In the Current Issue: "Food Allergies, the Body of Christ, and Liturgical Differences" (Part 2)

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Worship in a Divided World,” guest-edited by Benjamin Durheim, seeks to explore where our worshipping communities stand with regard to divisions that have pulled Christian worship patterns in divergent directions both negatively and, especially in recent times, positively as strengths. This excerpt is by Samantha Slaubaugh on navigating the needs of people with food allergies in worship and especially when serving the Lord’s Supper. The full essay is accessible through institutional and individual subscriptions. –– Melinda Quivik

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The Vatican II constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium, affirms that Christ is present “when the Church prays and sings… in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members. From this it follows that every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of His Body which is the Church, is a sacred action surpassing all others.” If we are to be able to receive the varying modes of participation as means for mystagogical reflection done by all, we must rely on this theological foundation: Christ is present in the gathered assembly; it is the whole baptized people of God, the body of Christ, through whom God performs the liturgy. The Spirit dwells in each member and reveals herself through their enacted relationships. . .

How do congregations that are unintentionally or intentionally resistant to deviations from the majoritarian norms begin to foster a liturgical imagination that sees the participation of all baptized members as a communal encounter with the Other in worship? How do we embody relationships of liberative ingestion, where we become safe for others to be fully themselves as we gather at the table? As a parent to a child with food allergies, access intimacy is fostered quickly and powerfully when someone performs awareness and care. The person may not know initially how to keep my child safe, but when they ask what we need before we gather, they embody a solidarity with me as a caretaker. . . They enter our world. A liturgical imagination, an orientation toward mystagogy, allows us as praying people to enter the world of others, especially strangers, not as conquerors who seek to possess or dominate, but as members of the body of Christ who seek to be what they already are.

While this simple task—walk alongside others and perform caring relationships in liturgical spaces—may appear to be vague, I offer it here as a praxis of liturgical solidarity that is available to all liturgical practitioners, to all the baptized. No one needs to wait for official changes in liturgical practice, renovations in liturgical spaces, or justice-oriented ministries to arise by someone else’s power in order to begin to foster access intimacy and create new liturgical performances of liberative ingestion.

Having a child with food allergies has revealed to me the inevitability of ingesting others. As such, I have sometimes found division to be necessary where justice is absent. When we discuss liturgy in a divided world, church leaders and congregants must consider how they are, in fact, contributing to divisions through their approach to dealing with differences in worshiping communities on an individualized rather than communal basis. The Holy Spirit invites us to be ingested in a liberative ingestion, to become what we eat when we eat the body of Christ. In this transformation, becoming the body of Christ, we are being made safe for consumption; we join God’s work of liberation for those whom we have oppressed by turning from our harmful practices that mutilate Christ’s body.

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Samantha Slaubaugh is a Fellow at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music. Her recent publications can be found here.

Samantha Slaubaugh, “Liberative Ingestion: Food Allergies, the Body of Christ, and Liturgical Differences,” Liturgy, 39, nos.3–4 (2024): 142–151, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2024.2369033.