Brain overload.

One of the things I'm learning about me throughout the process of grad school is that I need order in my life.  I don't need every minute planned, but I like to have a general idea of what the day (or activity) will bring.  I can fly by the seat of my pants, but too much of that makes me nuts pretty quickly.  I don't even particularly care if I/we deviate from the plan, as long as there was once a plan to deviate from.  I think this is where my procrastinating gets me into trouble.  "I'm supposed to be doing this right now...oh look...a shiny puppy..."  But this semester has been a particularly rough start.  With the weather and holidays classes are slow to start and I'm slow to get organized.  I'm already behind, and I have a book that's absolutely kicking my butt.

So from that book is this thought.  Mom and I were talking about the Communion of Saints (looking to the lives of those Christians who've gone before us, or "saints", for wisdom/guidance) over break.  Then this morning we had a conversation about our lived lives (both individually and communally) as evangelism.  This is two paragraphs from the book that's kicking my butt.

"Like the poor and the stranger, the dead have little place in modern societies because they have no “utility.” Only that which bears an exchange value is allowed to make a claim on us, and so the dead, who can do nothing for us, are either forgotten or fetishized (and thereby turned into a commodity). Our medical, bereavement, and funerary practices keep the bodies of the dead at a distance and diminish any contact with them that is not entirely antiseptic and pumped full of formaldehyde. In the Christian household, however, both the living and the dead belong.  The dead in Christ commune with and make a claim on the living. This “communication” with the dead is not morbid, and though it is unsupported in modern cultures, it is quite common in cultures around the globe that have not yet been given over wholly to an instrumental rationality in which value is defined by usefulness (indeed, these cultures frequently include the dead in a ritual meal). For Christians, death does not have the last word, and the table of the Lord, in its reconstitution of time and in its remembering of the body of Christ, is literally a gathering of saints from across the ages within a local assembly. To evangelize the world, therefore, is to invite persons into a concrete local fellowship that is at the same time made truly catholic (“ according to the whole”) around that table.

Memory, according to J. B. Metz, is a form of solidarity with the dead, the suffering, and the conquered that is “dangerous” because it “breaks the grip of history as a history of triumph and conquest interpreted dialectically or as evolution”. The dead are part of our story, and through a eucharistic solidarity with the dead, we are saved both from resignation and from narcissism and thus freed to be life for the world. The “great cloud of witnesses” (for they are, indeed, evangelists) will not let us forget; and neither will they let us reduce hope to that which our own rationalities and technologies might produce in the world. Evangelism carried out eucharistically is both faithful and hopeful, because it is a telling and a sharing that is essentially a “remembering forward.”"

Stone, Bryan P. (2007-03-01). Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness

SO MUCH crammed into two paragraphs.  When we "do this in remembrance" what are we remembering?  Are we remembering Jesus the political instigator or are we remembering Christ the bringer of new life?  Or are we remembering both?  Are we remembering the suffering, trials, lives, and ultimate victory of those who have gone before us?  Are we participating in the story of Christianity?  Are we a living memory of the Good News?

But I think I'm going to focus on eucharistic food practices for my paper in my sacraments class, so look forward to that...

Gotta run...I'm late...again...