I saw this article on NPR this morning while I was scanning the news. I had to give a self-satisfied smirk, of course, but seriously, religious friends, take care of yourselves. I’m sure God will understand.
Through the eyes of the H1N1 virus, a Catholic church is a playground. The font of holy water near the church entrance is a great place for the virus to leap from one person to another. The passing of the peace, during which parishioners shake hands, is yet another favorite place for the virus. And then there’s Communion: The priest puts the host, or wafer, on a parishioner’s tongue or into the person’s hand, and then does the same for the next person. Often, he then serves wine from a common cup. It’s wiped clean each time, but that’s no guarantee it’s virus-free.
Bishop Mitchell Rozanski of Baltimore said these rituals have prompted a flood of questions.
“How should we deal with the distribution of Holy Communion?” he said. “Should we stop shaking hands at the sign of peace? Should we take [out] the holy water fonts as soon as the flu season begins?”
Rozanski is asking priests to use lots of hand sanitizer. But the bishop said a word from health officials that a pandemic has started could lead him to shut down churches.
Like Rozanski, Rabbi Moshe Waldoks at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Mass., has been thinking about swine flu a lot lately. The High Holy Days begin Friday, and he expects about 900 people at services. He’ll ask his congregants to greet each other a little differently this year. “I’m suggesting bowing to each other with a little Buddhist bow,” he said, “or the Obama fist bump could really be very good.”
And what about passing the Torah around the congregation? Some people kiss it, while others touch their prayer shawls to it. “I might say before we walk around with it, ‘If you’ve any concerns about stuff, this year maybe offer a wave instead of a kiss,’ ” Waldoks said. “I’m sure the Torah will understand.”
For Muslims, Friday prayers are the centerpiece of the faith and a potential viral hotbed. Imam Johari Abdul-Malik of Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., says 3,000 people come to worship there each week. “They stand shoulder to shoulder. They put their faces on the carpet and remember someone’s going to come behind them and prostrate with their face on the carpet,” he says.
Malik says that if flu breaks out, the leaders may ask people to bring in their own prayer rugs. The mosque may tell people to spread out more when they pray and amend the ritual cleansing before prayer, in which people visit a special washroom to gargle and wash their feet.
The imam said believers are loath to change these rituals because they’re so deeply rooted in the Quran. “How do you now convince them that what they used to do is now not permissible?” he asked. For example, Malik says, the Quran says that when two believers shake hands in greeting, their sins fall away. Some people may feel cheated of blessing if they have to stop that practice. “You come to the mosque, and nobody wants to shake your hand, no one’s going to embrace you. You’re like, ‘What’s going on? What’s kind of place is this? Where are the blessings?’ ” he said. “And you have to say, ‘Today the blessing is in resisting shaking hands.’ “
I dunno, Kimi, I’d rather get the swine flu than BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY. That’s just me, though.
I was unaware Muslims gargled before prayer.
In elementary school this one kid explained that there’s this thing they do to wash out their noses, too.
Hey, Mike! Which hell do you mean? Christian of Muslim?
An update: Bishop Wester (the bishop of the Utah diocese) has just announced some temporary changes to some Catholic traditions (apparently after consultation with the dept of health and the US conference of Catholic Bishops). Most remarkably, throughout flu season the Holy Communion will only include the Body of Christ, not the Blood (which is dispenses in a shared cup). And parishioners will be asked to avoid holding or shaking hands (during the exchange of peace or the Lords Prayer). This changes are set to begin next week at our local parish (St Thomas Aquinas main parish and the student St Jerome’s chapel at the Newman Center just off campus).
(For those interested in the nuances of Catholic theology: it is taught that since Christ is risen, the body and blood of Christ cannot really be separated, so anyone who receives one (bread or wine / body or blood) in fact receives the whole Christ. So by offering only the body and not the blood, the grace of the sacrament is not effected).
Here’s my question about Catholic theology relating to the Eucharist: “Transubstantiation is the changing of the substance not its accidents.” WTF?
Oh wow, didn’t notice your comment, Enkidu. The elementary school friend was a practicing Muslim. He was describing a practice Muslims do to clean themselves before certain prayers. It sounded more complex than gargling, if I remember correctly it involves swallowing water in a way such that it comes out through your nose. Then again, these are 10 year old memories and kids that young aren’t that great at communicating.
I don’t know if Stan’s post is meant to be a serious question or not. Assuming it is:
“Transubstantiation” as a doctrine is a way of trying to explain the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The claim that the bread and wine have become the body and blood of Christ looks, at the very least in terms of the appearance of things, to be absurd since it still looks and tastes like bread and wine. Transubstantiation is a way of trying to use some philosophical language to sort out what is going on .
Transubstantiation suggests that the “substance” (from the greek ‘ousia’ which can also be rendered ‘being’) changes while the empirical appearance remains the same. It is not actually an official endorsement of Aristotelian metaphysics, though the Aristotelian categories of “substance” and “accident” are useful for explaining what is going on in the Eucharist.
For Aristotle, substances are entities that have a degree of independent being. Accidents, on the other hand, refer to the being of attributes that are entirely dependent. Colors are good examples of accidental properties. Contra Plato, Aristotle denies that there is some separate Platonic Form of “Blue-ness”, for instance. Rather, blue is always the color OF some other object. Once the wall is destroyed, its “whiteness” is destroyed along with it. Whiteness by itself does not exist independently, “out there”.
Now in the ordinary course of events, when there is a substantial change, the accidents also change. When I eat broccoli, I don’t become “a little bit broccoli”, rather that substance is destroyed. And when it is destroyed, so are all of its accidents (even if not immediately, they go away eventually). The nourishment I get from the broccoli does not make me a “little green”.
The Eucharist is a miracle, so it is not an event that follows the ordinary course of things. I’ll wait for the SHAFTers to stop guffawing. … … In the case of the Eucharist, the “substance” is changed from bread to the real presence (the “real being”) of Christ’s body, and the wine is substantially changed into the blood of Christ. But it still appears like bread and wine – looks, tastes, etc like bread and wine. The accidental properties remain even though a substantial change has taken place. This does not ever happen other than in the Eucharistic miracle.
Now this was a hopelessly brief account of this, but this gives you an idea of what a Catholic means when he says “Transubstantiation is the changing of the substance not its accidents.” The wikipedia article on this (scroll down in particular to the ‘theology of transubstantiation’) is not bad, and unpacks things a bit more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation