I am approaching this grisly story in the spirit of the Roman playwright Terence, who declared:
Homo sum: humani a me nihil alienum puto. In English, I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.
Abu Sakkar is the Syrian rebel who was filmed eating the
body of a government soldier. That is, he is seen dismembering the soldier’s corpse
and pulling out a body part – heart, lung, liver? – which he lifts up and holds
in his hands before his mouth closes round it in a cannibal’s kiss.
Take, eat, this is my body….
Not merely unpalatable, Sakkar’s action was widely condemned
as barbaric and inhuman: an affront to all human beings; the desecration of our
common humanity. In response, Sakkar insisted that anyone who had suffered like
the people of his home town, Homs, would be prepared to do as much. He also
maintained that his was a symbolic act intended to humiliate and terrify the
enemy.
…. this is my body which is broken for you. Do this in
remembrance of me.
In the ritual act at the heart of the Catholic Mass, bread
and wine are transformed – transubstantiated – into the body and blood of
Christ. In the outward form of unleavened bread, the priest holds aloft the
body of Christ – tinga-linga-ling goes the sanctus
bell; eats him and drinks his blood before inviting the congregation to make a
meal of it.
The avowed aim is the direct opposite of Sakkar’s
depravity: to dignify rather than terrify; and so an end to enmity.
Instead of
appearing to desecrate our common humanity, transubstantiation serves to
consecrate ordinary things and everyday people in the name of Jesus Christ. As
bread becomes body so Christians come collectively alive in Corpus Christi. They
don’t see it as such, but composing themselves as one body is the real substance
of their ‘God’.
Yet in order to achieve this, liturgy is obliged to become
mythology. And it turns out that the myth of the Catholic mass is the mirror
image of Abu Sakkar’s ritual display: both are peddling a memorable line in
sacrificial victims; each entails eating the Other.
But one’s for good and the other’s pure evil, someone’s bound
to say. Also, words, however lurid, are by no means the same as deeds. Nonetheless, if on this showing man’s inhumanity
to man inhabits the same semantic field as the sanctity of God, that makes them
a perfect pair as well as polar opposites.
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