Transubstantiation?

Few people know the term and that’s probably a good thing. The difference between honoring traditions and traditionalism is night and day. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people, while traditions are the living faith of dead people. I love ritual, liturgy as long as it’s LIVING! And as long as it carries the SUBJECTIVE message of the ritual and doesn’t get bogged down in objectification that takes the ritual in to no-mans land, which transubstantiation does.

Transubstantiation is a Catholic belief regarding commuion, the Lord Supper or the Eucharist. Transubstantiation is the change of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ occurring in the Eucharist . In other words, I really am drinking His blood, eating His body.

Wikipedia puts it this way, “The Roman Catholic Church believes that, in accordance with what Jesus said, the underlying reality was changed: the “substance” of the bread was converted to that of his body. In other words, it actually was his body, while all the appearances open to the senses or to scientific investigation were still those of bread, exactly as before. The Church holds that the same change of the substance of the bread and of the wine occurs at the consecration of the Eucharist.

Religion gone wild!

Maybe another reality show!

Listen, when you get down to it, most of the rituals in Christianity today are left-overs from pagan worship! I’m okay with that so long as we’re subjetifying the ritual, looking back as to the significance of what it stands in for. Unfortunately, the ritual themselves have become more important than what they symbolized. And as Walter Starcke put it in his book, It’s All God, “The souls of ALL the different religions- Hinduism, Buddhism, American Indian, and Christian- are defined by their rituals.

I take communion quite often, with different elements. I love the ritual.

I just can’t buy the Dracula thing!