1.  "God is with us in as simple and factual a way as light and water or the bread we break and the cup we share."

Tad Guzie

2.  "The real Jesus took real bread and wine and identified himself with it....The last supper with his friends was an event, a fact. But important facts are always interpreted...it is not easy to remember that the event and the interpretation are not always the same thing...it is not always an easy matter to see how the interpretations relate to the original event... (Many) see a haloed Jesus with his friends (Ed.-male only, thank you) gathered around a table, a Jesus who is already virtually risen, in total control of history, including his own...But thanks to his divinity, he already has all the answers. There is one sacrament he has not yet instituted, and so for history's sake, he goes on to institute it."   

Tad Guzie

3.  Guzie quotes Gregory Dix's "The Shape of the Liturgy":  "To break bread and give thanks, in just the way Jesus did, was an obligation for every devout jew. Jesus was neither instituting a new ritual not telling his friends to continue an existing ritual: it would be pointless to command something that would go on in any case... Do this in memory of me. That is, whenever you do this in the future, whenever you gather for a meal and do what we have so often done together, you will be remembering me in what you do. What Jesus did, then, was to attach a new meaning to the most ordinary ritual in jewish life- indeed, to the only ritual or corporate act he could be sure his disciples would do together regularly in any case."

Tad Guzie

4.  "Jesus gave a new meaning not just to the passover meal but to any meal for which his friends would gather in the future."

Tad Guzie

5.  "We do religionize what is precious and holy to us; white wafers with crosses or IHS baked into them probably had to happen. But once it has, once the tradition has sacralized the ordinary, it is not at all easy to go back and reaffirm the simple gesture with which it all began...."

Tad Guzie

6.  "Our heads have trouble putting together with our hearts that extraordinary phenomenon of Jesus, that identification of God with the world of ordinary human experience, that union of the sacred with the profane, that abolition of distinctions which we sum up in confessing Jesus as God's own child...."

Tad Guzie

7.  "The goal of any religion is the goal of life itself...expressed in so many different ways that it is impossible to say: Here, very simply, is what people expect from faith and religion.... Until religion becomes a personal process, the church will be understood as merely a system or an ideal.... the word 'church' as we normally use it does not make most of us think of a living sacrifice, a personal process writ large....It is quite enough to deal with the personal process writ small. This involves keeping hold of the core of our faith, and seeing to it personally and in our small communities that our rites and symbols express the core rather than pull us away from it: God is not first found out there, in temples on Twelfth Street or Pleasantview Avenue, but in the temple of our hearts. What was once outside is now within, so that finding God and worshipping God is completely tied up with finding ourselves."

Tad Guzie