1. It strikes me that we are thinking too much about what we get from the Eucharist (reception of Communion) and too little about how we participate in it (offering our souls and bodies within Christ’s sacrificial offering).

2. This would have been more obvious in a pre-industrial age when the people who attended mass were the people who made the bread and wine and harvested the wheat and grapes, acts also blessed by the Church. They participated in the offering without always receiving Communion.

3. The building churches, the offering of music, the making of fine vestments and ornaments and the gift of money for the poor and needy (!) were also self-sacrificial, self-giving contributions and participations to the overall Eucharistic action.

4. When the Reformation stripped most of this away in the interest of greater “participation,” ironically this limited the highest participation only to those who could read.

5. Communion was reduced to what we get rather than anything we might give (caveat: as a participation in Christ’s gift of the whole created order to the Father). It becomes a personal vehicle the value of which is determined by the individual recipient’s faith.

6. Communion has been reduced to reception alone, from a socially extensive interaction of people with the goods of creation, to a “thing” given at a single point of time to a party of select individuals.

7. All of the above conspires to the fetishisation and commodification of the Eucharistic host, and this is seen all the more clearly in arguments about whether priests should abstain from “feasting” while the laity cannot receive.

8. This rhetoric actually conspires with precisely the atomising forces which are breaking up society rather than reinforcing the interconnectedness of the world and our fraternity with it: the sundering of truth, goodness and beauty.

9. And what underlies it all is the great division in western (and actually Islamic) philosophy: is creation fundamentally good and blessed (Iamblichus/Proclus/Aquinas/Al Arabi/Sadra), or neutral stuff on which we impose value (Averroes/Scotus/Ockham/Reformers/Enlightenment)?

10. In Christian terms, do we take a sacramental and iconic view of matter, or assume the same Cartesian mind-body dualism as the utilitarians of secular modernity? If the latter, I fear we are taking part in the disenchantment and technologisation of the world.