I no longer see a barber or hairstylist. I don’t think that I am too good to see a professional, but even a professional pianist cannot do much with piano that only has ten keys.
However, when I used to have a full keyboard, one of my favorite questions to ask the barber was, “If you see hair in your meal at a restaurant, would you send it back?” I have not done a scientific study of the number of people I asked and their responses, but the majority of barbers I asked said they would not send their food back. The reason? They shared that it is was more likely that they were the ones who had loose hair on them that fell into the meal. The vast majority of barbers said they would just pull the hair out and keep on with their meal.
Like it is no big deal.
Doctors talk about blood stuff with family members over dinner while everyone else gets queasy. Vets talk about lancing wounds on an animal, ranchers speak of pulling calves as they are birthed, and plumbers talk about the stopped up pipes they had to endure.
Like it is no big deal.
For so many of us, these topics trigger a sense of disgust, but these folk have crossed some disgust bridge. These topics are no longer disgusting. They are not a big deal.
Disgust is an “expulsive” response. It is that feeling of pushing things away or expelling them from your body. Humans are disgusted by so many things and sometimes, unfortunately, we feel disgust toward our fellow sisters and brothers. We push away the smelly, dirty, and unkept. We expel those who we think are unclean in some way. It can manifest in ways like pushing those who are sick away from us so we don’t get sick to pushing those who have a different culture away from us out of fear they will freeload. Disgust is a powerful influencer of our behavior and left unchecked it harms.
Christians have a sacrament called communion or the eucharist or the Lord’s supper. In a sacrament in which we say that the bread is the body of Christ and the juice/wine is the blood of Christ. Taken at face value, it makes sense why early Christians were accused of being cannibals.
This sacrament is mysterious and has a lot going on, but at a fundamental level communion addresses our disgust. We are associating bread with flesh and wine with blood. We make food associations all of the time. Many foods we don’t eat, not because they do not taste good but because of the texture (I struggle with eating the delicious lychee fruit).
The associations made at communion are intentional to aid and push us to encounter our disgust. If we can overcome the disgust of eating and drinking while thinking of flesh and blood then, surely we can overcome the disgust we feel toward our neighbor. Christians take communion as much as possible, in part, to practice confronting our own disgust toward each other. The more we confront the disgust we feel the more comfortable we are with these matters and the less expulsion we feel we need to do.
In this way, Christians are like the barber who is no longer disgusted with unknown hair in their food. There is no longer a need to push the food (or people) away, but rather bring it in close. Communion helps us invert our disgust and see that Christ does not call us to expel one another. That purity is an abstraction. That holding to what is clean only creates division among the body.
All of which to say that when a church leaders push for a “better” or “more faithful” or "traditional” or “prophetic” expression of the church, this is a nicer way of speaking about disgust. Disgust is always an expulsive response. We can expel others or we can expel ourselves. We can spit the food out (expel others) or we can avoid the restaurant entirely (expel ourselves). We can kick people out of the church who are unfaithful or we can remove ourselves from a church we “know” is unfaithful. Until we address the disgust we Christians have yet to overcome we will find that the denominational splitting will never end. Until we have a church of one.
Communion is disgusting on purpose.