Erotic Mysticism in Puritan Eucharistic Spirituality
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Studies in Spirituality 19, 93-112. doi: 10.2143/SIS.19.0.2043675 © 2009 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved.
TIMOTHY HESSEL-ROBINSON
EROTIC MYSTICISM IN PURITAN EUCHARISTIC SPIRITUALITY
SUMMARY — This essay explores how Puritan writers between 1586 and 1729 articulated their experiences of the Lord’s Supper as an eroti- cally charged encounter with Christ. Drawing on the Song of Songs, many Puritan writers appropriated its erotic language and imagery to express their desire for Christ, and their sense that the Lord’s Supper is the most intimate earthly medium by which Christ communes with his people. Three specific themes emerge, each treated in turn: 1) Christ as a seducer of the soul; 2) longing for consummation which is not fully possible in this life; 3) conception and pregnancy likened to bearing spiritual fruit. After a section specifically treating the Lord’s Supper, the essay draws on the work of postmodern theorist Julia Kristeva, whose notion of ‘seman- tic polyvalence’ helps to interpret the phenomenon of erotic mysticism. Rather than seeing such experiences as the result of an unhealthy subli- mation, they are interpreted as representations of an ultimately mysteri- ous encounter with the holy. The essay concludes by suggesting that these historical themes provide resources for rediscovering Christ’s intimate, embodied presence in contemporary Reformed Eucharistic spirituality.
INTRODUCTION
In Take This Bread Sara Miles describes her mid-life conversion experience which took place when she ‘walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine’.1 She writes that ‘eating Jesus’ changed her entire life as she embraced a faith she previously had scorned. A God whose existence she doubted, a Jesus whose name she had previously used only as ‘a mild expletive’ became real as she heard a priest say words she knew to be untrue or only metaphoric: ‘This is the body of Christ’. As she received Holy Communion Miles knew that Jesus was, as she writes, ‘real and in my mouth’.2 Of her Eucharistic experience at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco Miles goes on to write, ‘Holy Communion knocked me upside down and forced me
1 Sara Miles, Take this bread: A radical conversion, New York: Ballantine Books, 2007, xi. 2 Ibid., 59. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 94
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to deal with impossible reality of God’.3 Miles’s experience filled her with a deep desire to become one with the body she was communing. Much of Take This Bread describes Miles’s efforts to make sense of her new found faith through engaged social action, especially through feeding the poor. Her under- standing of the sacraments takes shape through helping to build a network of food pantries among San Francisco’s most economically disadvantaged popula- tions. She describes a Eucharistic spirituality rooted in everyday physical reali- ties: ‘The material world was my ground: bodily experience the context in which I searched for knowledge and love’.4 She describes the outworking of her Eucharistic encounter as ‘a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed’.5 The bodily experience in which Miles’s spirituality is grounded suggests another dimension of human embodiment, for she writes of her Eucharistic experience in sensual, even erotic terms. As her journey progressed in the early weeks Miles was dazed, she recalls, by the inarticulate mystery of her Eucharis- tic experience, going through her days ‘excited beyond words, frequently on the verge of tears (…) my throat tight as if facing danger or intense sexual excite- ment; I’d be ravenously hungry, then unable to eat, as you are when you’re heart- broken, or newly in love’.6 The way Miles reports her experience is reminiscent of other periods in the history of Christian spirituality. For instance, twelfth and thirteenth century female mystics in the West frequently describe visions and ecstasies centered on the Eucharist. Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210-1285) described mystical union as ‘eating God’, while Hadewijch of Brabant (mid- 13th century) reports a vision at mass in which Christ gives himself to her in the Eucharist as he holds her in an erotic embrace. Other women mystics in this period celebrate the physicality of the incarnate Christ available to them in the Eucharist, their own physicality becoming the locus of spiritual experience. Sometimes their focus is on physical deprivation through fasting, suffering, and illness, while at other times they focus on erotic pleasure or feeding the hungry. Whether experiencing grace as eating, orgasm, or death, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, many medieval women ‘found physicality, as they understood it, redeemed and expressed by a human God’.7 Inclusion of the erotic dimen- sions of human experience in the Eucharistic event ‘suggest a special confidence
3 Ibid., xiv. 4 Ibidem. 5 Ibid., xv. 6 Ibidem. 7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption: Essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion, New York: Zone Books, 1992, chapter 4: ‘Women Mystics and Eucharis- tic Devotion in the Middle Ages’, 119-150. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 95
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in the Incarnation’, which in turn affirms that ‘the whole human person was [is] capable of redemption’.8 Much contemporary Protestant Eucharistic theology and spirituality lacks the earthy, amorous, and corporeal implications suggested in Miles’s experience or that of medieval women mystics, suggesting instead that the Eucharist is a kind of mental exercise by which worshippers recall the saving death of Jesus and find personal forgiveness. This raises a question: are there resources within Protestant spiritual or liturgical traditions that inform and sustain the kind of sensual Eucharistic spirituality Miles describes, a Eucharistic spirituality which embraces human embodiment and eroticism, and which attends to the physical needs of others? In fact, from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries the Reformed tradition offers another instance of Eucharistic piety which embraces the physical and erotic dimensions of human experience. In this article I will examine Puritan devotional and Eucharistic writings between 1586 and 1729, focusing specifically on the erotic dimensions of human embodiment they report having experienced while praying, reading Scripture, and observing the Lord’s Supper. For many Puritan preachers and writers, the Lord’s Supper was regarded as a site of erotically charged encounter with Christ, the lover of the soul. Draw- ing upon the language and imagery of the Song of Songs, Puritan writers describe a spirituality in which they encountered Jesus as lover and bridegroom, speak- ing of their encounter with him in highly erotic terms. These writings indicate that the Reformed tradition does indeed possess resources that may inform an earthy, sensual Eucharistic spirituality that affirms human embodiment as a graced reality.
EROTICISM AND MYSTICISM
Bernard McGinn has observed that the use of erotic language and imagery – i.e. ‘physical descriptions of the beauty of the lover, as well as images of longing and meeting, of burning and swooning, of kisses, embraces, and even of intercourse’ – so thoroughly saturates the literature of Christian spirituality and mysticism
8 Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption, 150. Bynum’s argument focuses on how medieval women inverted an inherited misogynist tradition that essentialized gender traits, asserting the inferiority of femaleness. The women mystics she examines overcame such misogyny by embrac- ing the physical and affective traits considered inferior as, in fact, privileged sites of encounter with the divine. The element of her argument I am drawing on here is that there are witnesses within Christian traditions that embrace physicality, resist body/spirit dualisms so prevalent else- where in Western Christianity, and that these elements of Miles’s memoir have ample prece- dent in Christian history. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 96
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that any attempt at brief summarization is impossible.9 Likewise, Sarah Coak- ley notes an ‘undeniable interconnection of sexual desire and contemplative desire for God’ that runs through Western Christian contemplative traditions.10 Indeed, sexual union – or the desire for it – has been regarded as a fitting image to express the experience of spiritual union in a variety of religious traditions, and scholars have long been attentive to such expressions.11 Popular caricatures of Puritans, however, suggest they would know little about ‘burning and swooning, kisses, embraces, and even intercourse’, much less draw on such experiences to describe their piety. Given these stereotypes, it may surprise some that erotic imagery is shot through Puritan devotional literature as well. The sacred eroti- cisms of which scholars speak were as much a part of sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century Puritan literature as they were for Hadewijch of Brabant or Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). One source of erotic devotion among Puritans was the biblical Song of Songs and its history of mystical, alle- gorical interpretation. Early English Puritans were given many labels by friends and foes alike. While most within the movement referred to themselves as ‘the godly’, one pamphleteer dubbed Puritans as ‘a hotter sort of Protestant’. This label indicated the zealous, passionate devotion for which they were known, a passionate devotion which readily embraced the Christian tradition of mystical erotic Song of Songs interpretation as a fitting expression of piety. While the his- tory of ancient and medieval Christian and Jewish commentary on the Song has been well studied, less well known are the sermons and commentaries on the Song of Songs that poured from Reformed presses in Boston and London in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Reformed Protestants adopted and adapted the nuptial metaphor, so central to the history of Christian mysti- cism, as their own.12
9 Bernard McGinn, ‘Mysticism and sexuality’, in: The Way Supplement 77 (1993), 46-54: 47. 10 Sarah Coakley, Powers and submissions: Spirituality, philosophy and gender, Malden, MA-Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, 56. 11 Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; Michael Hayes, Wendy Porter & David Tombs (Eds.), Religion and sexuality, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998; Patricia Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt & Radhika Balakrishan (Eds.), Good sex: Feminist perspectives on the world’s religions, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001; E. Ann Matter, The voice of my Beloved: The Song of Songs in western medieval Christianity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990; Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, My secret is mine: Studies on religion and eros in the German Middle Ages, Leuven: Peeters, 2000; Denys Turner, Eros and allegory: Medieval exegesis of the Song of Songs, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995); Bernard McGinn, The foundations of mysticism; Origins to the fifth century, New York: Crossroad, 1994. 12 Appropriation of erotic and nuptial imagery continued within the Reformed tradition into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appearing in the sacramental revivals in Scotland and the North American frontier in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. See Leigh Eric 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 97
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In seeking Reformed resources for an embodied Eucharistic spirituality, I will draw on this Puritan engagement with the Song of Songs, exploring how preach- ers and devotional writers appropriated the language of erotic desire to express their piety, especially in relation to the Lord’s Supper. I will delineate three themes that appear in Puritan literature of erotic devotion: 1) Christ as a suitor; 2) the desire for union with Christ expressed through conjugal imagery; 3) spir- itual pregnancy and childbearing. After considering these three themes I will consider how Puritans regarded the Lord’s Supper itself as an erotically charged encounter, the most intimate possible meeting place for Christ and the believer. In conclusion I will address those who dismiss this tradition as evidence of shame-ridden sublimation of sexual desire, drawing on the semiotic work of Julia Kristeva to suggest that this tradition can contribute something vital to the renewal of Reformed Eucharistic spirituality.
THEME ONE – CHRIST AS SUITOR
Imagining Christ as a suitor was common in Reformed devotional literature. Puritan preachers described Jesus as one who approaches human subjects, flirt- ing with them, wooing them, and desiring them. Boston’s Thomas Shepard (1635-1677) regarded the words of Song 5:2 (‘open to me my sister, my dove, my love, my perfect one’) as Christ’s enticements to his beloved. With these words Christ ‘allureth the soul to embrace him’. He will not be denied in his advances, according to Shepard, but continues ‘at the door knocking, and say- ing open unto me my Sister, my Love, my Dove, deny me not, be not squeam- ish’.13 Not only was the image romantically evocative, but it was also consistent with the Reformed understanding of election: grace is a gift, bestowed upon the elect as the result of God’s free choosing. God initiates relationship with human persons. The Puritan Divine Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) reckons that the words of Song 4:16 (‘Awake, O North wind, and come then South, blow upon my gar- den’) indicate the workings of grace: ‘Ordinarily Christ first stirs up desires’. After the initial enlivening, one might become aware of some ‘deadness of Spirit’ and express a desire for further revitalization; however, Christ is always the ini- tiator.14
Schmidt, Holy fairs: Scotland and the making of American revivalism. 2nd ed., Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2001. The most extensive treatment of this phenomenon is Kimberly Bracken Long, ‘Ravished with the love of Christ: The eucharistic theology of the American holy fairs’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University, 2005). 13 Thomas Shepard, The sincere convert, Boston 1672, 99. 14 Richard Sibbes, Bowels opened, London 1658, 6. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 98
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Theodore Beza (1519-1605), whose published sermons on the Song of Songs were influential among Puritans, took great pains to establish the passivity of the female character in the Song, who he equated with the human soul. Beza insisted that the opening words of the Song, ‘let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’, do not indicate the woman’s initiative as it appears on the surface of the text. The soul can long for the embrace of the heavenly bridegroom only if the desire is divinely initiated. Beza likens the work of grace to his understanding of proper gender relations: ‘It may seem strange and a little unseemly’ he writes, that a ‘chast and pure Virgine’ would initiate such a liason, because ‘in every wel- ordered marriage, the first words proceede from the man, and not from the maiden or woman which he wooeth’.15 Despite the antiquarian nature of Beza’s views on propriety in male and female courtship, the reformer understands this as a perfect analogy for the way God works. Although the bride or soul may for- get herself, consumed with total desire for the presence and love of her bride- groom, Beza reminds his readers that Christ loves first: ‘without this, wee could never knowe him aright unto salvation, nor love him’.16 The Massachusetts poet and preacher Edward Taylor (1642-1729) also believed that Christ must initiate this relationship, but his understanding of Christ as a suitor did not diminish his sensuous poetic wit. Taylor grounds his spirituality in the union of human and divine in the incarnation, an event that is solely the result of God’s free and gracious action. However, Taylor frequently describes the incarnation in sexual terms, adopting a long devotional tradition of invoking erotic passion as the best human analogy to describe such a mys- tery.17 Taylor imagines Jesus playing an elaborate, flirtatious game of seduction with his eyes. When the Song of Songs 5:12 says ‘His eyes are like doves’, Tay- lor senses the delightful gaze of Christ’s ‘pert piercing firey Eye’.18 Addressing
15 Theodore Beza, Master Bezae’s sermons upon… the Canticle of Canticles, London 1598, 14-15. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Albert Gelpi, The tenth muse: The psyche of the American poet, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, 35. 18 Edward Taylor, Preparatory Meditations, second series, 428. All quotations from Taylor’s poetry will be taken from Edward Taylor’s God’s determinations and preparatory meditations: A critical edition, ed. & introd. Daniel Patterson, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003. Refer- ences to Taylor’s poetry will hereafter be cited in parentheses in the text with the series num- ber, poem number, and line number in succession. E.g., PM 2.119:2 On a biographical note, Taylor was born in Leicestershire, England, into a family of non-conformists. For a time he was a schoolmaster. However, with the pressures brought against non-conformists by the Restoration of Charles II, Taylor emigrated to Massachusetts and attended Harvard for a time. He accepted the call to form a Congregational church in the newly established frontier town of Westfield in the western reaches of the colony in 1671. He remained there as pastor until his death. Taylor wrote a great deal of poetry, although only a few verses were published 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 99
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Christ directly, the poet writes, ‘No eye did ever any face bedight / As thine with Charming beauty and delight’ (PM 2.119:5-6). Taylor imagines Christ playing a flirtatious game of ‘bow-peep’ with him (PM 2.96:50). His suitor’s penetrating look has the ability to stir Taylor’s affections to a fevered pitch: Lord let these Charming Glancing Eyes of thine Glance on my Souls bright Eye its amorous beams To fetch as upon golden Ladders fine My Heart and Love to thee in Hottest Steams (PM 2.119:25-28) Elsewhere, Taylor poetically describes how Christ continues the seduction over a feast at the sacramental table; Jesus provides ‘Entertainment sweet’, with ‘spiced dainties in this Dish’, and ‘well spiced Delights’ (PM 2.131:31, 33, 34). Inspired by the banqueting and gardening images in the sixth chapter of the Song of Songs, Taylor depicts his soul’s enjoyment of the divine suitor’s attentions, as well as ‘the sensuous attractions of the love feast’ for the worshipper seeking commun- ion with the divine lover.19 According to John Gatta, Taylor imagines ‘God’s courtship of humanity’ as ‘an elaborate love game initiated by amorous darts from Christ’s eyes’.20 Taylor’s poetry depicts a kind of giddiness over the atten- tions of the divine suitor, who is able to overcome his own lackluster devotion and hardened heart, drawing him into warm communion. Taylor extensively describes the seductive power of Christ’s beauty with the words of the Song of Songs, savoring the facial and bodily details as visual stimulants which excite spiritual affections. The Song of Songs 5:1 is the basis for a meditation on Christ’s attractiveness, which has the ability to renew the poet’s flagging spirit and draw him into relationship: Oh! Hidebound Heart. Harder than mountain Rocks. Cannot one beam of this bright golden Head Have entrance, that’s trim’d with black Curld Locks In all its vigorous green up flowerished My Child affections thus to touch and thaw And to thy golden head their spirits draw? (PM 2.118:1-6) Elsewhere Taylor savors lush descriptions of his suitor’s body. Meditating on other passages in chapter 5 of the Song of Songs, Taylor produces an index of
during his lifetime. In 1937 Thomas Johnson discovered Taylor’s handwritten verse in the base- ment of the Yale Library and published some of the Preparatory Meditations for the first time. Since then, Taylor’s work has received a vast amount of scholarly attention and his poetry is reg- ularly included in anthologies of American literature as exemplary of colonial North American verse. 19 John Gatta, Gracious laughter: The meditative wit of Edward Taylor, Columbia, MO: Univer- sity of Missouri Press, 1989, 190-191. 20 Ibid., 191. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 100
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descriptive qualities that draw him toward Christ. As the ‘chiefest among ten thousand’ (Song 5:10) Christ is a king dwelling in a realm of glory beyond imag- ining, which, when contemplated, evokes awe and the desire to live within it. The ‘bed of spices’ which lodges in Christ’s cheeks (Song 5:13) emits a ‘Sweet beauty reeching in thy Countenance’, and ‘amorous charms’ that draw Taylor toward Christ ‘in a Trance’ (PM 2.120:4-5). Christ’s ‘legs like Marble Pillars’ (Song 5:15) impress the desiring soul with their strength (PM 2.123[b]:19-30). Taylor confesses he is so smitten, ‘That all my heart and hearty Love most right / Leap thence and lodge (…) in thy heart’ (PM 2.123[b]:45-46). Christ’s beauty and strength are so captivating as to cause the human worshipper to swoon upon catching sight of him. Speaking the words of Song of Songs 5:16 directly to Christ, Taylor declares ‘Thou altogether Lovely art, all Bright’. He goes on, exult- ing ‘Thy Loveliness attracts all love to thee’ (PM 2.127:25-26). His reflection upon the alluring nature of Christ’s beauty and his own free response to Christ’s charms builds to a fever pitch as the poet declares he is consumed by desire for the one who is ‘altogether lovely’.
THEME TWO – LONGING FOR UNION / CONSUMMATION
According to Reformed devotional writers, complete union, the full consum- mation of spiritual desire cannot be realized in this life. Beza reminds his read- ers that ‘the true consummation of this marriage is not in earth, but in heaven’.21 While the betrothal – the covenant – is made on earth and renewed regularly in the Eucharist, the final wedding celebration, the full consummation, will take place in the next life. Samuel Whiting (1597-1679) of Lynn, Massachusetts, promises that in heaven the saints will eventually enjoy ‘Christ’s sweet embraces (…) in that celestial Bride Chamber and Bed of Love’.22 English clergyman John Collings (1623-1691) explains that life on earth is a time of preparation for the marriage, a time for the bride to mature spiritually as she makes herself ready to wed the heavenly bridegroom.23 Nevertheless, one can experience a foretaste of such bliss in the here and now; while on earth, the saints can stoke the flames of desire, stimulating this long- ing for the consummation by imagining it through the language and imagery of the Song of Songs. Spiritual practices like prayer, Bible reading, and the Lord’s Supper are likened to foreplay by which the believer can intensify spiritual desire. The Song of Songs was, of course, especially suitable for contemplating the
21 Beza, Sermons upon…, 21. 22 Samuel Whiting, A discourse on the Last Judgment, Cambridge 1644, 102. 23 John Collings, A cordial for a fainting soule, Part II, London 1650, 89. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 101
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possibility of full consummation of one’s spiritual desire, for the Song enables readers to ‘see as much of Christ as can be seen of him, on this side of Heaven’, according to Collings.24 Such a view was consistent with the frequent insistence throughout Christian history that the Song of Songs represents the most com- plete portrait of the most intimate encounter between God and the human sub- ject. Writers from Origen (185-254) to Bernard of Clairvaux insisted that only the mature in faith should work with the Song of Songs, but when those advanced in faith do approach the Song, it can lead them into the deepest depths of intimacy with the Christ. As Puritan ministers assured their flocks that these fleeting experiences pre- saged a more complete experience of heavenly bliss, they often did so in language that mirrored erotic stimulation. Boston’s Samuel Willard (1640-1707) prom- ised that one can now steal a glance or a kiss from Christ that causes the heart to swoon. He goes on to assure his listeners that these transitory moments serve to heighten the anticipation of that day when bridegroom and bride will enjoy full intimacy, uninterrupted caresses and delight. As Willard describes the ful- fillment of anticipation his rhetorical intensity increases, building toward climax until finally there is resolution: There shall be that intimacy that there is between the most loving husband and most beloved wife, and transcendently greater (…) they will not be interrupted (…) There will be no more Coyness on their parts (…) but the delights which they shall enjoy, shall be both full and uninterrupted (…) the reciprocal ardors of Affec- tion between him and us shall break over all Banks and Bounds, and we shall be entirely satisfied, both in soul and body. Then we shall come to our rest.25 English politician and mystic Francis Rous (1579-1659) provides one of the most sensational examples of Puritan erotic mysticism. Rous’s treatise The Mys- tical Marriage is not a commentary on the Song of Songs, per se, but rather a meditation on the nuptial metaphor. As he begins to develop the metaphor, Rous alludes to the Song of Songs 1:4: ‘there is a chamber within us, and a bed of love in that chamber, wherein Christ meets and rests with the soul’.26 Rous focuses on Christ’s beauty, urging readers to do the same in order to stimulate their desire: Fix [thine eye] upon him as the fairest of men, the perfection of spiritual beautie, the treasure of heavenly joy, the true object of most fervent love, and inflamed
24 John Collings, The intercourses of divine Love betwixt Christ and his Church, or the particular believing soul, London 1683, 30. 25 Samuel Willard, A compleat body of divinity, Boston 1726, 557. 26 Francis Rous, ‘The mystical marriage, or, experimental discourses of the heavenly marriage between a soul and her Saviour’, in: Rous, Treatises and meditations, London 1656, 687. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 102
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affections (…) fasten on him, not thine eye only, but thy mightiest love, and hottest affection. Look on him so thou maist lust after him; for here it is a sin not to look that thou maist lust, and not to lust having looked.27 The writer eventually erupts in ecstatic verse, expressing a desire that his capac- ity to love be expanded by his intimate encounter with Christ. He mingles clas- sic mystical language of melting and inebriation with erotic imagery: Lord, though that love which I have, attain not to that measure which is unmea- sureable, yet Lord, let it be a full measure that thou pourest into me, and let there be nothing void in my heart, and unfilled by thy love. Yea, let thy spirit of love come so fully into my soul, that it stretch and enlarge her measure, and make her grow from the measure in which she is, unto the measure in which she should be (…) let the measure sometime be not only full, but running over; even running over to a spiritual drunkenness (…) for these extasies and excesses of love, shall somewhat advance my ability of loving thee. For when my understanding, will, and affections are all overflown, overcome, amazed, then shall my wonder gaze on thee, and my very fainting shall be enflamed toward thee, and melt into thee.28 Taylor, too, bursts into fits of ecstatic desire and delight at times, anticipating his union with Christ in conjugal terms. As part of Christ’s chosen body, the church, Taylor exults to have become a ‘member of this spouse of thine’ (PM 2.142:37) so that he may enjoy the rapturous delight of complete union with the bridegroom. He describes his euphoria in an erotically charged passage sug- gestive of orgasm. Considering how Christ has seduced his bride, his ‘dove’ (Song 6:9), and how he has ‘Circled her within his glorious arms’ (PM 2.142:23), Taylor describes the moment of exuberance when the fluids of grace rush forth: Thy Love that fills the Heavens brimful throughout Coms tumbling down on her with transcendent bliss Even as it were in golden pipes that spout In streams from heaven, Oh! What love like this? (PM 2.142:31-34)
THEME THREE – CONCEPTION, PREGNANCY, AND CHILD-BEARING
These amatory visions of union with the beloved lead the male Puritan writers to the logical end of their metaphoric change of gender. If their spiritual loveplay is imagined and experienced in erotic terms, it is also reasonable to imagine con- ception of children. The male poet imagines himself impregnated with the seed of his beloved bridegroom. It should be obvious at this point that this imagery
27 Ibidem. 28 Ibid., 736. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 103
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was not unusual among Puritan men, who were required to imaginatively trans- mute their gender identification from male to female in order for the spiritual marriage analogy to be effective. Some have speculated that Puritan men like Edward Taylor exhibit severe anxiety about the transformation of their ‘manhood’ into a passive feminine role. Walter Hughes discerns a ‘poetics of panic’ as he awaits the sexual aggression of his divine lover to overwhelm him.29 However, such a reading seems to ignore the pervasiveness of such language in male Puritan writ- ing. Gender roles seem to have been fluid, especially in early New England cul- ture. Various roles may have been designated as either masculine or feminine but were not always rigidly confined to men or women who often took up roles of the ‘other’ sex depending on circumstances.30 While this phenomenon did not necessarily extend to granting women equal status in society, it did allow ‘male believers to assume a bridal role without any sense of personal or social calamity’.31 Puritan ministers, like others in Christian history, frequently used marital imagery, what Amanda Porterfield calls ‘bride consciousness’, to describe the spiritual life, encouraging male and female believers alike to imagine themselves as brides of Christ.32 Sanctification was understood in terms of mystical union, and clergy like Boston’s Benjamin Colman (1673-1747) describe it as a marriage between God and humans, stressing that ‘a marriage makes Two become One so that he [sic] is joined to the Lord in one spirit’.33 This phenomenon is problematic in a significant sense. Space prevents a thor- ough critique here, but it must be acknowledged that the evident malleability of gender identification in nuptial mysticism owes in large part to social hierar- chies and power relations as related to gender roles. Bynum notes that medieval male writers used female language to speak of their souls or selves more fre- quently than did women writers. For medieval European men, the spiritual ideals to which they sought conformity were humility and renunciation. Because women held subservient positions in society, male writers wanting to embrace pious ideals of humility and servitude had to adopt female personas when describing their position in relation to Christ, their head.34 Porterfield examines
29 Walter Hughes, ‘“Meat out of the eater”: Panic and desire in American Puritan poetry’, in: Joseph Boone & Michael Cadden (Eds.), Engendering men: The question of male feminist criticism, New York-London: Routledge, 1990, 102-121: 116-119. 30 Richard Godbeer, Sexual revolution in early America, Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 79. 31 Ibidem. 32 Amanda Porterfield, Feminine spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980, 27. 33 Ibid., 26. 34 Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption, 165-175. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 104
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a similar phenomenon within New England culture. Puritan ministers promoted the ideal of ‘affectionate, hierarchical marriage’ as normative in the social and spiritual realms.35 Again, self-renunciation and obedience were spiritual ideals to be sought. Sexual satisfaction was portrayed as ‘an encounter between a male authority and female submission’, and the work of grace is compared to such an encounter.36 Porterfield claims that this ‘depiction of grace as erotic struggle for submission to God’ contributed to social expectations of marriage which author- ized and encouraged male dominance and female subservience.37 Belden Lane hopefully notes that men who experienced themselves as spiritual wives in rela- tion to Christ could potentially usurp oppressive gendered hierarchies in the social realm, but this does not appear to have been the case.38 The inequity rein- forced by the nuptial metaphor is significant and troubling. However, the use of marital imagery enabled Puritan men to imagine themselves as wives in rela- tion to Christ, their husband. Thus, Puritan ministers often portrayed the reception of Christ’s presence and grace in terms of fertility and reproduction. In the context of describing Christ’s desire to marry the devoted and in urging the reader to be faithful to him, Cotton Mather (1663-1728) also urges the soul to ‘receive’ Christ freely and ‘by Him to bring forth Fruit unto Him’.39 Samuel Willard described grace as a ‘seed sown within us’.40 Thomas Foxcroft (1697-1769) compared redemption to a seed of corn planted in soil and being fertilized, going on to say that ‘the saints shall be impregnated, and spring up; sprout upon his stalk, and (being ripe to the harvest of glory) be gathered into the garner of paradise’.41 Taylor’s orgasmic imagery is not limited to the passage cited earlier. Elsewhere he prays: O let thy lovely Streams of Love distill Upon myself and spoute their spirits pure Into my viol and my Vessel fill. (PM 2.32:49-51) The work of grace is portrayed as lovers playing upon their bed: ‘The Soule’s the Womb. Christ the spermadote’42 he writes, ‘And Saving Grace the seed cast there-
35 Amanda Porterfield, Female piety in Puritan New England: The emergence of religious human- ism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 3-4. 36 Ibid., 14. 37 Ibidem. 38 Belden Lane, ‘Two schools of desire: Nature and marriage in seventeenth-century Puritanism’, in: Church History 69 (2000) no. 2, 372-402: 295-297. 39 Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, Cambridge (MA) 1692, 67-68. 40 Willard, A compleat body of divinity, 821. 41 Thomas Foxcroft, A funeral sermon occasioned by several mournful deaths (Boston 1722), quoted in Godbeer, Sexual revolution in early America, 78. 42 ‘The seed giver’. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 105
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into’ (PM 2.80:31-32). The poet imagines himself filled with Christ’s seed, but not simply filled: the male poet imagines himself impregnated by his beloved bridegroom. Desiring Christ’s seed, he understands it as the force of life ‘Making vitality in all things flow’. Seed and womb conjoin to conceive children, spiritual children of course – the fruits of the spirit – but imagined and perhaps experi- enced in some way as conceived within the poet’s womb. Bearing these spiritual children will bring new life into a world currently inhabited by ‘Things Spiritu- all Dead’ where the image of God has grown ‘thread bare’ (PM 2.80:37-39). Children of the union will newly populate the world with bearers of God’s image. The resulting conception issues in the birth of eternal life, overcoming the death and decay of the fall. He bears spiritual children as a sign of his complete devo- tion. Children of the union will newly populate the world with bearers of God’s image. Thus Taylor exclaims that his divine lover is the ‘Well Spring of this [new] life’ and begs Christ to drench him with liquid grace (PM 2.80:43-45). Francis Rous also begs Christ to fill him with divine love so that he might become ‘generative’, conceiving and bearing Christ’s children. Rous prays that he might love Christ like a wife: ‘let me desire union with thee because I love thee, and because I love thee, let me desire to bring forth fruit unto thee’.43 Rous desires not merely a spiritual one-night stand as it were, but rather a per- manent and complete union. He wants to express his devotion by bearing fruit, likened to children, which are the Christ-like virtues dwelling within his soul. Rous vows to nurture these as a sign of his adoration: Give me therefore children by this union with thee, even fruits of thy spirit which may resemble thee and be pledges to me of thy union with me. And when I have brought them forth, let me give praise unto thee for thou only maketh the barren to bear; and to be a fruitful mother of children.44
THE LORD’S SUPPER
At this point it is evident that many Puritans approached the Lord’s Supper as an erotically charged encounter between Christ and the worshipper. The intimacy experienced in the Lord’s Supper is frequently equated to marriage in Puritan literature on the subject. In his sermon series published as Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper Edward Taylor likens the Eucharistic feast to a wedding ban- quet for Christ, the bridegroom, and his beloved bride, the church.45 The feast
43 Rous, ‘The mystical marriage’, 737. 44 Ibidem. 45 Edward Taylor’s treatise concerning the Lord’s Supper, ed. Norman Grabo, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1965. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 106
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is a celebration of the union between Christ and his beloved. Puritan writers often likened the civil covenantal aspect of marriage to what happens in the Lord’s Supper. In his manual of instructions preparing the faithful to celebrate the Eucharist, Matthew Henry (1662-1714) reminds his readers that the Lord’s Supper is a feast celebrating the marriage covenant between Christ and the church with the words of Song of Songs 2:16: ‘my beloved is mine and I am his’.46 Henry writes that the Supper, like marriage, is ‘such a covenant as makes two one; a covenant founded in the dearest love, founding the nearest relation, and designed to be perpetual’.47 Further, the wedding feast solemnizes the vows exchanged between bride and bridegroom; here the believer ‘renounces all other lovers that stand in competition’ with Christ.48 In likening the civil covenant of marriage to the spiritual covenant sealed in the wedding feast, Richard Sibbes explains that just as covenant fidelity leads to a deepening of initial desire between lovers; the vows made and repeated in the sacraments deepen the bond between Christ and the members of his church over time, heightening their desire for one another.49 References to fidelity indicate the sexual dimension of marriage, and writers like Thomas Shepard draw on the erotic aspects of marriage to describe the Lord’s Supper. Continuing with the Christ as suitor theme, Shepard imagines the sacraments as the place where Christ invites his beloved to share a conjugal tryst. Christ draws the soul into his ordinances ‘that he might there declare his mind unto her’. Elaborating on the dynamics of the Lord’s Supper, Shepherd explains that Jesus ‘cannot express his love so much in seeing her [his beloved], or in sorrowing with her, but he must have her in bed with him, he must make over his whole estate to her, he must beget children by her’.50 In short, he must marry her, and the Lord’s Supper is the great celebration of the consummation of this marriage. Taylor, for his part, understood the Eucharist as the most intimate of earthly acts by which the believing person communes with Christ. For him, the language of the Song of Songs is most fitting to describe what takes place between Christ and communicant in the Eucharist. ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’ reads Song of Songs 2.16, and to Taylor this is the language of a marriage covenant, the most intimate and cherished of human relationships. These words describe perfectly for Taylor what occurs at the Lord’s Supper:
46 Matthew Henry, The communicant’s companion: Or, instructions for the right receiving of the Lord’s Supper, Boston 1716, 39. 47 Ibidem. 48 Ibidem. 49 Lane, ‘Two schools of desire’, 379. 50 Shepard, The sincere convert, 108. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 107
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I’m Thine, Thou Mine! Mutuall propriety: Thou giv’st thyselfe. And for this gift thou takst mee To be thine own. I give myself (poor toy) And take thee for myne own, and so to bee. (PM 2.79:19-22) Taylor’s view of the Eucharist as intimate encounter shaped his involvement in the Stodderean controversy, a late seventeenth century New England debate over the nature of the Supper in relation to baptism and conversion. Briefly, Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729), grandfather of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), began advocating an ‘open table’ for those who had not yet demonstrated an experi- ence of conversion, or regenerating grace. Stoddard regarded the Eucharist as a ‘converting ordinance’. Taylor and some of New England’s leading clergymen opposed Stoddard, condemning his permissiveness and warning that his views threatened the purity and sanctity of the rite.51 For Taylor, whose intense, inti- mate experiences at the Eucharist are recorded in his poetry and sermons, the Supper as the most intimate experience by which Christ communes with his people may no more be shared with outsiders than may a couple open their bed- room to others. Responding to Stoddard’s perceived laxity, Taylor called the Eucharist ‘a most Holy Ordinance of most intimate Communion with God’.52
EROTIC EVOCATIONS
It has become commonplace among modern interpreters to regard the history of allegorical or spiritual Song of Songs interpretation as a prudish sublimation of the Song’s erotic imagery and sexual themes. One historian, for example, writes that ‘allegories of the Canticles resolve the surface eroticism into relation- ships between the soul (or the church) and the glorified Christ: that is, into rela- tions between incorporeal or metaphorical persons’.53 A scholar of American lit- erature reads Edward Taylor as refusing to develop the erotic implications of the Song of Songs, claiming that the poet completely ‘absorbed the process of alle- gorization demanded by the commentary tradition’, thus defusing any erotic
51 For a full account of the controversy see Robert G. Pope, The half-way covenant: Church mem- bership in Puritan New England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. 52 Edward Taylor, ‘The revised Foundation Day sermon’, in: Thomas Davis & Virginia Davis (Eds.), Church records and other sermons: The unpublished writings of Edward Taylor. Vol. 1, Boston: Twayne, 1981, 283-373: 325. For a fuller account of Taylor’s position see my ‘Language of the feast: The Song of Songs in Edward Taylor’s eucharistic theology’, in: Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy (2008), 90-113. 53 Debra Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Sacrifice, scholarship and subjectivity, Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1994, 172. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 108
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implications of the text.54 In recent years, Hebrew Bible scholars have commonly addressed the history of interpretation in some way when dealing with the Songs of Songs. Progressive and conservative scholars alike commonly cast this history in a negative light. Andre LaCocque has maintained that spiritual readers of the Song display a ‘deep seated repugnance before its erotic nature’.55 Tremper Long- man III regards Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song as indicating the Cistercian abbot’s ‘contempt for flesh and for females’ and likely connected to his violent conflicts with Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and others. ‘A timely reminder’, Longman writes, ‘that the unnatural suppression of sexual love can lead to frightful consequences’.56 However, I suggest that the dismissive approach misunderstands the nature of sublimation in Puritan, and other, spiritual readings of the Song. Writing about the erotic dimensions of Bernard of Clairvaux’s spirituality, Mark Burrows quips that such approaches reveal more about our ‘modern post-Freudian sensi- bilities’ than about the spiritual appropriation of erotic literature in pre-modern communities.57 Those who approach the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love between God and Israel, God and the church, or God and the individual soul are certainly sublimating human erotic desire into a sign of spiritual longing. Without question, the nuptial metaphor as a sign of a spiritual relationship is a trope, standard in the history of Song commentary. As a genre in its own right, the allegorical and mystical approach which understands the literal eroticism in the Song as a sign of something spiritual things shapes – and perhaps constrains – the reader’s horizon of expectation of this text.58 As the genre advances and develops, interpreters already know that they should expect an encounter with Jesus when they are confronted with such frankly erotic language. Still, does this mean that they were fearful of or repulsed by such language and imagery? If this is the case, then why pay any attention to it at all, much less preach lengthy sermon series, write long commentaries, and compose poetry about it? Why engage in such playful, titillating discourse as is often found in devotional, homiletic, or commentary literature? Does it mean that Puritan readers and
54 Jeffrey Hammond, ‘A Puritan Ars moriendi: Edward Taylor’s late meditations on the Song of Songs’, in: Early American Literature 17 (1982-83), 191-214: 198-199. 55 Andre LaCocque, Romance she wrote: A hermeneutical essay on the Song of Songs, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998, 3. 56 Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 2001, 33. This argument was advanced some time ago by William E. Phipps, ‘The plight of the Song of Songs’, in: Jour- nal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974) no. 1, 82-100: 90-92. 57 Mark Burrows, ‘Foundations for an erotic Christology: Bernard of Clairvaux on Jesus as “Tender Lover”’, in: Anglican Theological Review 80 (1999) no. 4, 477-493: 478. 58 E. Ann Matter suggests the medieval commentary tradition as a genre in its own right, shap- ing readers’ expectations and serving as a ‘model of writing’. The voice of my Beloved, 3-19. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 109
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writers who appropriated the text of the Song of Songs spiritually or understood the Eucharist as an erotic encounter were indicating some kind of unhealthy and perverse obsession that they were too timid to express openly? Julia Kristeva addresses these issues, reflecting on the nature of the religio- erotic literature like the Song of Songs and its reception history. ‘As soon as the evocation of amorous experience begins’ she writes, ‘we step into a world of undecidable meanings’. When we read or hear ‘your love is more delightful than wine / delicate is the fragrance of your perfume / your name is an oil poured out’, these words evoke the intoxicating aromas, the thrilling anticipation of the touch of which they speak. They trigger ‘an overflowing of meaning, a flow of significations and sensations comparable to that produced by caresses, perfume, and oils’. Kristeva calls this phenomenon ‘semantic polyvalence brewed by the state of love – seat of imagination, source of allegory’.59 Expressions of mystical or spiritual desire and encounter are themselves rooted in human physical and psychological experiences of desire and encounter and represent an ‘intersection of corporeal passion and idealization’.60 Rather than an indication of repugnance or contempt for such erotic language, such semantic polyvalence indicates at some level an affirmation that human sexuality is indeed one of God’s good gifts, that human expressions of intimacy and love reflect and at some level par- ticipate in their divine source, and that human erotic desire is a fitting analogy for the relationship between human beings and the God who has become incar- nate in human flesh. Further, As Kristeva notes, in amorous dialogue ‘I open myself up to the other. I welcome him in my loving swoon, or else absorb him in my exaltation’.61 Such erotic discourse indicates a desire for otherness. It makes one vulnerable. It facilitates the kind of openness necessary for one to enter into complete intimacy with another. Octavio Paz has written, ‘Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness’.62 Commenting on the Song of Songs Paz asserts that the ‘religious meaning of the poem is indistinguishable from its profane erotic meaning: they are two aspects of the same reality’.63 Imag- ination is central to eros, poetry, and religion according to Paz; thus, the lan- guages of sexuality and spirituality will naturally co-mingle as they grope for ways to express that which is beyond language. Allegorical or spiritual appropri- ation of the erotic elements in the Song of Songs or the nuptial metaphor may
59 Julia Kristeva, Tales of love, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 90. 60 Ibid., 95. 61 Ibid., 94. 62 Octavio Paz, The double flame: Love and eroticism, transl. Helen Lane, New York: Harcourt, 1995, 15. 63 Ibid. 18. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 110
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be seen as a technique which facilitates the passionate, yet un-nameable human yearning for communion with the divine, and assists the worshipper in express- ing the willingness to be inhabited and transformed by the presence of Christ. Such frank eroticization of spiritual language may also indicate something fur- ther. In his work on the English metaphysical poets, Richard Rambuss regards ‘sacred eroticism as eroticism, as a form of sexual expression’. Rambuss pushes us to read through the conventionality of such erotic textualities to consider how ecstatic religious texts ‘bespeak a devotion that is – and is not just like – an erotic experience, an affective aftershock that seldom registers as ‘just’ spiritual’.64 Thus, the appropriation of such erotic discourse reflects the lived experience of those who speak and write of their experience of Christ’s presence in these terms. It reflects a genuine yearning for an absent God, but it also discloses a mode of mysterious, intimate encounter. Kristeva notes that ‘the problematics of incarnation’ present themselves here: ‘The loved one is not there, but I experience his body; in a state of amorous incantation I am united with him, sensually and ideally’.65 Although Kristeva is trying to explain literary conventions and textual strategies, her semiotic approach is applicable to sacramental theology. The sign value of the sacraments is to evoke the presence of something – or someone – seemingly absent, to tan- gibly manifest what is intangible. The body of Jesus is presented when worship- pers join their bodies in space with other bodies, touch one another, and smell, taste and swallow bread and wine. For John Calvin (1509-1564), the primary theological influence upon the Puritans of England and New England, the signs of bread and wine are the physical objects in which human perception and divine presence meet.66 With appropriate cautions about the function of signs, Calvin fully affirmed their value as God’s gifts to human beings in the power of the Spirit, in evoking or manifesting the real presence of Christ, asserting that ‘by the showing of the symbol, the thing itself is also shown’.67 Writing about the Eucharist in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argues: If the Lord truly represents the participation in his body through the breaking of bread, there ought not to be the least doubt that he truly presents and shows his body (…) For why should the Lord put in our hand the symbol of his body, except to assure you of a true participation in it? (…) When we have received the sym- bol of the body, let us no less surely trust that the body itself is also given to us.68
64 Richard Rambuss, Closet devotions, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, 5, 74-75. 65 Kristeva, Tales of love, 94-95. 66 Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and liturgy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 155-156. 67 John Calvin Institutes of the Christian religion, ed. John T. McNeill, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960 (Library of Christian Classics), IV:xvii.10, 1371. 68 Ibidem. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 111
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Further, for Calvin, real presence included a physical dimension in the sense that Christ becomes one with the faithful person through the human body. It is necessary for Christ to inhabit us or reside in us; we grow into and become one with Christ, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, as he feeds us with his body and blood: ‘as Christ becomes our food, we become one in Christ’.69 The incar- nation is central here, as it was for Edward Taylor and other Reformed thinkers. The incarnation is the work of God who ‘reached across the chasm between human and divine, between boundedness and boundlessness’ to unite with humanity ‘through the unity both of Christ’s person and body and of Christ’s body’s physical body with the individual bodies of believers’.70 The divine inhab- its material reality, a physical human body, experiencing the bodiliness of human emotion, want, deprivation, desire, arousal, pleasure and satisfaction. The human body and its desires are hallowed by this inhabitation. Human physical desire is affirmed as a fitting expression of spiritual desire. Even further, the possibility is opened for human and divine to become one, an indication of God’s own desire for communion with human worshippers. Taylor expresses his loving amaze- ment at this prospect: What Love is this of thine, that Cannot bee In thine Infinity, O Lord, Confinde, Unless it in thy very Person See, Infinity, and Finity Conjoyn’d? What hat thy Godhead, as not Satisfied Marri’de our Manhood, making it its Bride? (PM I.1:1-6) The erotic Eucharistic musings of the Puritans are consistent with their Calvin- ist sense of God’s real participation in human life through the sacraments, and they express the deep yearning of the soul to be one with the source of love. But do they have anything to contribute to contemporary Reformed Eucharistic spir- ituality? First, they remind Reformed Christians that we are embodied beings. The Lord’s Supper itself should be a constant reminder of our embodiment for it consists of food and drink, elemental sustenance, indicators of our depend- ence upon the earth and its produce for our very survival. This also indicates that the whole of embodied human experience, from hunger to sexual desire, is the location of encounter with God. Early Reformed theologians well understood that God meets and embraces humanity within human experience. Sara Miles writes of her Eucharistic encounters: ‘There was the suggestion that God could be located in experience, sensed through bodies, tasted in food; that my body was connected literally and mysteriously to other bodies and loved without
69 Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, 160. 70 Ibid., 160-162. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 112
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reason’.71 Much Protestant Eucharistic observance lacks this explicit awareness, focused as it is on cognitive recollection and individual piety. Further, the taste- less Styrofoam-like wafers and eye-dropper sized portions of grape juice most often employed in North American Protestant assemblies do very little to evoke sensory or sensual experiences, to suggest the embodied nature of the Christian assembly, or to elicit the ‘state of amorous incantation’ Kristeva describes which can potentially mediate intimate encounter with an incarnate deity. Perhaps renewal could begin with the recovery of elements that resemble real food and drink in quantities sufficient to suggest a meal. A second contribution hinted at by the Puritan sources challenges the heav- ily penitential and sacrificial emphases characteristic of Reformed Eucharistic liturgies. June Christine Goudey critiques these emphases in favor of a Eucharis- tic imagination that sees redemption as resulting not only from Jesus’ death, but ‘as being fulfilled by God’s incarnating presence in Jesus and in all of creation’.72 Such an imagination might invite worshippers into a Eucharistic experience cel- ebrated as a joyous feast of life, love, and justice rather than as a somber funeral- like occasion. Finally, a more sensory rich and joyous approach to the Eucharist might aid Reformed Christians in overcoming their reputation as ‘God’s frozen chosen’ and lead to a wider renewal of affective and experiential spiritual prac- tice to which Reformed history bears ample witness. Perhaps renewed Eucharis- tic practice can encourage a contemporary appropriation of the passionate piety for which their early Puritan forebears were known.
71 Sara Miles, Take this bread, 66. See also Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff, The Eucharist: Bodies, bread, and resurrection, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. On page 127 they state, ‘The Eucharistic life is about the real stuff: bread and hunger, food and pleasure, eating disorders and global food politics, private property and the common good’. The overall thrust of their work seeks to hold together materiality of bodies in liturgical practice and the eschatological fulfillment of material reality as also indicated in Christian liturgy. 72 June Christine Goudey, The feast of our lives: Re-imaging communion, Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002, 158. This is not to suggest, however, that Puritan Eucharistic theology was not also penitential and sacrificial. Rather, that the erotic, sensual experiences suggested by the Puritan language under consideration here offer an alternative to such emphases.