How many times have I plucked a piece of bread or cracker from a silver tray, then taken a tiny plastic cup from another, larger, silver tray to prepare? Or plucked a small plastic container the size of a creamer you get in a restaurant filled with grape juice and cleverly holding a wafer in the lid from a basket on a table outside the door of a sanctuary?
How many times have I bowed my head in contrition and gratitude, emblems in hand, worship team playing quiet background music—sometimes an old hymn, more often a contemporary song—praying in those quiet moments spent waiting for all to receive. Examining myself. Silently confessing. Praying prayers of thanksgiving. Remembering Jesus’ sacrifice.
Once a month for decades—excluding the years I attended a church where communion was served only on a weeknight when we weren’t in attendance.
Let’s partake of the bread together. Let’s partake of the blood together.
Now, I wait for an usher’s prompting to stand and make my way on creaking floorboards to the front of a nave in a century-old church where I stand in a circle of sojourners, cupping my hands as if hungry—because I am.
The priest makes his way around the circle. He pauses, looking into my eyes.
The body of Christ broken for you, Linda.
Then he places a round wafer in my waiting hands, and I respond—amen—then pick the wafer from my cupped hand and put it on my tongue.
Someone else steps in front of me holding a silver chalice and looking into my eyes.
The blood of Christ shed for you.
My hands guide the stem of the cup to my lips. I taste the wine. Christ meets me there.
Henri Nouwen described the Eucharist as “the most ordinary and the most divine gesture imaginable.”
Jesus, in all his humanness and mysterious divinity, meets me in the liturgy of a weekly Eucharist, bringing me to the foot of the cross and into an experience with the Divine.
Early in my walk with God, I was taught the folly of trusting feelings. Feelings were faulty; the caboose of the evangelical Fact, Faith, and Feeling train.
Circumstances led me to a different tradition and a place where emotion and experience, if not the locomotive, were undoubtedly closer to the front than the end of the train.
Within each custom, I was both fed and left hungry for more.
One morning, a handful of years ago, in the solitude of morning prayer, I experienced divine love such as I had never felt before—one I secretly doubted was manifest in the twenty-first century. Some weeks earlier, I had prayed a dangerous prayer—God, let me feel your love—and the answer came when I was reading scripture in an unfamiliar translation. God, the Father, knew you and chose you long ago[1]. I was overcome as God’s love poured over me. In the days that followed, I basked in my own belovedness and began to see others through the same filter.
The gift was meant to be experienced, then shared.
I’m new to the Anglican tradition and I’ve come to hunger for the weekly Holy Eucharist service. It influences the way I love God and my neighbour. Like the experience of divine love that came to me as an answer to prayer, the Eucharist is a gift of grace inviting me to partake in community, nourishing and connecting us to and through Christ.
When, on Sunday morning at the Eucharist service, the priest stands in front of me, looks into my eyes, and says “The body of Christ broken for you, Linda”, the sacrament is transformed into something rich, personal, and mystical. I can’t explain it. All I know is that, washed in gratitude and buoyed by love, the awareness of Jesus’ body being broken stays with me when I walk through the old wooden doors and at the end of the service into the world.
Go forth and bear witness to Christ.
We are sent forth into the world and a new week topped up, so to speak, connected, and filled with grace enough to share.
[1] 1 Peter 1:2, NLT