always expected to pray as ‘‘little children’’? If so, why? What does it mean to
claim that a ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ mediates the communication between the earthly
prayer and the supernatural deity who presumably hears and answers? What
is the Holy Spirit anyway? When people assert that they ‘‘feel’’ its ‘‘presence,’’
what do they feel? What constitutes its presence? When a Christian hymn
suggests that Jesus’s ‘‘voice’’ finds its way to the worshiper’s ‘‘ear,’’ that Jesus
‘‘calls’’ upon His followers to ‘‘walk’’ with Him and to ‘‘talk’’ with Him, do
the lyrics imply that worshipers actually hear Jesus’s voice, actually experience
walking and talking with their Savior?
Why would anyone want to eat the body of Jesus, or drink the man’s
blood? Remember, Jesus was an actual person when He walked on earth,
and it is the actual person, Jesus, whom billions of earthly communicants
consume when they participate in the Eucharist. Jesus also was, and is, a
God of course, and the notion of Godhead is always firmly tied to the ritual.
But worshipers don’t consume a Godhead; they consume the sacrificial
Redeemer of the fallen human race, the Lamb of God. Permit me to ask
again, why do they wish to do this? Surely such behavior invites close psycho-
logical scrutiny. Were we to visit some faraway island in some faraway ocean
and find ourselves invited to eat the body of a god in the form of, say, a
coconut, we would instantly put on our thinking caps and ask ourselves,
what’s going on? Somewhere in our minds might lurk the words ‘‘magic’’
or ‘‘mumbo jumbo.’’ We would strive to explain both conduct and myth
as inseparable facets of a peculiar cultural enactment. Why would we not
do the same for the Eucharist? Were we to exempt it from such scrutiny,
would we not be indulging ourselves in the ‘‘us and them’’ kind of thinking
that characterizes former eras, the colonial, Victorian period, for example,
when the ‘‘savages’’ ate the gods and the Christians participated in the
sacred traditions of the church? Eating a god’s body is exactly that whether
one is naked and painted or wearing a business suit. Might the answer to
the question, why do Christians wish to consume Jesus Christ? reside in
the orthodox claim that such consumption triggers an actual, inward, sym-
biotic union between communicant and salvational presence? Those who
swallow Christ immediately dwell in Christ, and Christ as swallowed
immediately dwells in them. Moreover, one’s feeling of being in Christ
and of having Christ inside one is linked theologically to the Holy Spirit
that has descended transformationally on the bread and the wine and thus
awakened the worshiper’s capacity to apprehend God’s presence as the ritual
unfolds. Accordingly, might the psychological nature of the Holy Spirit
have everything to do with the feelings people experience as they participate
in certain magical acts and nothing to do with the putative supernatural
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization
5
claim that a ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ mediates the communication between the earthly
prayer and the supernatural deity who presumably hears and answers? What
is the Holy Spirit anyway? When people assert that they ‘‘feel’’ its ‘‘presence,’’
what do they feel? What constitutes its presence? When a Christian hymn
suggests that Jesus’s ‘‘voice’’ finds its way to the worshiper’s ‘‘ear,’’ that Jesus
‘‘calls’’ upon His followers to ‘‘walk’’ with Him and to ‘‘talk’’ with Him, do
the lyrics imply that worshipers actually hear Jesus’s voice, actually experience
walking and talking with their Savior?
Why would anyone want to eat the body of Jesus, or drink the man’s
blood? Remember, Jesus was an actual person when He walked on earth,
and it is the actual person, Jesus, whom billions of earthly communicants
consume when they participate in the Eucharist. Jesus also was, and is, a
God of course, and the notion of Godhead is always firmly tied to the ritual.
But worshipers don’t consume a Godhead; they consume the sacrificial
Redeemer of the fallen human race, the Lamb of God. Permit me to ask
again, why do they wish to do this? Surely such behavior invites close psycho-
logical scrutiny. Were we to visit some faraway island in some faraway ocean
and find ourselves invited to eat the body of a god in the form of, say, a
coconut, we would instantly put on our thinking caps and ask ourselves,
what’s going on? Somewhere in our minds might lurk the words ‘‘magic’’
or ‘‘mumbo jumbo.’’ We would strive to explain both conduct and myth
as inseparable facets of a peculiar cultural enactment. Why would we not
do the same for the Eucharist? Were we to exempt it from such scrutiny,
would we not be indulging ourselves in the ‘‘us and them’’ kind of thinking
that characterizes former eras, the colonial, Victorian period, for example,
when the ‘‘savages’’ ate the gods and the Christians participated in the
sacred traditions of the church? Eating a god’s body is exactly that whether
one is naked and painted or wearing a business suit. Might the answer to
the question, why do Christians wish to consume Jesus Christ? reside in
the orthodox claim that such consumption triggers an actual, inward, sym-
biotic union between communicant and salvational presence? Those who
swallow Christ immediately dwell in Christ, and Christ as swallowed
immediately dwells in them. Moreover, one’s feeling of being in Christ
and of having Christ inside one is linked theologically to the Holy Spirit
that has descended transformationally on the bread and the wine and thus
awakened the worshiper’s capacity to apprehend God’s presence as the ritual
unfolds. Accordingly, might the psychological nature of the Holy Spirit
have everything to do with the feelings people experience as they participate
in certain magical acts and nothing to do with the putative supernatural
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization
5
