You Are Who You Eat With

Rituals of Exit, Continued...

It’s gone Candlemas and I have re-emerged from fighting off work and taxes. Up ahead I’ll be doing some writing about some of the terms in my new book The Messianic Commons, since I’m sometimes being asked what I mean by this or that. For now, what follows here continues the series Rituals of Exit, which explores those two messianic rituals of immersion and feasting, not as points of entry into a religious group, but as points of exit from political economies of law and violence.

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A baptism is a grand statement. There is something wonderfully rash about a ceremony that marks a singular threshold across a person’s life. But there is a certain feeling when everyone goes home: an awareness that the ceremony celebrated something, but was not the thing itself. One cannot live on such things alone.

What, then, would be the ongoing pattern for the eccentric life of this outlaw’s carnival? What ritual would form the common embodied space for this dubious political body, with its peculiar void of law and power?

The second ritual of exit was an ongoing rhythm which would form life as a river shapes the stone.

The place of happening was the table. As far as meals go, it was solemn, peculiar, disruptive, awkward and dangerous. It was the keeper of an alarming enchantment. Bread and wine, shared in a simple ceremony, performed as an act of social anarchy, political insurrection and morbid carnality.

As the bread was broken and passed along it was said to be the brutalised body of the peasant messiah, which they would eat. As the wine was passed down the table it was said to be blood from his execution, and they would drink it. The cult of ingesting the body and the blood of the dead was as unpalatable in the first century as it is lost upon the well-worn religious imaginations of today. Just as the Ritual of Uncitizenship by immersion in a river was a death ritual, so this Ritual of Solidarity around the table was also a death ritual, but not in a generalised sense. It was a ceremony by which the gathered community took into their own bodies something particular: the body mangled by political violence and state brutality. It was that death that lay beneath the acute point of absolute law and absolute mastery; the embodied life whose debt was deemed greater than the sum of their being.

See the materiality of this ritual. Touch and taste is political. It was concerned absolutely with experience; with material life. Holding principled political opinions against the corrupt power is something, but this was morbidly and recklessly different: taking the broken body of the subjected into one’s own body; a bizarre gesture toward material identification with someone at the worst end of human experience.

Every time and place has its way of designating who is who. In Roman society, the meal was a theatre of rank and status. Men were carefully seated according to their social position. Women and children were present in various attitudes relating to their place, their powers of entertainment and attraction. Slaves did the serving and ate somewhere else afterwards; usually the leftovers. There was no table where slaves ate with the free, though the enslaved youths who were chosen to serve wine would often be obliged to provide sexual services afterwards. Meanwhile, naturally, there was no table where colonised Jews ate with colonising Romans: this was forbidden by various expressions of religious law and social taboo. In all quarters, the table was the place where the social and political order of things was restated over and over again.

The Ritual of Solidarity was a wilful demolition of the social order. There was no slave or free insofar as everyone ate together, the same food at the same time around the same table. There was no ranking distinction between women and men. They abandoned keeping separate tables for Jews and Romans. It was a mad-hatters tea party: an outrageous feast occurring outside the walls of the world. Each and every gathering gave the central space to the brutalised. In the torn bread itself they recognised the broken lives of the powerless as the social location of hope.

The table was the heart of the outlaws’ carnival. It was a performance of a dream, of some open toward which they turned their faces. Here it was in embryonic form, at the anarchic feast of friendship across difference and struggle.

I have a feeling that all this would look strange next to some its austere and orderly religious offspring today. How do those rituals of inclusion, which often demand card-carrying membership, relate to this feast of the excluded and brutalised? While the gamesmanship of the Roman feast ever deferred to Caesar, the Ritual of Solidarity deferred to everything left to die outside the city.

Maintaining this wilful taboo was hard. The letters of the messianic texts are riddled with discussion on how to keep a diverse table, how to be considerate of difference, how not to alienate the other. There is outrage when the feast slides back into the pattern of Roman order; when the powerful are expecting once again to be served by their inferiors. “Do you not have your own homes to get drunk in?” snarks Paul. More still, the Ritual of Solidarity causes more arguments within the messianic community than almost anything else. There are plenty of fallouts around the table. Every power relation in the room was laid bare and all difference revealed. Awkwardness was guaranteed and ignorance rang loudly. All were confronted with the ugliness of their own power, and with that voluntary confrontation came the possibility for something new and extraordinary to occur.

There could be nothing simpler than a meal, and no place so ordinary as the table. And yet, the table is endlessly complex; a cocoon of world-making and self-making alike. You are who you eat with. The Roman table was a place where the participants internalised a hierarchical social body of law and debt. At the Ritual of Solidarity the gathered were reconstituted into something different. It was an intentionally staged happening of difference and encounter. It wasn’t guaranteed, but there was always the possibility that they would become a kind of kith and kin. The table became the new political space for a sort of outsider politics: the politics of relationships good enough to make law superfluous.