The early Christians provide a model of community for the Church, an ideal that we are always to be striving toward.
They prayed together, ate together, shared possessions, cared for the poor together — and all these things daily. They lived such a tight-knit life that they had “all things in common” (see Acts 2 and 4). There is no doubt that the Church in our day has work to do in recovering this vision.
But how do ordinary Catholics like you and me begin to do this? Most of us are nowhere near Acts’ vision, and, if we are honest, could not imagine how it might look in our own lives. Not to mention that all that togetherness and sharing seems a little scary even to the best of us. What should we do?
Let me suggest that we start where the early Christians started, for they didn’t get there all at once either. They started where the whole Christian life starts: with the Eucharist, the Mass, and they were committed to extending its logic to all their lives, little by little. So, after the Mass, it became the custom to hold a meal — they called it the Agape, or Love Feast. What happened in the sacred liturgical context of the Mass here found its expression in normal life.
At the Mass everyone — rich and poor, sinner and saint, doctor and dropout — are equally included, all undeservedly, in the common good of salvation. It is a liturgical feast wherein food, drink and praise have the function of uniting what was separate, and where we enact the unity that we have in the body of Christ.
Perhaps most importantly, too, the Eucharist is primarily a celebration. It is “mere” thanksgiving — Eucharist means thanksgiving — for the victory Christ has won for us. We don’t accomplish anything at the Mass, we simply celebrate what God has accomplished for us. That’s what worship is.
At the Agape meal these two aspects of the Mass — unity and celebration — began to invade all of life. The meal included everyone, and it celebrated, among other things, the odd but wonderful fact that God had seen fit to make these particular people my sisters and brothers at this particular moment.
After the Mass, I might suggest, this is the most important task for Christians today, just like it was for the early Church. There may be more to Christian community than eating together regularly, but there cannot be less. It is the foundation, as it was in the Acts of the Apostles, from which everything else springs.
Perhaps most importantly, we must hold on to this feast as a celebration. Thankfully, for us who are Minnesotan and Catholic, this doesn’t have anything to do with being particularly exuberant or sentimental or saying pious things about God all the time. It’s primarily about the fact that eating together is a time to simply enjoy one another — in the flesh, face to face, in the present moment.
Celebrations aren’t useful or functional. We’re not trying to accomplish anything when we eat together. The feast is an end in itself. This is important to get straight, because, in the first instance, the feast is not even about community building. It is the community. Ironically, it will create social bonds if we don’t make it about that. Again, you don’t have to get anything done, and that is why you can enjoy it. Like the Eucharist, it is what all our other efforts are for; it’s the climax of life. Bask in it. Soak up the good things about it.
Make it a point to be aware that God has brought each person there intentionally as a gift, and this includes those who may be different from us. Because they are God’s gifts, we do not need to control, manage, or impress them — only to receive them. This means being open, not least to the way that they may genuinely surprise us, evading our prejudices and stereotypes. For in our brothers and sisters we want to leave open the possibility of finding Christ himself — present among us simply as a gift. In this way Christians eating ordinary meals together is meant to be a foretaste of heaven itself.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St Paul.
