Table or Altar: The Both-And Catholic Worldview

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

I shared a blog I had written on being a eucharistic minister with a friend of mine in Wisconsin, who also has served in that capacity. In my blog, I describe how I came to look beyond the host I was holding to look at the faces of those coming to receive Communion. I realized that the mosaic of people coming to Communion were the embodiment of “the body of Christ.” My friend Debbie said that when she distributed Communion, she concentrated on the host itself, at times even feeling a warmth come to her fingers holding the bread. Clearly, we viewed the same experience from different perspectives. I realized that I was steeped in the post-Vatican Council II Catholicism of my young adult years, while Debbie was attuned to a more traditional view of the eucharistic bread. Catholicism proposes that something is lost when one point of view exists without the other.

Different perspectives are not new in Catholicism, and the church has always shifted points of emphasis. The first followers of Jesus knew him as a human being, one of their own who was a wise teacher, a compassionate healer, and a prophet calling for transformation of society. Those who knew Jesus personally didn’t need to be reminded of his humanity. The gospels, especially the Gospel according to John, made the case that Jesus was also divine. His divinity came to be emphasized so much that in the Middle Ages his humanity was in danger of being overlooked or downplayed into oblivion. Some artists began to paint more human portrayals of Jesus. Before Vatican Council II, Catholic literature tended to use the word “Christ,” a title that suggests the presence of the divine, more than his name “Jesus.” After the Council, Catholic writers spoke more often of Jesus, some even calling him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua, in order to remind people that the divine Christ was also the human Jesus. Before changes brought on by the Council, the Mass was celebrated at an altar facing the front wall of a church; the Eucharist was the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Afterwards, the directives called for tables to be erected in the sanctuary so that the priest-celebrant was facing people, and at least symbolically during the Eucharist people gathered around a table. The Mass was not just a sacrifice performed on an altar; it was a meal shared among friends. When there was a small gathering, people were at times invited to stand around the table where the Mass was being celebrated. The center of worship was to look like a table, without the adornment associated with altars. More recently, many theologians are reminding Catholics not to forget that the Mass celebrates the sacrifice Christ made on the cross as well as the meal he shared with his disciples. Again, the meaning of Eucharist is lost without both designations.

All of these changes in emphasis demonstrate the both-and worldview of Catholicism. My friend Debbie concentrates on Christ’s presence in the bread consecrated at Mass and distributed as Communion. I share that belief, but I have come to appreciate that Christ is present in people as well. It’s not a matter of one or the other, either-or, but of both-and. Christ is human and divine. The Mass is sacrifice and meal. “Both-and” describes our human condition as well, so it is appropriate that Catholicism would be at home in such a worldview. We humans are body and soul, not separate but blended together. What we think of as our spiritual dimension emerged out of the same evolutionary process as our intricate bodies have. To remind people of their both-and nature, Christianity talks about the “resurrection of the body.”  It’s not a spiritual soul separate from a body that lives beyond death but the entire person, albeit not the cells and molecules that make up our physical body. Christ’s presence and life after death are mysteries, beyond our comprehension, and always more than we can imagine. As mystery, they can only be approached in the language of both-and.