A Table Open to the Cosmos

A Christian process theology of the Eucharist reorients liturgical discussions and practices of the open table. Rather than focusing on the qualifications that determine a human person's acceptability to approach the table and receive the elements of the sacrament, I argue that 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.

In this paper, I argue for the cosmically open table through a critical retrieval of the ecclesiology of organism that was developed by twentieth-century process theologian Norman Pittenger. For the ecclesiology of organism, the relatives who gather and are gathered at the meal’s table can reveal and enact God’s own priorities for adventure, zest, truth, beauty, and peace through communal harmony for and with one another. Through the encounter with Love-in-action in the Eucharist meal, attentive eating of all common meals emerges as a habit that seeks and enacts holy food justice as part of what it means to become Christians for the world. Meals are also events that can reveal the present entanglements of food in the Western diet with the dynamic and devastating conditions of anthropogenic climate change and transnational corporate food and agricultural regimes. Presently, these revelations can and do happen in the same meal events: peace and brokenness, adventure and monotony, beauty and discordant pain, zest and boredom, truth and marketed lies are disclosed in eating. Yet Pittenger’s understanding of the connection between Eucharistic life and Christian action is not fully adequate on its own to wrestle with the implications of these contrasting revelations.

This paper, then, engages the work of womanist, liberationist, decolonial, and Black Atlantic theologians to critique and build on Pittenger's groundbreaking ecclesiological work. Ultimately, I will argue that the cosmically open table of the Eucharist recognizes that the very materiality of the Eucharist meal challenges its eaters to pay attention to how our living as the Body of Christ impacts the quality of life in our local communities, larger socio-ecological regions, and the world. As a meal, the Eucharist forms the church to construct worlds that prioritize food justice for planetary well-being in response to identified deprivations and exploitations in the Plantationocene. Opening the table to the influential presence of the whole cosmos empowers Christan activity for the life of the world as a faithful response to the grace encountered in the sacramental meal.