Eucharistic Identity

In my book The Slavery of Death I discuss, borrowing from Arthur McGill and David Kelsey, how an eccentric identity can emancipate us from our slavery to the fear of death, a fear which functions as the power of the devil in our lives (Hebrews 2.14-15).

The key idea behind an eccentric identity is coming to receive your life (and the things in your life) as gift. The experience of gift, cultivated through the practices of doxological gratitude, reduces both our basic and neurotic experiences of anxiety and scarcity, our worries about having enough (basic anxiety) and being enough (neurotic anxiety).

So gratitude sits at the heart of the eccentric identity.

And as I've pondered the central role of gratitude in our Christian identity I've wondered, post-publication, if I shouldn't have chosen another word to describe this sort of identity.

Specifically, while I really like the label "eccentric identity" I'm more and more taken with describing all this as being a "Eucharistic identity."

Eucharist, we know, comes from the Greek word εὐχαριστία (eucharistia) which means "thanksgiving."

Which, it seems to me, makes Eucharistic a wonderful word to describe an identity that is to be founded upon gratitude and gift.

As Christians we are to cultivate a Eucharistic identity.