I want to open this post by sharing two stories. The first takes place at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.
Tourists come from all over the world to see this magnificent church, with the altar at its heart. But on May 21, 2013, the usual crowd of tourists witnessed an unusual sight. An elderly man went up to the altar, pulled out an automatic pistol, and shot himself in the mouth, his brain debris splattering everywhere among the 1,500 visitors.
This was the suicide of 78-year-old Dominique Venner, an ideologue of the French far-right. Protesting same-sex marriage, Islamic immigration, and rising leftism throughout Europe, Venner described his death as a sacrifice, in order to shock slumbering consciences.
Venner was not a Christian but looked to Europe’s pagan past for civilizational ressourcement. He longed for Europe to be restored to the vitalist ethos centered on the strongman and the creative force of human aggression.
But even though Venner wasn’t a Christian, he chose to harness the symbolism of the altar in his final act of protest. Even in his rejection of sacramental ordering, Venner’s suicide shows a tacit understanding that the symbolism of the Mass somehow lies at the center of culture and is a fitting location of sacrifice. His suicide note even described his death at the altar as a type of sacrifice.
This is one among a host of examples that could be multiplied of how those who reject Christianity still cannot escape from the significance of the Mass, nor the notion that the Eucharist somehow lies at the symbolic heart of civilization.
Now I want to tell you another, brighter story.
Once there was an empire that institutionalized violence, slavery, land theft, and false worship. This empire also perpetuated brutal mistreatment of women, children, and war prisoners. Though this empire brought stability to some regions, it destroyed traditional ways of life by going into foreign lands and imposing administrative and cultural norms that undermined communities. Wealth was taken from local provinces and sent to the capital, with devastating effects on many rural regions, eroding localism and creating economic dependency on imperial structures. This contributed to modes of urbanization that further undermined community and weakened the family.
When this empire seemed at the height of its power, a handful of Christian missionaries went around establishing Eucharistic micro-communities. These communities, based on the rhythms of true worship, functioned like cells of resistance; and while their resistance was peaceful, they were perceived as a threat because they showed a different way to be human than the priorities of the imperial culture. Through their expanding Eucharistic communities, believers demonstrated a different approach toward marginalized people like the poor, women, and victims of plagues. And where the surrounding imperial culture was based on top-down models of oppression and victimhood, the Christians organized their lives around the community virtues such as forgiveness, almsgiving, and love. As these sacramental communities spread, so did the counter-culture they represented until eventually the king of the empire confessed Christ. Over time a new culture began to be built out of the ruins of the empire, and this new culture would eventually contain entire cities centered around the rhythms of the sacraments.
In case you haven’t guessed, the events I just described is the story that begins in the book of Acts. By establishing Eucharistic communities, missionaries like St. Paul and the other apostles laid the groundwork for an alternative type of culture to that of Rome – a culture that would eventually lead to the societal order we refer to as Christendom.
Eucharistic Cultural Renewal
It’s becoming trendy to problematize Christendom, and to eschew the notion of “Christian culture.” Yet as historians like Tom Holland and others have pointed out, the freedoms we enjoy, and the very cultural norms by which we critique the hypocrisy and deficiencies of Christian society, directly emerged out of Christian civilization. Significantly, the Christian culture of Europe and the Byzantine East began with a few single seeds, namely the Eucharistic micro-communities we read about in the New Testament in places like Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia, etc.
The story of this Eucharistic counter-culture is key for us today as we pray for and seek cultural renewal. Life under the modern nation state is remarkably similar to life in the Roman empire. Like Rome, the modern nation state has brought some stability to the world, but at a terrible cost: the sprawling administrative state—whether our own federal government, Canada, the EU, or virtually everywhere today—has worked in tandem with industrial capitalism to erode traditional ways of life, imposing administrative and cultural norms that undermine local community and weaken the family in the process.
In dealing with the anti-culture around us, the solution today is the same as it was in the first century: cultural renewal through the power of the Mass, or the Divine Liturgy as it’s called in the East. Through the Eucharist God is constituting a people – a community in the midst of a society of anti-community.
Eucharistic communities, in turn, become the means for healing our society and nation, as indicated in this diagram.
But is there really a link between the Eucharist and the renewal of society, and what is the relationship between a Eucharistic community and culture?
If you had asked me this question before I started attending St. Patrick’s, I probably would have said no. But I joined the parish just as Fr. Patrick was mid-flow in an extensive Sunday school series on culture and community, and the relationship of both to the sacrifice of the Mass. Fr. Patrick has been teaching us that the Eucharist is what generates, nurtures, and sustains the parish community which, in turn, provides the divine energies for the transformation of all other societies and nations.
Misunderstanding the Eucharist
Making the case for Eucharistic community is difficult for a number of reasons. For one thing, we often misunderstand the Eucharist. Most of the current ways of conceptualizing Communion, even among sacramental traditions, treat the Holy Mysteries in ways not integrated with community, with the result that the Eucharist becomes compartmentalized from our understanding of culture and community. Though we might expect this within non-liturgical traditions holding a purely memorial view of the Supper, it is even prevalent among Orthodox, Catholic and High Church Protestants, since what functionally prevails is often more akin to a franchise view of Communion: the Eucharist is approached like a Starbucks drive-through with no organic connection to the community in which it is celebrated.
But we also find ourselves up against misunderstandings of culture.
Misunderstanding Cultural Renewal
Most of the current prescriptions for cultural renewal bypass the role of embodied community, treating culture as an abstraction. I’ve been involved in the discourse on cultural renewal ever since I was 26 when I started working for a Christian lobby group in the UK. Since then, I’ve worked for numerous Christian organizations that have a mission to renew culture and transform society. Yet in all this ministry, it’s been very rare to see attention given to the relationship between cultural renewal and community. Significantly, when Rod Dreher ignited discussion about the relation between community and cultural renewal in the discourse on The Benedict Option, his emphasis on sacramental micro-communities was widely received as a repudiation of culture, as if focusing on community as the linchpin of cultural renewal somehow equates to a run-for-the-hills isolationism.
Neglecting the role of community in cultural renewal has led to massive misunderstandings, not only about strategies for cultural renewal, but even about the nature of our current anti-culture.
I’d like to explore this last point, as well as the relation between culture and community. This will lay the groundwork for returning to a discussion of the Eucharist, and its role in transforming society through re-constituting community.
Understanding Our Anti-Culture
When we think of our current anti-culture, many things come to mind. Anti-culture manifests itself in widespread addiction, trauma, depression, abortion, violence, and on and on. But I want to suggest that we can actually understand all these disorders as symptoms of a far deeper malaise. These are all symptoms of an anti-culture that can be defined, first and foremost, as an erosion of community.
The legacy of the great historian Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) helps us understand the relation between culture and community, and thus the relation between anti-culture and the breakdown of community.
Dawson defined culture as the common life of an aggregate of people. Culture is a shared public life, a life a people live in common. When we have a shared common life, then we inhabit a culture and have a sense of responsibility for it. Culture then becomes a place we attend to with art, institutions, ceremonies, festivals, local traditions, worship—in short, all the things that come to mind when we think of culture, and all the things we seek to defend from the forces of chaos and barbarism.
Dawson challenges us not to think of “culture” as an abstraction that exists in the same abstract plane as “the market” in economics – as a disembodied phenomenon. There is only the culture of embodied communities.
Yet often when Christians talk about cultural renewal, we neglect the role of embodied micro-communities, with the result that culture becomes something disembodied and abstract. And when we think of culture as an abstraction, we end up with false prescriptions for healing culture, and in particular we end up neglecting the role of community.
Culture and Loving Common Life
When we talk about the cultures that emerge out of a shared public life, we are ultimately talking about love. An embodied communal culture is about love between us and the people with whom we share a common life. And culture is about the creative products—institutions, art, traditions, leisure practices—that emerge out of that loving common life.
As an example of how culture emerges out of a loving common life, consider a family. A man and woman are private individuals, but when they come together in marriage, their shared common life creates a mini-culture. This culture is creative, giving birth to a little community, a family. A family is a miniature culture: each family has their own customs, rituals, and traditions that organically emerge out of their shared public life. And the culture of one family is different to the culture of another family, even though both families may inhabit the same broader society.
Similarly, the culture of a village, a tribe, a neighborhood, will have its own traditions, rituals, and unspoken understandings, that give cohesion and meaning to their shared public life.
Conceptualizing culture in this way helps us understand the true import of what I mentioned a minute ago, namely that we are living in an anti-culture. The reason culture is in disarray, and can often only be conceived in the abstract, is because there has been an erosion of embodied community, of shared public life, and of the love that holds culture and community together. There are many examples we could give but consider towns.
Icons of Anti-Culture
If you look at these typical neighborhoods, as pictured below, there is nothing that distinguishes these from hundreds of other similar neighborhoods. The features of cities that used to help establish a common public life—things like town squares, street corners, taverns, walkable market places—are usually not accessible from the neighborhoods, wherever else they may exist in the city. You often can’t even buy groceries without getting into your car and driving away from your immediate community.
This means that the things that tie us to the land—including shared public life particular to a locale—become tenuous and fungible, with the consequence that we are not truly “inhabiting” the places we live in a real and meaningful sense.
Today’s neighborhoods and cities that once fostered community have actually become places that isolate us from one another, with modern houses functioning as icons of anti-culture. Many people tell me, not simply that they don’t know their neighbors, but that if they were to take steps to get to know their neighbors, that would be considered highly weird. Gestures of goodwill to people on one’s own street risk getting oneself labelled as a creep. Through automatic garage doors, we can enter and exit our house literally without ever having to step foot in the neighborhood, and many people go years without even knowing the names of people two or three houses adjacent. This leads to a way of life that is lonely and deeply isolating.
Not only are these structures built as a militant violation of God’s stamp on creation through the rejection of geometry and sacred patterns, but their very design and layout turn them into temples to autonomous individualism, icons of anti-culture.
These types of houses, like anti-communal neighborhoods within cities, do not spring up naturally. If development is left to unfold organically at a human scale, then city streets, villages, and neighborhoods typically foster shared public life. What we have today is the result of thousands of political and economic choices, including numerous rules and artificial impositions, that collectively suppress the natural impulses of humans as social creatures. From Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” which bulldozed neighborhoods in the name of progress, to economic policies hostile to small businesses, to so-called urban renewal schemes that separate commerce from living, we now exist within a political, economic and regulatory ecosystem inimical to genuine community.
The common factor in this ecosystem has been to facilitate what Philip Bess refers to as “that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self.”
Now to be sure, the vestiges of community still exist today, but they have migrated around amenities like the gym, swimming pool, coworking lounge, or affinity groups (largely online) centered around entertainment (sports, music, etc.). Even in some rural communities where the echoes of authentic social cohesion still linger, technology is isolating the younger generation from any deep awareness of mutual dependence, as the omnipresent digital ecosystem reinforces the myth of self-sufficiency and radical autonomy. When universities, or malls, or coffee shops, make a nod toward the need for communal bonds, it often feels that community is just one more therapeutic add-on in the ongoing quest for self-actualization.
The Politics of Anti-Culture
This has profound implications, including political implications. When people are isolated, they can be more easily manipulated by the elites who would control us, as Stella Morabito has showed powerfully in her book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.
Or consider the political implications in the widespread renegotiation of the very meaning of patriotism. If you love your community you will fight for it. You will defend your people and your people’s way of life and traditions. But what is Patriotism when one community or neighborhood is interchangeable with any other? When one community or neighborhood is more or less interchangeable with any other, then people become disincentivized to fight against policies or persons threatening to undermine the integrity of their community, because one can always just move somewhere else. If a data center goes up in your neighborhood, then rather than fight, you can simply relocate. When nothing ties you to the particularity of one locale vs. another, then patriotism becomes merely abstract, reduced to a vague allegiance to the bureaucratic mechanisms of the nation state.
The Ecclesiology of Anti-Culture
The same mentality often prevails in how we approach church: on the franchise view of church, where one parish is more or less interchangeable with any other, then if there is a recurring problem, or if there is a person you don’t get on well with, then instead of learning to work through the problems in patience and long-suffering, you can simply leave. Church begins to be approached, not as an actual parish community, but like a drive-through, where the services offered become fungible with any other church in your larger archdiocese or communion.
For many modern evangelical Christians, the very term “parish” has receded into anachronism. Our approach to church then comes to mirror the breakdown of community that is the hallmark of our anti-culture.
The Psychology of Anti-Culture
We know in our bones that there is a different type of life. Tourists come from thousands of miles to visit old towns built in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, with the tourists often not fully understanding what attracts them to these spots. Yes, we like them because they are old and historic, but even more fundamentally, whether we realize it or not, old European towns attract us because all the elements—from winding cobblestone roads to marketplaces to city gates to village commons—all these elements foster community. Streets and the squares designed to be active public places have a humanizing pull that is remarkably strong, even when these spaces no longer function as living centers of shared communal life, just as historic churches attract us even when they no longer function as vibrant places of worship.
Remember that shared public life is the seedbed of culture. In historic villages, principalities and small kingdoms, the culture of community became incarnated in customs, rituals, and institutions that included everything from local food traditions to leisure practices to unique forms of clothing and music.
But within the contemporary context, to the extent that culture is incarnated in customs, rituals, and institutions, these tend to be the institutions and traditions of mass mono-culture, without any intrinsic relationship to real embodied micro-communities.
Even when this mono-culture is subdivided into affinity groups—such as youth culture or consumer subculture, or ideological tribes—these occur within the matrix of largely disembodied consumption networks possessing no organic relation to actual embodied communities and spaces.
This has profound psychological implications. The mental health and addiction crises we’re facing is not just because of the increased accessibility of chemical and behavior addictions, but because of lack of healthy connection.
Those of you in the behavioral health fields will be familiar with the famous Rat Park Study. This classic study from the late 70’s began by putting rats alone in a series of separate cages. Each rat was given access to two beverages: regular water, and water laced with heroin. The rats became addicts, and 90% died from their addiction.
But in the second phase of the experiment, rats were given the same choice, but this time they weren’t alone but placed in a rat community where they could engage in activities with other rats such as working together, playing together, raising families, and so forth. During this phase of the experiment, only 5% of the rat population chose the drug water.
In a society that is systemically antithetical to community, we are like the rats in the first phase of this study. We have created a pressure cooker for addiction, depression, and maladaptive mood states.
At the 2025 OCAMPR conference I had the privilege of serving on a panel with Dr. Mena Mesiha, Mary Mesiha, and Mina Botros to explore the question of tech addiction, and in Mary’s presentation she cited the British novelist Johann Hari, who said “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety – it’s connection.”
Mary went on to make the observation that
”Addiction is not about the pleasurable effects of substances, it’s about the user’s inability to connect in healthy ways with other human beings. In other words, addiction is not a substance disorder, it’s a social disorder, the substance is not the issue, it is what is underneath.”
What is underneath is usually some type of isolation or loneliness because of the breakdown of community. And that makes sense theologically. We were designed so that our nous desires connection with God; yet because God’s love is incarnational, His love is mediated through human instrumentality, including communities. It is very hard to connect with God, and thus to flourish in our humanity, when one is isolated from others. That is why even monastics typically dwell together in community.
Clearly, therefore, the recovery of community must lie at the heart of cultural renewal. You can’t have a culture without community, and you can’t have a community without culture.
Eucharist Theology & The Cultural Mandate
You might be able to guess, based on the opening of this article, where I’m headed next. As Fr. Patrick has been teaching in his two-year Sunday school class, the solution to recovering community, and thus culture, is restored communion with God in the Eucharist, and the embodied micro-communities that emerge out of sacramental celebration.
At this point, many questions emerge. There are hundreds of thousands of Eucharistic celebrations every week, so why do we still live in an anti-culture? Is the renewal of culture and community via the Eucharist something mystical, or is it something we can see and participate in tangibly? And how does this relate to other aspects of societal engagement?
In order to properly address these questions, we need to marinate ourselves in Eucharistic theology. Unfortunately, the sacramental debates between Protestants and Catholics over the last 500 years have largely hijacked discussion of the Eucharistic to narrow categories about how Christ is or is not present in the Elements, thus eclipsing biblical aspects of how Holy Communion reconstitutes community and culture. To properly align our thinking with scripture, we need to go back to the very beginning.
The notion that there is a necessary relationship between culture and community is rooted in the Garden of Eden. In the beginning, God gave the human family a world rich in cultural, technological, aesthetic, and institutional potential, and He told them to go out and develop it. That is why Genesis 1:26–28 and 2:15 are often referred to as the “cultural mandate.”
But what was the foundation of Adam and Eve’s culture-building vocation? It was communion with the Creator. The little community Adam and Eve had with each other and the animals—and en potencia with all the future communities implicit in the command to be fruitful and multiply—were outgrowths of communion with the Creator, who came down to walk and talk with them in the cool of the day.
Through culture and godly community, men and women could take what was true in heaven—and that little part of heaven that had come to earth known as Eden—and extend that throughout the entire planet, making everywhere habitable for the divine presence. As such, the culture-building tasks humans were given—geographical and numerical expansion, tending and guarding, shepherding and dominion-taking, etc.—were not ends in themselves, as if the human vocation was fundamentally utilitarian. Rather, the culture-building vocation was an outgrowth of, and a means to further facilitate, intimate union with the Creator. This becomes particularly clear if we read the Genesis narrative in the context of the Ancient Near East (ANE).
Temple Theology & the Cultural Mandate
Genesis, though it describes events at the very beginning of history, is a literary product of the ANE, and thus must be interpreted in that setting. This is relevant because scholars have noted that the creation account reads like an ANE temple construction narrative.
In the ANE, temples were places to facilitate the presence of a god. Here’s briefly how it worked. In the mindset of the ANE, the purpose of religion was not for humans to go to heaven, which was a place in the sky, or on top of a mountain, where a nation’s god was enthroned above the gods of rival nations. Rather, the goal was that by worshiping the deity, people could bring heaven down to earth—to make the earth habitable for their god.
The means for bringing heaven down to earth was to build a temple for the god to inhabit, so he could dwell amongst his people. The temple then became a boundary or frontier between earth and heaven. Divine presence in the temple would then enable the deity to rule on earth as a microcosm of his rulership in heaven. That rule would begin with his favored nation and then gradually be implemented throughout society. This implementation happened through worship, conquest, expansion, and law. By facilitating law, order, and right worship, ANE temples brought people together, establishing a little community that reflected heavenly society, centered around divine presence.
The role of temples in forming community has become clear from archeology. In the early stages of human urbanization in Ancient Mesopotamia, common people did not live in cities (even allowing for the qualification that ancient cities are more akin to what we would call a village today). Archeology indicates that, in the earliest stages of urbanization, a city was initially just a temple complex, with public structures like granaries and administrative buildings attached to it. But drawn to the power of the temple and the protection it promised, people gradually moved nearer the temples, with cities then expanding to include common dwellings. By being near the sacred space of the temple, people believed they could ward off chaos, receive protection, and perform rituals that would ensure good harvests and fertility. In time, these little communities around the temple became the basis of a distinct culture, with its own language, rituals, obligations, customs—in short, a shared common or public life.
So the basic pattern is three-fold. First you have a heavenly pattern—a heavenly community in the clouds or on top of a mountain. The heavenly community consists of all the gods of the different nations. Each nation believed that their god was enthroned in the heavens above the gods of the other nations. This heavenly community was then embodied in an earthly temple—an area of sacred space. What established the temple as sacred space is an image or idol believed to function as a boundary between earth and heaven (just think of the stone idol of Ungit in C.S. Lewis’s story Till We Have Faces.)
The temple then became a control room for creating an earthly culture structured around divine presence.
Now you’re probably already beginning to connect the dots and understand how the Genesis narrative both assumed and challenged this basic framework. When Moses began asserting the supremacy of Israel’s God over the gods of the other nations, the Genesis creation account was part of that assertion, as it challenged rival creation accounts. Genesis, though it describes events at the very beginning of the world, is very much a literary product of the ANE; as such, it is part of Moses’ project of asserting Yahweh’s supremacy. It is a polemic against rival gods, and it has many of the same literary features as rival creation accounts and temple-construction narratives. And Genesis also contains a template for the right-ordering of society, but that right-ordering won’t occur through the presence of Marduk or Ra being extended via conquest and idol-construction, but through the presence of Israel’s God being spread via His images.
Genesis challenges ANE paganism by showing that the primordial vocation to connect heaven and earth is through humans being fruitful, subduing the wilderness outside the garden, and shepherding the earth with loving husbandry as God’s vice-regents. By faithfully fulfilling this vocation, humans act as priests between God and the rest of creation, ushering all of the world—including the broader society that existed then only potentially—into intimate union with the Creator. They would reflect all their love and creativity back to Him in worship, eventually spreading His love from sea to sea.
But all of this creative, culture-building work (tending and guarding, building and preserving, numerical and geographical expansion, taking dominion, stewarding the earth, loving husbandry of the animals) was to unfold within this larger template of communion with the Creator, as indicated by the first concentric circle in the diagram. The community of Eden—initially just the little society of the human family dwelling in intimacy with the Creator—is the basis of the cultural mandate.
If the prelapsarian state had continued, then obedience to the command to expand numerically and geographically would have produced multiple small communities, all rooted in communion with the Creator. If this loving communion with God had continued uninterrupted, then the cultural mandate would naturally have led to numerous human communities, each with their common public life—their own traditions, customs, rituals, languages, literature, and cultural artifacts—all living in harmony with each other through their harmony with the Lord.
Of course, this was disrupted by the Fall. After the Fall, mankind was banished from the garden-temple where God was present. Thus, communion with the Creator was lost. And as we see early on in Genesis, this breakdown of communion with the Creator leads to a breakdown in human community and therefore a breakdown in culture. The human being becomes fragmented, leading to disordered desire, addiction and mental health problems; and human society becomes fragmented, leading to anti-culture and a range of cascading social disorders.
Anti-Culture in the ANE
After the fall, human community (concentric circle 2), begins to be constructed independently of divine presence (concentric circle 1). This, in turn, results in a broader society (concentric circle 3) built independent of community.
A society of cities and empires springs up which undermines, rather than emerges out of, human community. And as we saw, temples became places, not of union with the true God, but communion with devils. The presence of these false gods led, not to loving community, but to unlove in the form of temple prostitution and human sacrifice. Whereas the presence of God in the primordial garden-temple was fundamentally about loving relationships, in paganism the presence of a god became terrifying, again depicted so well by C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces (though the book takes place in the Iron Age, not ANE Bronze Age).
So false worship led to the inversion of true community, and when this flowed outward to society the result was anti-culture. Anti-culture came to a climax in Babel. We often think of the tower of Babel as man’s attempt to reach the gods in heaven. But again, in the ANE, the purpose of religion was not to go to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth—to create an earthly society that was a microcosm of heaven.
There isn’t time to explore this now—and I’ve discussed this in my last two books—but when we understand Babel in its ANE context, and in light of some of the texts outside Genesis that discuss these events, it emerges that Babel is the ultimate anti-community. Through the city, it became possible to organize human beings into social structures larger than God originally intended men and women to live within. We know from paleoanthropology, and the work of scholars like Jared Diamond, that cities became ways of leveraging surplus labor for empire-building. The leader/s of a city will exert control over the surrounding countryside; the city will become a nation state; the nation state may eventually turn into an empire, where a few people exercise unprecedented power over thousands. This leads to a macro society that is antithetical to genuine community. Seen in this context, the single language at Babel was emblematic of a totalizing system, an oppressive unity—a macro society that is antithetical to localism and genuine community.
God broke up the Babel project by confusing their languages and scattering them abroad in small, linguistically distinct societies. This slowed down the growth of anti-culture, but it did not establish true community. For true community to happen, communion with the Creator must be re-established. If there can be a re-establishment of true sacred space, based around communion with the Creator, then cities themselves can be expressions, not of anti-culture like Babel, but of the humanizing values of Eden.
Communion Restored
Right after the Babel narrative what happens? God calls Abraham away from the idolatry. Through God’s covenant with Abraham, the divine presence that had been lost at Eden was re-established, at least partially. And immediately God promised Abraham many descendants, and we read about the sanctification of a little community growing up around his household—a community defined by true worship rather than the surrounding idolatry. And what did God say about this community? He said He would bless this community in order that all the nations would be blessed. So here again, we see the three-fold progression from the divine presence to culture to broader society.
This pattern keeps playing out like fractals. Initially the divine presence had simply established a community around the household of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But after the captivity in Egypt, this expanded to include the nation of Israel, which became broken down into micro-cultures of different tribes and extended family groups.
The purpose of the covenant community—the people with whom divine presence was restored—was always the mission to the Gentiles, that the broader international society might be habitable for the divine presence.
And so we see that almost every time God reiterated his covenant with one of Abraham’s progeny, there is a recapitulation or intensification of the divine presence, and then God emphasizes that this is for the sake of the whole world.
For example, when Abraham’s grandson Jacob had a dream of God’s presence, symbolized by a ladder of heavenly beings ascending and descending, the Lord promised Him a community, and then immediately promised that this community would transform the broader society—that through his family all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen 28:11-14). Or again, when God’s presence was intensified in Moses’ tabernacle, and then later in Solomon’s temple, the Lord made clear that the purpose is the blessing to the nations. The community centered around Abraham’s family was not for themselves, but for the whole world.
This community centered around the Abrahamic covenant is a recapitulation of Genesis. Remember that in Eden, intimacy with the Creator is what established community and then drove the cultural mandate, like this:
After the covenant with Abraham, intimacy with the Creator established community and then drove the mission to the Gentiles.
Communion Broken
The reason it was so tragic when God’s people rejected Him, is because intimacy with the Creator was lost, and with that the covenant community failed in their mission to the broader world. When the covenant community broke covenant with their God—for example, by using idolatry to seek the presence of false deities—there was a breakdown of human community, and God’s people became divided and began warring against each other. And as a result, there was a breakdown on the flow outward to the broader Gentile society. As Isaiah warned, the name of God was blasphemed continually among the Gentiles because God’s people ceased functioning as ambassadors of His presence.
By the Second Temple period, we can see that many of God’s people had developed the type of insularity that neglected their international vocation, the third concentric circle, making an idol out of their own community—now bereft of divine presence.
Divine Presence Restored
So what does God do? If God’s solution is in keeping with this primordial pattern, then in order to restore society, He must reconstitute community. And in order to reconstitute community, He must restore the divine presence.
In fact, God restores His presence in the ultimate way through tabernacling among us in the flesh. Through Emmanuel (“God with us”) the Creator walked and talked with mankind just like in the Garden-Temple. In fact, the incarnation is the ultimate recapitulation of Eden, restoring in the person of Christ (the perfect image of God) the primordial human vocation to act as a boundary or frontier between heaven and earth. And when intimacy with the Creator is re-established, what is the result?
The result is a restoration of community.
Restoration of Community
Christ establishes a community around Himself in the twelve disciples, who function as types for the restoration of the 12 tribes of Israel, and thus the entire covenant community. Then He began restoring the micro-communities around Him, namely the families and villages in the regions He visited in his itinerant ministry. Consider how many of Jesus’ healing miracles brought a person into wholeness with himself or herself, and then back into community with others. The healing of the leper, the blind man, the demoniac, the woman with the flow of blood, the paralytic, the centurion’s servant, the boy with the unclean spirit – in each case, their healing restored them to community.
Christ didn’t spend much time in the big urban centers like Tyre and Sidon, but villages, where he focused on healing the small communities. Consider how much of Christ’s teaching is concerned with the community virtues like brotherly love, forgiveness, mercy, self-sacrifice, and living at peace with those around us. Christ wasn’t just offering isolated moral teaching to show us how to improve ourselves; rather, He was showing the people of His day how to flourish in community so that households and villages can reflect kingdom values. And this is how culture is renewed, because when households and villages function with kingdom values, the result is distinctive cultural traditions, which is why a Christ-centric Syrian culture will look different from a Christ-centric Chinese culture, etc.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. As we read the gospels, the emphasis is still not the broader society, although there are some hints, such as the calling of the 70, which is a number symbolic of all the nations. But for the most part, Christ’s direct emphasis is on the community and communities of Israel. He makes this point—uncomfortably for many readers—in His initial rebuff of the Samaritan woman. Given what we know of this pattern, however, the renewal of culture and community in Israel must culminate in the healing of the broader society: all the ends of the earth, every tongue, tribe and nation. And if the broader society is to be restored, the engine that drives it must be the divine presence.
Thus it should come as no surprise that after the ascension, when the divine presence was temporarily withdrawn, there was a pause in taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. In the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19, Jesus had instructed His followers not just to convert individuals but to disciple the nations – to transform the broader society. But what is needed before this can happen is a restoration of Christ’s presence.
So what does Christ say to them, as recorded in Acts 1? He says they will take the gospel to the ends of the earth only after the return of His presence via the Spirit. They are told to wait for this before getting on with the job of discipling the nations. Their waiting culminates in Pentecost, when divine presence is restored in the spirit of every baptized Christian. And then immediately two things happen that become the themes of Acts 2-4. First, human communities are renewed, beginning with the Jerusalem church. The believers around Jerusalem begin to establish the type of shared common life that is the foundation for culture. But secondly, out off this shared common life, the broader world—which is to say, all the language groups—begins being reached. This renewal of society is being driven by divine presence. But divine presence isn’t just in the form of God the Spirit coming at Pentecost. God the Son also returns to us to create a community around his presence. How does this happen?
In Christ’s great Eucharist sermon of John 6, He declared that the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven, and that there would be a recapitulation of the Incarnation through the bread of His presence.
In the Eucharist, no less than in the Incarnation and at Pentecost, God comes down. Or you might say that we ascend and go up. The liturgical practices of the East have tended to emphasize that in the Eucharist heaven descends to earth, whereas the liturgical practices of the West have tended to emphasize that in the Eucharist we ascend to heaven. It doesn’t really matter how the vertical imagery plays out, because the point is that in the Eucharist there is a restoration of the heaven and earth synthesis that was the telos of the original garden-temple. Like Jacob’s dream about the ladder, there are heavenly beings ascending and descending both directions, reconnecting earth and heaven. That reconnection is what happens in the Eucharist: in the bread and wine, heaven and earth are united, just like they were in the original garden-temple. In the sacred mysteries, our communion with the Creator is no less real and personal than when He walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, or when He tabernacled among us during His earthly sojourn.
This is why the doctrine of Real Presence is so crucial: Christ really does enter our bodies with the bread and wine, enlivening us as living temples to fulfil the primordial human vocation of connecting earth and heaven. He really is present with us in the Sacred Mysteries (not just metaphorically or symbolically) even as He was really present in the Garden of Eden when he walked with mankind in the cool of the evening. And through this presence, community is formed: a little community that functions as a microcosm of the synthesis of heaven and earth, and the means through which that synthesis will be implemented in the macrocosm.
This Eucharistic synthesis of heaven and earth is what ANE temples were trying to achieve. And pagan people in the bronze age understood something that modern Christians often miss: they understood that sacred space diminishes the further away you get from the heaven and earth synthesis of the temple. Remember that anthropologists tell us that cities, the first communities and cultures, began as people moved to be closer to temples to be near the heaven-earth synthesis they claimed to offer. This dynamic is no less true in the context of true religion: the further our life is from the sacrifice of the Mass and its handmaid the Divine Office, and the more our lives and identities are defined by activities, ideas, and media that de-center us from the Eucharistic community, the more our own lives lose their sacred quality. But conversely, the more our lives center around the sacrifice of the Mass, the more we flourish as people, and the more we contribute to the transforming the broader society.
This is why Real Presence has social, societal, and even political implications.
Remember that in Genesis, intimacy with the Creator is what established community and then spurred the cultural mandate. And then after the covenant with Abraham, intimacy with the Creator established community that always had the broader Gentile world as its aim.
But this is fulfilled now in the Eucharist. The intimacy we enjoy with our Creator every time we celebrate the Sacred Mysteries is no less the means by which God is blessing all nations and converting the broader world.
Intimacy with the Creator through the Sacred Mysteries now becomes the basis for us, as redeemed images of God, to fulfil the cultural mandate. And as we’ve seen, culture-building is nothing short of tending, guarding, and nourishing the common life of a people—in this case, the life of a community centered around the sacraments.
Renewing Society
The culture of Eucharistic communities, in turn, spills into the broader society. And if you want to know what this means in practice, just look at what happened in the first century. The Apostle Paul went around establishing Eucharistic micro-communities, and what was the result? The result was that the brutal Roman Empire eventually folded into Christendom. Through these communities, the broader society was renewed and the world was blessed with centuries of cultural Christianity. Even before the conversion of the Roman empire, the micro-societies that grew up around the Eucharist started a revolutionary counter-culture, resulting in societal shifts in everything from how women were treated to how people thought about practices like exposure of infants.
If we want to renew culture today, it can only happen on this same template: transformative communities centered around the Sacred Mysteries. But now, two thousand years after St. Paul, our thinking about the sacraments is muddled, caught in the pincer movement of two equally damaging errors.
Misunderstanding the Sacraments
On the one hand, there is the anti-sacramentalism of modern Christianity with a low view of Communion that denies that anything particularly transformative occurs when we consume the body of Christ. And so rather than seeing church as a community unfolding around the sacred mysteries, church becomes just one more affinity group among a myriad.
But in more historic communions, like Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and some High Church Protestant groups that affirm Real Presence, there can be a tendency to have such an exalted view of the Eucharist that it starts being approached like magic, as if its efficacy in our community will be more or less automatic. Both are anti-incarnational, the one because it is Gnostic and the other because it is mechanistic and monergistic (and thus not actually an exalted view of the Eucharist).
Towards Sacramental Synergy
Because the efficacy of the sacraments are not automatic, it takes work to connect the dots between Real Presence and community, just like the other sacraments require synergistic participation. It takes work—including strategy, planning, and intention—to make the community constituted in the Eucharist function as the absolute center of parish life.
We have to constantly assess if the design of our buildings, the allocation of our resources, the focus of our teaching, etc., are facilitating community. Do we have a structure in place for supporting the common public life?
The Benedictine monasteries can serve as examples. They fostered community not simply in the technical sense that they were communes where people lived together, but also because these monks were proactive to facilitate community. These monasteries functioned as hospitals, centers of learning, centers for collecting and transmitting herbal knowledge, places that facilitated poverty relief, mental health counseling—encompassing much of what we would now classify as social work. As a result, these monastic communities blessed the villages around them and communities outside their own walls. These were not isolated good works, but the means of translating the heaven-earth synthesis of the Mass into community and culture. And in the process, the Benedictines saved civilization, preserving the art, learning and culture of classical Greece and Rome.
The Benedictine communities throughout Europe weren’t anything out of the ordinary but just examples of the church being the church. Everywhere the church has gone, a shared common life develops around the Eucharist. This is the true reality of which temples in the ANE were the corruption. In the Bronze Age, people moved near temples because they hoped to harness the blessings and protections afforded by divine presence. But in the era of the church, centering our lives around the divine presence of the sacraments really does lead to blessings, including the culture of a shared common life.
We too can make the church the center of society, but it begins by each of us making the church the center of our lives. Centering your life around the church isn’t just about saying your prayers, or going to church. It’s about more than even going to church multiple times a week. For often when we attend church faithfully, the church is fragmented from the rest of our life. We have our church family, our work family, our sports family, etc., and children who grow up in these multiple communities grow up being spiritually schizophrenic. Remember how ancient life centered around temple, not just geographically but daily life participating in religious rituals and all life integrated – entire community centered around. Even if we can’t attain that ideal now, centering our lives around church involve making sacrifices so that the parish community is the center. At a minimum that involves a corporate liturgical life, but centering your life around church is also about taking steps to cultivate meaningful community, to linger afterwards to visit with people, to practice community virtues like patience, longsuffering, hospitality, benevolence; it means being available to provide mentoring, accountability partners, to bear one another’s burdens, to weep with those who weep, to listen when people need to talk even if you’d rather be doing something else, etc.
All of this is how we put into practice the heaven-earth synthesis of communion.
It’s easy to gloss over the links between Eucharist, community, and culture. We may acknowledge that Eucharistic miracles occur as people are occasionally healed of disease when they receive the body and blood of Christ, yet the greater miracle we often miss is that through the Eucharist God is constituting a people – a community in the midst of anti-community. But just as a person can receive Communion unworthily and thus reject its efficacy, so too a parish can nullify the Eucharist’s communal fruit by failing to actively cultivate community. Just because everyone is partaking in the blessed sacraments, doesn’t mean community will just happen. We have to work to translate God’s presence into all the nooks and crannies of parish life.
Often we give insufficient attention to that translation. Speaking from my own Orthodox tradition, I’ve noticed we like to congratulate ourselves on being incarnational and avoiding the Gnostic separation of the spiritual and the material. Yet our culture of learning often leans heavily toward abstract intellectualism. When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I sat through many catechism classes in which Orthodox theology remained largely abstract, disconnected from the ordinary demands of communal life. Similarly, our seminaries emphasize church history, the minutiae of liturgical theology, patristic studies, the grammar of theological languages, while devoting comparatively fewer resources to the practical domains required for building strong communities, or addressing the needs of people who have been wounded by anti-culture. Consequently, clergy often feel unqualified to address the crisis of anti-culture and loneliness as it manifests itself in mental health challenges, trauma recovery, family breakdown, addiction recovery, and so forth. The result is that we often outsource these problems to secular experts, leading to further fragmentation, perpetuating the sense in which the church is only one compartment in a life with multiple centers.
Again the problem is often that we treat the Eucharist like magic, as if its efficacy for our community will be automatic. Somehow we are less susceptible to this misplaced monergism when it comes to the other sacraments. When you are baptized, you don’t just forget about it; rather, you have to engage in everything involved in a transformed life to make your baptism a reality. Or again, when a man and wife are joined in the sacrament of marriage, or when a clergyman is ordained into the sacrament of priesthood, the initial sacrament begins a work that will only flourish with perseverance, creativity, strategic planning, and day to day participation with the energies of God. Similarly, when we join with each other in Holy Communion, that begins the real work of learning to live as a community.
Or you could think of the Mass like conception that starts a process that culminates in a person with a unique personality. The sacrifice of the Mass starts a cultural soul, a parish culture with a unique personality. But it takes intentionality and strategy to flesh that out into Christian education, art, music, poetry, reading and prayer groups, addiction recovery resources, accountability groups, singles groups—in short, a shared common life and associated culture
At the heart of a shared common life is love. What connects the Holy Mysteries to all the nooks and crannies of day-to-day parish life, and what connects parish life to the larger society we are transforming, is love: virtues like putting up with one another, being patient, being humble, listening to each other, bearing each other’s burdens, being willing to do work without praise, taking care of the elderly, checking in on the people who live alone, etc. This is how we tend and guard the shared public life that is the heart of a culture.
This is central to what salvation is all about. After all, theosis is about the reintegration of the human being that was fragmented at the fall. That reintegration takes place as the nous and body are reintegrated, but it also takes place at the level of community. Again, just think back to how many of Jesus’ healing miracles—from the woman with the flow of blood to the boy with an unclean spirit—brought a person into a right relationship with their community.
Discipling the Nations Through Eucharistic Community
This shared public life is not just for ourselves; it’s also how we disciple the nations. The whole significance of St. Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—undertaken in the face of strong Judaizing elements that would confine the cultural implications of the gospel—is that he was bringing in the Gentiles qua Gentiles as part of the broader international implications of the gospel, inviting them to sanctify their own cultural traditions, with their own histories, creativity, and unique cultural expressions. That is also what the Orthodox Western rite is trying to achieve in a small way, offering to westerners an Orthodox understanding of their own heritage.
When a Christ-centered community is at the heart of a culture, then the culture is able to flourish in all its unique particularity. But without Christ, even the good things in culture eventually become toxic. When a culture is created around ideology or hobbies or race or a certain socio-economic bracket, then even when these things may be good, the community eventually goes toxic. That’s why there can be no lasting solution to our anti-culture outside Eucharistic communities.
This message is crucial for today. Throughout modern western society, people are fragmented, lonely, and in disarray. All around us, people are hungry for community, but these needs will not be met in the pseudo-communities of tribalism, identity politics, or consumer affinity groups. It won’t even be fully met in building beautiful buildings, practicing Christian agrarianism, or new urbanism, although all these things will certainly help.
Ultimately, the crisis of loneliness can only be met in the body of Christ, mediated to us in the Sacrifice of the Mass and then becoming a reality in the sacramental community that forms around that. We bring our insecurities and trauma and anxiety into the community so we can process it with others, because healing no less than salvation, is a team effort.
For that team effort to work, the Eucharist must be the point of integration. We know that when something other than the Eucharist becomes the focal point of the community, then community begins to fracture. Even good ideology can become an idol when we begin looking to that ideology as the linchpin of community cohesion. The common table of the Lord’s supper reminds us that it is not our ideologies, our common interests, or our political views that hold us together, but what Christ did on the cross.
Building a Counter-Culture
As the church lives out her mission, and people flock to her for healing, then gradually an alternative society will be created in the broader world. As we live as citizens of the kingdom of God, this counter-cultural society offers a subversive element to the power structures of the world, showing a different way to be human.
The idea of a counter-culture is key. We are not just trying to prop up the city of man, but to be truly counter-cultural, to offer a new society running parallel to anti-culture. And as Lewis shows so well in his novel about a modern-day Tower of Babel, That Hideous Strength, these sacramental micro-communities are all around us, often hidden from view, yet already participating today in the eschatological reality of Revelation 17-20, when there is the final overthrow of anti-culture.
The final apocalypse promises that the Heavenly City will descend to earth, and the redeemed will ascend to heaven, thus echoing’s Jacob’s ladder where the flow is going both ways to symbolize the complete marriage of heaven and earth. Yet the author of Hebrews reminds us, we can begin ordering our lives toward the heavenly Jerusalem today, so that this eschatological horizon is already a partial reality for those of us who are in Christ (Heb. 12:22–24).
This side of the eschaton, these two cultures—the inaugurated New Jerusalem and the City of Man—are existing together like the wheat and tares, often side by side in the same places, even the same institutions and governments. One represents the Heavenly City and true culture; the other, the corpse of Babel, and thus anti-culture.
This eschatological reality is already a partial reality now through the heaven-earth synthesis of the sacraments. Through the Sacred Mysteries, God’s counter-cultural agenda for the broader society—an agenda to transform the nations, their institutions, their societies, and even their governments—is breaking into space and time. Some of us are called to work directly at that transformation in government, education, culture, media, education, etc., while others work behind the scenes through nurturing relationships of love within whatever sacramental community God has placed us. But in both cases, the engine that drives our work is the heaven and earth synthesis of the Mass, and the transformed communities springing up around it.
While the full effects of this transformation are ultimately eschatological, these communities function as outposts of the heavenly empire. Eucharistic communities offer a counter-culture that shows Christ’s inaugurated kingdom already at work, while anticipating the culmination of that kingdom when the heaven and earth synthesis will be complete.
This is again something that Lewis captures so well. In his book, That Hideous Strength, he shows that the apocalyptic conflict between the New Jerusalem (city of God) vs. the Babel (the city of Man), is played out in humdrum community activities like putting up with one another, faithfully saying our prayers, loving each other in sacramental communities, helping the poor within our parish, creating things of beauty that draw us to one another. And when we do these community things as outgrowths of our intimacy with Christ, then we develop a shared public culture, and the world around us is renewed.