For the less ambiguous-minded, more scientific, think of it as the supernatural traces that can be detected in the details of certain experiences, occurring distinct from overt divinity. Déjàvu in its obscurity gives us a name for that phenomenon which esoterically connects muddled memories to your present taste or smell or movement or location.
Walter Benjamin warded off homesickness when he was away at college by scribbling his childhood memories. In the process of transferring memory to thought to writing, he found a rather accurate compass for the esoteric charting. He connected the color red to blurred recollections of market streets, the sounds of carpet being beaten to releasing clinging dust particles, the shadow plays he would create betwixt linen sheets to his year of bed-ridden fever. His memoir was his poetic melody. And for this reason, the senses, all en"compass"ing smell, taste, hearing, touch, and seeing became his detective work to best unearth the knowledge that was buried beneath surfaces.
To locate these graven bones, we actually must dislocate ourselves. What catches your attention? When something is disruptive, perhaps? A piece of chicken makes its way onto a waffle with a lacing drizzle of honey. Metallic crystalline infrastructures cupping cardboard bird feeders go up in a public walkway imbuing garden significance onto what was once purely transitional. How about this: a quartet of Mendelssohn sawing musicians engaging in the rhythmic chaos next to genre-organized book shelves.
When anything puts a filibuster on what has until now only ever been routine, we literally and figuratively come to a screeching halt. And if we are lucky enough to be breakable, we will be redirected off our walk-the-plank interstates and taken down back roads to observe what dwells in the solitudes.
This takes me to a Biblical threshold that I must cross. When we make the "un"believable our mode of inquiry, we see Christ as the crazy man He was. The vampirish suggestion that paved a perpendicular intersection to Jewish credence and culture saying, "For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink," displaced even the disciples well beyond their understanding and comfort: "'This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?'"
This bread and wine Jesus was saying would be the new standard for meal sharing meant that the conditional followers of His ministry could no longer beg for the gift like the pattern of manna-hungry Jewish wanderers in the Old Testament. Putting Himself between the Giver and the gift as if to say, "This is your second chance to get the manna thing right," He refused to let the people spoil their appetites. Making Himself the bread, a peace offering, the meal now is a place of repentance and acceptance. Meals where either plant or animals must die before the partaking meant Jesus was to be on the altar. The cross was before Him, a bloody, flesh tearing feast. And one from which we must eat to be vertically (God) and horizontally (man) reconciled.
This bread is the ipecac of humanity, the thing we eat initially and vomit up, incompatible with our sin corpuses and simply hard to swallow in a world that posits it as poison. Yet "we are what we eat,"so the more we nibble on the bread of Christ, we taste and derive from its sustenance the ability to do crazy things, good things, holy things, sacrificial things, that are surprising to us as the doers.
We come full circle. We have been dislocated. Our initial appetite for this thing we thought was bread now becomes the world's decaying flesh that tricks the eye and leaves the soul's stomach growling, and Christ's flesh becomes this incarnated tangible bread of Heaven.
"Oh the ravel of sleeve of care." -Macbeth
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