Hidden Parables

Years ago, my spouse, then a student at a theological seminary, took a graduate art history course at a nearby university. The course involved a visit to the university's art museum. Standing before a Renaissance painting, students suggested possible metaphorical meanings for the characters in it, while others wondered whether it referred to a Greek myth. Finally, my spouse voiced what was obvious to him as a seminarian: “It's depicting a Bible story.”

I have had a similar experience in teaching philosopher Simone Weil's 1942 essay “On the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” which she sent to her friend Fr. Perrin, describing it as an attempt at articulating a “Christian conception” of study. The New Testament figures frequently in the essay—specifically, Matthew 6, 7, 13, and 25; Luke 11, 12, and 17; and John 14. Yet students often struggle to recognize Weil's frequent allusions to Christian Scripture, which leaves them puzzling over or ignoring key portions of the essay. (Weil does not help here; she never names the gospels, likely assuming her reader's familiarity with the Bible.)Footnote ¹

Nor are students alone in ignoring Weil's scriptural references. Though philosophers and educators have frequently made use of her essayFootnote ² and college professors like myself often assign this text to their students,Footnote ³ scholarly discussions of this essay seldom acknowledge Weil's reliance on the New Testament,Footnote ⁴ and none to my knowledge have considered how these references enrich her description of attention and study.Footnote ⁵ This is unfortunate given that Weil's writings show an “intricate dance of form and content” and must therefore be “encountered with an eye not only to what she says, but to how she says it.”Footnote ⁶ One of the frequent forms Weil uses is “exposition by myth,”Footnote ⁷ and she compared the gospel parables to “the great symbols of mythology and folklore.”Footnote ⁸

On the one hand, Weil uses parables and images to communicate her personal spiritual experience without explicit self-reference. In her “spiritual autobiography,” she describes how she felt mediocre as a young student, but came to the “everlasting conviction” that “any human being … can penetrate to the kingdom of truth … if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment.”Footnote ⁹ This conviction set her on a decade-long journey of “concentrated attention that was practically unsupported by any hope of results.”Footnote ¹⁰ She reports that during a violent headache, she was reciting George Herbert's eucharistic poem, “Love,” when “Christ himself came down and took possession of [her].”Footnote ¹¹ Yet in her project of “de-creation,” Weil is self-effacing; her “one concern with fame was how to avoid it”;Footnote ¹² she “assiduously … removed herself from” her works;Footnote ¹³ she transformed her own “embodied experiences” into “images of spiritual stances.”Footnote ¹⁴ Using parables and images allows Weil to obscure the autobiographical sources of her insights, even as they help her make claims to universality.

But Weil uses parables and images in her writing to do more than convey her own experience: she uses them to “blast the reader into another reality,”Footnote ¹⁵ to say more than is at first apparent. This is the case in her essay on study, in which her New Testament allusions, oblique though they may be, support her claim that she is describing a “Christian conception of studies.” For Weil, Christianity was “centred on the figure and teachings of Jesus.”Footnote ¹⁶ As Ann Loades points out, “three elements of Christianity … retained their redemptive power” for Weil: the Lord's Prayer, the sacraments, and the text of the gospel.Footnote ¹⁷ As we will see, each of these three appears in some form in her essay on study. Indeed, she is drawn to eucharistic, eschatological passages of the gospels, particularly Jesus’ parables.

Attending to her use of the New Testament allows us to see not only that Weil was a reader of the Bible, but that her pedagogical ideas are thoroughly infused with a particular theology of Eucharist—though one that requires critical assessment. In what follows, I first exegete Weil's biblical references in the order in which they appear in the essay, showing how they point to a eucharistic, mystically eschatological vision of study. I give special attention to the language of the difficult master–slave section of her essay to show how she weaves together the Greek New Testament, her personal experience, and the eucharistic theology of Herbert's English-language poem “Love.” I end with a brief critique of Weil's educational vision, which relies on a dyadic (God-soul) vision of Eucharist and eschatological waiting and thus results in an asocial concept of learning. I suggest that a more social vision of Eucharist might result in a more appropriately social vision of education. My primary audience is those who teach Weil's essay, that it might enrich their understanding of her educational vision while clarifying her use of Christian Scripture, and likewise help their students make sense of the opaque sections of her essay. I also hope it will be of interest to Weil scholars and scholars of reception history of the Bible.Footnote ¹⁸

Hints of Eucharist

Although the eucharistic theme of the essay is not immediately clear, the opening lines of Weil's essay clarify that she is outlining a theological vision of pedagogy. She writes of a “Christian conception of study” and claims that “prayer consists of attention.” Her core argument then is that school studies can develop a “lower kind of attention,” thus “increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer.”Footnote ¹⁹ This claim catapults Weil into a discussion of faith, for she knows her claim cannot be proven in advance. She writes:

In pursuit of spiritual progress, we must therefore “regulate our conduct by [the experimental certainty] before having proved it.” In pursuit of truth and light, we must “hold on … for a long time by faith alone, a faith at first stormy and without light.”Footnote ²¹ Attention over the long term depends upon faith, which Weil calls “the indispensable condition.”Footnote ²²

To show what such faith looks like, she offers an image that she also uses in her spiritual autobiography: “The best support for faith is the guarantee that if we ask our Father for bread, he does not give us a stone.”Footnote ²³ The source of this line is a Jesus-saying appearing in an early Jesus discourse in Matthew 7:7-11 and Luke 11:9-13. Matthew 7:7-11 reads:

(The Lukan parallel is almost identical, except for the fact that the child asks for fish and egg rather than bread and fish.)

In both Matthew and Luke, this teaching on “bread” comes soon after the Lord's Prayer, in which Jesus teaches his disciples to ask their heavenly “Father” for their “daily bread.” Weil notes in her spiritual autobiography that she learned the Lord's Prayer in Greek and “made a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention,” and she also wrote commentary on the Lord's Prayer.Footnote ²⁵ As noted above, the Lord's Prayer was one of the main elements of Christianity that held power for Weil. A teaching that follows on the Lord's Prayer would be of special interest to her.

In this Jesus-saying, a hungry child asks for bread and must wait for it from his father—a reference that already has eucharistic overtones.Footnote ²⁶ Weil mentions only bread, but in both Matthew and Luke, the child also asks for fish. Bread and fish invoke the gospel story of the multiplication of the loaves in John 6, and they became an early eucharistic symbol in Christian mosaics and paintings.Footnote ²⁷ For the reader immersed in this web of associations, Weil's reference to the image of asking the Father for bread points to the idea that waiting for truth to dawn is akin to eucharistic waiting.

Here it is essential to say something of Weil's understanding of the sacrament of Eucharist. Weil wrote elsewhere, “A Christian sacrament is a contact with God through a sensible symbol, employed by the Church and whose meaning derives from a teaching of Christ's.”Footnote ²⁸ Eucharist in particular was not simply about Christ's teaching, but contemplation of the perfect Christ in his suffering. As Claire Wolfteich notes, Weil regarded the sacrament of Eucharist with longing, and she believed the proper stance toward it, at least for herself, was to contemplate its purity and goodness—and through it, to contemplate Christ—without eating.Footnote ²⁹ Such contemplative waiting, she believed, opened one to the possibility of communion with God, who promised to descend. For Weil, always a religious outsider, Eucharist meant desired, promised communion with God, but not necessarily communion with other humans. Eucharist for Weil was almost entirely distilled to contemplative prayer, which she believed yielded spiritual fruits.Footnote ³⁰ The solitary nature of contemplative prayer and eucharistic longing is further clarified in Weil's other images for faith in her essay on school studies: an Inuit folktale about Crow hungering in the darkFootnote ³¹ and the life of Jean Vianney, the Curé d'Ars,Footnote ³² both of whom intensely pursue their desire for light and truth, but who strike the reader as lonely figures.

Though Weil has not specified Eucharist in the essay, hints of her concern with the sacrament continue. Having described the role of faith and desire, Weil seeks to instruct her reader in “how to set about” paying attention.Footnote ³³ Weil denies that attention is a “muscular effort” or “will power” that declares “I have worked well!” (possibly a reference to the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14). In her oft-quoted definition, Weil writes, “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.”Footnote ³⁴ That is, the “object” becomes subject, revealing itself to our understanding as we await it. The primary agent is truth, not the truth-seeker: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers.”Footnote ³⁵ Weil thus calls attention a “negative effort” that is not evidenced by tiredness but is instead drawn by desire.Footnote ³⁶

Weil sees this “negative effort” in terms of the sacraments. She writes, “Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament,” adding, there is “a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.”Footnote ³⁷ This comment, though brief, offers an explicit theological frame for the biblical allusions that follow. In St. Augustine's famous definition, a sacrament is an “outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.” Although Roman Catholic tradition has recognized a number of sacraments, baptism and Eucharist remain the central sacraments, with “the sacrament” referring to the consecrated elements of the eucharistic meal.

The question of effort is central to discussions of sacraments. Because humans must perform the rituals of the sacraments, debates around sacraments have often centered on divine and human agency. What makes a sacrament efficacious? Divine grace? Correct performance? Human purity? Weil appears to agree with theologians who say that in the sacraments, human persons take postures to receive grace, to wait for “contact with God.” Although we cannot contrive or control contact with God, we can trust that the sacraments are one of God's promised means of grace. In this light, the proper attitude of the person receiving a sacrament is to wait, attentively and humbly, in faith, to receive God. This sacramental waiting might be called a “negative effort.” Weil is, I propose, suggesting that students may approach school exercises as Christians wait for the descent of divine grace in sacraments—desiring, patient, and confident in God's promise to arrive.Footnote ³⁸ To illustrate the “negative effort” of such waiting, Weil then offers images from several of Jesus’ eschatological parables, all of which involve waiting and meals.

Parables of Watchfulness

Although most of Weil's advice is for the student, she urges teachers to focus on helping students understand the crucial role of attentive (sacramental) waiting. She writes that teachers ought “to bring out in a brilliantly clear light the correspondence between the attitude of the intelligence in each one of these [school] exercises and the position of the soul, which, with its lamp well filled with oil, awaits the Bridegroom's coming with confidence and desire.”Footnote ³⁹ This is a clear reference to Matthew 25:1-13, the Parable of the Virgins, also referred to as the Parable of the Bridesmaids or the Parable of the Bridegroom.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Parable of the Virgins appears only in Matthew and is the fifth and last of the “Matthean discourses,” in which Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple (Matt 24:1-2) and counsels his followers to “keep watch” (Matt 24:42) for the coming of the Son of Man. As Ulrich Luz points out, this section of Matthew is dominated by “comparisons, similitudes, and parables.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is both eschatological—concerned with ultimate things and end times—and apocalyptic—seeking to make sense of human suffering by taking a divine perspective.Footnote ⁴² Additionally, according to Luz, the parables in this section “are interrupted—or introduced—with imperatives that deal with perceiving rightly … and with watching”Footnote ⁴³—exactly Weil's concerns.

In the Parable of the Virgins, which has a long history of mystical and eschatological interpretation in Christian tradition,Footnote ⁴⁴ ten young women (literally, “virgins”) await a long-delayed bridegroom, presumably as bridesmaids. Although all bring lamps (or torches),Footnote ⁴⁵ only five of them bring oil for their lamps. While awaiting the bridegroom, they all fall asleep. When the bridegroom finally arrives, only those who can light their lamps are admitted to the wedding banquet—a symbol of Eucharist—while the others are shockingly left out.Footnote ⁴⁶ The parable's coda reads: “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.”

The Greek word here for keeping watch is γρηγορέω (gregoréo). In the pre-Christian Greek world, the term meant to stay awake or to keep watch for something or someone. Yet as Luz notes, early Christians adapted the verb, using it to signal an attitude of alertness or vigilance, which Luz suggests arose out of an original practice of a “prayer watch.” The verb “later became the term for a more general attitude of life,” one that associated “watching” with “praying.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus in Christian Scripture, γρηγορέω is used “in an absolute sense without an object” and as “a metaphorical designation of a basic ethical-religious attitude.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It is an expression of eschatological hope, of waiting for God, of waiting for the heavenly banquet of communion with God.

Though Weil does not mention the coda's instruction to keep watch, her image of the student as awaiting the bridegroom “with confidence and desire” points to the centrality of the idea of keeping watch. Indeed, “keeping watch” in this eschatological sense mirrors Weil's use of the French “attente”—a watching and waiting that does not predetermine its object, that is like praying, that becomes an ethical-religious attitude of life. Thus, to be attentive in study is “Christian” because this is the attitude Jesus teaches his disciples in the face of the expected parousia—the arrival of God and the heavenly banquet. It is, moreover, the same attitude Christians ought to adopt in waiting to participate in Eucharist, that foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Through her mention of details from this eschatological parable, Weil hints that students can bring the attitude of eschatological longing, of eucharistic contemplation, to the act of study.

Weil then deepens her theme of watchful waiting, and, as we will see, of eucharistic longing, by turning to another eschatological parable, this one even more focused on a meal. Emma Craufurd's English translation reads:

In my experience of teaching, students find this wish that they will “really be the slave” baffling and repugnant. Though the imagery does not cease to trouble us, it helps to set it in its biblical context.

Weil refers to the slave who opens the door to the master. The English translation unfortunately says the master is “absent,” but Weil's French reads, “pendant que son maître est à une fête”: the master is at a party. This detail confirms that Weil is drawing on Luke 12:35-38, the Parable of the Faithful Servants, which, notably, follows on the Luke 11 “bread” sequence noted early in section two above:

Two details draw Weil's attention in this parable: the attitude of the slave and the response of the master. In the Greek text, the same verb reappears: the servants are “keeping watch” (γρηγοροῦντας); they are vigilant, attentive, waiting. Weil refers again to this parable in her essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” where she describes “the attitude that brings about salvation.” She writes:

Thus, the one “keeping watch” in hope (γρηγοροῦντας) expresses ὑπομονὴ, enduring attentiveness, which Weil sees as essential to spiritual progress—and also to study. This is the sort of “slave” she hopes students will become—those who can keep attentive watch, patiently awaiting the arrival of truth. (Indeed, she feels she has herself become this sort of slave. In her letter, “Spiritual Autobiography,” Weil writes of her year working in a factory, where she says she “received forever the mark of a slave,” adding, “Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” She also remarks there that she came to the insight that “Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”)Footnote ⁵³

The eucharistic overtones grow louder as Weil turns to the parable's master. As cited above, Craufurd's translation reads, “The master will then make his slave sit down and himself serve him with meat.”Footnote ⁵⁴ It is important to note to the English-language reader that there is no “meat” in Weil's original French. Rather, there is a grammatical ambiguity: “Le maître alors installe l'esclave à table et lui sert lui-même à manger.” Weil's French might be better rendered, “The master will then make his slave sit down and feed him himself.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In this English translation, we can better hear the ambiguity: the master may be serving dinner, or he may be serving himself as dinner, presenting his own body as food.

Weil's linguistic and theological brilliance is on full display here. In my view, Weil intends a double meaning (“he himself will serve” or “he will serve himself [as food]”). Note that George Herbert's seventeenth-century mystical poem “Love,” the occasion of Weil's first spiritual experience of Christ, contains the same intentional ambiguity.Footnote ⁵⁶ Herbert's poem begins, “Love bade me welcome.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The guest refuses, confessing he is unworthy. “Love” continues to assure the hesitant guest of his welcome, reminding him of Love's sacrifice, implicitly on the cross of Christ: “And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?” The guest agrees to enter on the condition that he, the guest, will serve at table. Herbert then depicts a drama of grace, in which unworthy guests may only receive. The poem ends: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:/So I did sit and eat.”

Herbert's poem, like Weil's essay, is clearly informed by Luke's gospel, in which one of superior status bids one of lesser status to sit and eat a meal.Footnote ⁵⁸ But Herbert's poem, which so influenced Weil, also expresses eucharistic theology, in which “host” has a double meaning: Christ is the welcoming host of the dinner and the presence in the consecrated host eaten by those who partake.Footnote ⁵⁹ In Herbert's poem, the “host,” Love, does more than serve dinner. Love says the guest must sit down and “taste my meat.” “My meat” can refer both to the meat Love offers as host and to Love's own flesh. That is, Love serves the guest with himself. Love is the meal.

With her rendering of Luke 12:37 as “Le maître alors installe l'esclave à table et lui sert lui-même à manger,” Weil captures Herbert's English-language ambiguity. The master will himself serve, and he will serve himself as food. Thus, Weil's reference to slaves and masters extends her prior claim that school exercises are like a “sacrament.” Studies are like the Eucharist, in which the host upon whom we wait shocks us by waiting on us, in which the host offers himself as food. We might imagine, for example, that a geometry problem to which we give our full attention will suddenly open itself to us and become not just a cognitive task but a source of nourishment or delight. The student who practices this sort of attentive study is practicing eucharistic waiting: this is a “Christian conception of study.”

Weil then offers another image of slaves and masters at the table: “When the slave has worn himself out in the fields, his master says on his return, ‘Prepare my meal, and wait upon me.’ And he considers the servant who only does what he is told to do to be unprofitable.”Footnote ⁶⁰ She is drawing on Luke 17:7-10, in which Jesus offers another master–servant image:

As Bovon points out, the vocabulary of servants, shepherding, table service, eating, and drinking is reminiscent of pastoral ministry and Eucharist.Footnote ⁶¹

Weil uses this second master–servant image to distinguish between what Robert Chenavier describes as “two forms of obedience to necessity,” that is, “obedience without consent or obedience with consent.”Footnote ⁶² Weil explains that when we “do all that is demanded of us,” we do right, like a student checking off assignments to get a good grade. The student does what is required. But the master only “loves” usFootnote ⁶³ and becomes our servant when we go beyond such demands by keeping watch and desiring.Footnote ⁶⁴ This reversal is so profound that Weil coins a new beatitude: “Happy then are those who pass their adolescence and youth in developing this power of attention.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Eucharistic Contemplation of Suffering

Near the end of the essay, Weil turns to the theme of love for the neighbor: “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.”Footnote ⁶⁶ She has in mind especially the suffering neighbor, and she writes of the “miracle” of giving attention to those who are suffering. To illustrate this “miracle,” Weil turns to what she calls the “first legend of the Grail.” Obviously, this is not a scriptural reference, but it continues the eucharistic theme and so is worth notice.

The grail legend has many forms, the most influential being Parzival, the epic written by Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1170–ca. 1220 CE), which tells of a knight's quest toward spiritual awakening and in which the “grail” is a stone or jewel “that provides the choicest foods one could wish for in abundance.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Though the English translation of Weil's essay refers to a “miraculous vessel,” the French reads, “pierre miraculeuse qui par la vertu de l'hostie consacrée rassasie toute faim.” That is, the grail is a “miraculous stone” that gets its nourishing power from the consecrated host—the bread—that satisfies all hunger.

An interesting reversal happens here. Weil earlier cited the “guarantee” of faith that if we ask our Father for bread, we will not receive a stone. But in the Parzival epic, the stone itself is a treasure we seek, capable of giving us the bread for which we hunger. As Weil points out, in the Parzival story, the grail (the miraculous stone) goes to the one who asks a wounded king, “What is your torment?”Footnote ⁶⁸ That is, the stone that gives bread goes to the one who has learned to gaze upon suffering. This is, however oblique, an image of eucharistic contemplation, in which Christians gaze upon the suffering of the afflicted one. Eucharistic contemplation of Christ's suffering is meant to facilitate love for any suffering neighbor.Footnote ⁶⁹ Likewise, a practiced attitude of expectant waiting on that which does not immediately appeal to us or serve us—such as a difficult geometry exercise—can prepare us to love human persons who repulse us.

Parable of Divine Grace: The Pearl in a Field

Weil concludes the essay with yet another biblical allusion: “Academic work is one of those fields containing a pearl so precious that it is worthwhile to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition to invoking the rich young ruler whom Jesus told to sell all his possessions (Luke 18, Matt 19, Mark 10), this is a conflation of two of Jesus’ sayings, which appear in sequence in Matthew 13:44-46:

In the two images, two versions of agency are on display. Jesus first speaks of a treasure found unexpectedly in a field that does not yet belong to the finder. That is, the kingdom comes to one who was not seeking it, provoking a response of desiring, joy, sacrifice. The second image is of a pearl merchant seeking fine pearls, who comes across a great pearl, presumably in a market. In this image, the one who seeks, finds.

Weil combines the images into an unusual vision: a pearl in a field.Footnote ⁷¹ Weil's adaptation at first appears absurd: pearls do not grow in fields, but in water. If someone sought to hide a single pearl, they would not bury it in a field, where it would be so easily lost. If someone found a pearl in a field, she could simply pick it up and take it home without the bother of selling all her possessions. But this absurdity is really an image of Weil's paradoxical—and sacramental—vision of human attention and divine grace: a great pearl is lying in a field, and we can do nothing to acquire it, except watch for it, and when it comes, sacrifice everything for it. It is a “negative effort.” When truth comes to us through study, it is, as the sacrament is, entirely a divine gift.

Assessing Weil's Educational Vision

Through her implicit references to gospel parables and images, Weil paints a picture of attentive study as akin to eucharistic contemplation infused with eschatological longing. Study done with such attentiveness opens the way for God's descent; it is a training in compassion. Weil offers a rich description of study that sets the search for truth into a theological frame, asking students to undertake the spiritual exercise of patiently acknowledging the truth of things outside themselves—whether mathematical truths or the truth of others’ suffering. These contributions make Weil's vision of study a gift for teachers who understand the enterprise of education as more than simply pragmatic preparation for careers or financial gain.

Yet while inspiring, Weil's educational vision is also problematic. In her view, learning seems to be a process of the individual waiting upon truth and does not appear to involve other students or a rich dialogue between student and teacher. Truth seems to descend out of silence, not out of conversation between teacher and students, or in the potentially noisy exchange of peer learners. The teacher is responsible for impressing upon students how important patience and openness is; one wonders what else the teacher is expected to do for the student who is struggling or unmotivated. Herself profoundly introverted, Weil neglects the social element of education. Yet human persons learn not only through contemplation and introspection, but also through processes of social interaction. Weil seems to think a lack of attention or motivation is simply the result of impatience or resistance to truth, when these can also be signs of an overly individualized education.

This deficit in her educational vision is due, I would argue, to a problematically individualized theology, particularly her theology of Eucharist. As we have seen, her biblical references reveal a eucharistic vision of study marked by eschatological longing, but it must be admitted that her idea of Eucharist is mystical and dyadic, in that the soul contemplates the purity of the host and God descends to the soul. This is, as in Herbert's poem, an intimate meal for two, set in the privacy of the soul. This vision of Eucharist converts the eschatological into the mystical; the waiting that Christians are to do together in anticipation of God's coming reign becomes almost entirely the contemplation of the individual soul awaiting God's presence. Although such contemplation is meant to result in concern for the suffering neighbor, Weil makes no mention of the fellow student in the process of study. What might it look like to await the coming of truth with others, to search for it with a friend?

The problem is not that Christian sacramental theology has nothing to offer education; indeed, Weil brilliantly perceives the potential of eucharistic and eschatological parables to inform an educational vision. The problem is Weil's dyadic, spiritualized theology of Eucharist, which she distills almost entirely to (rigorous) contemplative prayer. Perhaps to put it too simply, if for Weil prayer consists of attention, Eucharist consists of contemplative prayer. This reduction allows her to ignore both the community as copartner in spiritual practice and the human bodily process of eating together.

Rather than a solo spiritual exercise, Eucharist originated in a communal meal, and the eucharistic table was a place of gathering before it was a sacrificial altar. In Jesus’ parables, after all, the meal is often a banquet attended by many, and even the master serves multiple slaves at once. In contrast to Weil's vision of Eucharist as a moment of individual mystical contemplation and contact with God, many contemporary theologians—who admittedly postdate Weil's writings—emphasize the communal and bodily aspects of Eucharist. For example, Catholic theologian Kenan Osborne argues that the meaning and practice of Eucharist and eucharistic spirituality is dependent on a prior Christian community, so any call to renew the sacrament must include a call for renewed community.Footnote ⁷² Reformed Protestant theologians Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass write that in Holy Communion, “worshipers experience the extravagant hospitality of God's welcome to others; they collectively say no to what is harmful and yes to what is good; they keep the Sabbath holy in a joyful celebration of Christ's resurrection.”Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, Christian environmental ethicist Larry Rasmussen sees “table fellowship” in Eucharist as a “reliable map” of larger community patterns and governance and urges us to “think outward from the Eucharist” about shaping communities.Footnote ⁷⁴ Feminist theologians Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff argue for the central role of bodies and food in Eucharist, so that “the Eucharistic life is about the real stuff: bread and hunger, food and pleasure, eating disorders and global food politics, private property and the common good.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Likewise, Mary McGrann describes Eucharist as “the meal that reconnects” and that helps Christians intervene in the global food crisis.Footnote ⁷⁶ The point is, Eucharist can be interpreted as a multi-dimensional communion with God, others, and creation. In this theological view, the sacrament is not simply about individual contemplation and reception of grace, but community. Obviously, these visions of Eucharist are a far cry from Weil's understanding of the sacrament, originating in a quite different theological framework.

What happens if this communal vision of Eucharist grounds education? A few reflective educators of Christian faith have linked their work in teaching to a communal theology of Eucharist. In her Teaching as Eucharist, Joanmarie Smith describes the movements of Eucharist (“take, thank, bless, break, give”) as the “source and sustenance” of the teaching ministry.Footnote ⁷⁷ Michael James, Thomas Masters, and Amy Uelman use the “spirituality of communion” central to the Focolare movement to reimagine education as an enterprise of fostering wholeness in community.Footnote ⁷⁸ More concretely, in a chapter aptly titled “Eat This Class,” Julie A. P. Walton and Matthew Walters describe the historic Christian practice of Eucharist primarily as a “shared meal,” and they describe how integrating shared meals into the practice of teaching a college nutrition class fosters student interdependence.Footnote ⁷⁹ Although these experiments in teaching move in different directions, each offers a social vision of education grounded in a more communal theology of Eucharist. Each of them seems to remember that there is more than one servant at the table, more than one guest at the wedding feast.