the Open and Relational Theologies Unit will consider the practice, purpose, ethics, and theology of the open table, or a Christian eucharist that includes all and excludes none. Papers will analyze eucharistic practice from the perspective of ritual studies, considering how embodied activity provides an alternative means of knowing reality, then transforming that reality which has come to be better known. Papers will also consider the ethical implications of communal eating in a world dominated by agribusiness, in which the act of eating itself implicates one in global systems of privilege. Developing this theme, papers will address the open table as an act of resistance to social marginalization. Although mealtime has frequently been a time of exclusion, Jesus's teachings and practices suggest that sacred mealtime can express ethical universalism, thereby enacting the unconditional love of a cosmic God.
This paper examines communion, as reflected, described, and enacted in the early church, through two prominent theoretical perspectives: the cognitive science of religion and anthropologically informed conceptions of agential relationality and ritual entailments. Arguing this second body of thought superior, a move is then made to develop ritual relationality through consideration of ritual practice as one among many modes through which we do more than generate relations among people, objects, places and idea, but also to describe, encounter, articulate, and disclose truth.
The Eucharist table is open to the whole cosmos through the creative interplay of the memories, hopes, and relationships of the meal itself. Meals always ground the societies who eat them in the planetary processes of life, identifying our relatives at the table and disclosing opportunities for gratitude and humility in response to the beloved dignity of all our kin. This imperative is grounded in the organic claim that every eater is fundamentally related to everyone who is eaten. Meal memories, hopes, and relationships have been, are, and must continue to be critically important events that disclose restorative and life-giving ecological solidarities that include and transcend the Church.
Since at least the second century CE, Christian communities have erected fences around their eucharistic tables, offering a less than hospitable vision of Christian community, especially when it comes to reflecting Jesus’ practices of table fellowship. For adherents of Open and Relational theology, which presupposes that God is by nature love, following Jesus’ practice of dining with marginalized members of Jewish society (sinners and tax collectors), it is appropriate to remove the fences and offer unfettered hospitality to everyone, such that divine encounters at the table at which Jesus presides and where the Holy Spirit is at work transforming relationships with God and with all who gather, including strangers and persons living outside the Christian faith, the church, following Open and Relational perspectives can be a welcoming place for the marginalized and contribute to a less violent and more welcoming world.