Easter Reflection: The Lord's Supper

I wrote last year about Quakers and Easter, both what it can mean from a community perspective, and what it can mean from a spiritual perspective. This year, I wish to reflect on a Christian story that forms part of the Easter narrative, but which has led to a practice that is undertaken regularly, year round, by most Christian and derived traditions – though not, largely speaking, by Quakers (certainly not by those who worshipped in an unprogrammed manner, and not consistently by those in programmed traditions). I refer, of course, to the story of the Last Supper, and the practice of the Eucharist – also known as Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, the Blessed Sacrament, Sacrament of the Altar, the Breaking of Bread (a term which can relate to wider and older traditions), and other names besides. For those who do not recognise those terms, this is the symbolic (or more than symbolic, depending on your denomination) consumption of the body and blood of Christ – in the form of bread or wafers and wine (or grape juice or water, depending on denomination) – during the main worship service in most Christian churches.

The Death of Fox

From the title of this post, you might have supposed that it was going to be a sort of tailpiece biography, covering the time shortly before and after the actual death of George Fox. Another possible interpretation would be that I was, out of all character, joining in with the sporadic habit of some Quakers online, bemoaning how unlike Fox most Quakers are today.

In either case, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. Rather, it is a reference to The Death of the Author, an essay by the French literary critic and author Roland Barthes (it's original French title itself being a play on the title of Le Mort d'Arthur, but that's too tangential a path for me to dive down here), and of the literary theory concepts that derive from it.

The essential principle of the essay, and the related (but separately posited) theory of the “intentional fallacy”, is that the author is not the authority when it comes to the meaning of a piece of work. Once an author has created a work, they might tell you what their intent was, you might infer it from other sources, but intent is not the determining factor of meaning. I don't say that this theory is universally accepted in the study of literature; I also probably don't understand it perfectly, not having studied literary theory or analysis, so please don't rely on my explanation (or lecture me too harshly if you know it better – I'm glad to learn more, but please keep it friendly).