Last week we went to a New Members Class at church, which
was less a “class” and more a “getting to know you” between us (my husband and
I and another new member of the church) and some of the longstanding members of
the congregation (and by longstanding, I mean at least one person there was a
fifth-generation member). Everyone was asked to share about themselves,
answering a set of questions ranging from the mundane “What do you do during
the day?” to “Where are you on your faith journey?”
The hardest question for me, and the reason that I was glad
to go nearly last so that I had time to think, was “What about church are you
passionate about?” Everyone else had such great, specific answers—they had
ministries they really cared about, and people within the congregation that
they cared about, their families, and so on. And so while I listened to their
stories, I pondered what it was about church that I just had to be there for—what’s the image of church that my mind keeps
coming back to again and again?
***
There was a period of time when I couldn’t shake the sense
that God was purely fictional. But I never had that feeling about Jesus. I
could concede that he wasn’t necessarily who I had been told he was, but he
still felt Real.
Even long before that time, I was deeply jealous of the
medieval mystics I studied who encountered Jesus in intimate visions—I would
love to share a pot of tea with Julian of Norwich (she seems like a tea
drinker) or wine with Margery Kempe (maybe coffee if it’s before lunch, since
someone with fourteen children probably needs all the caffeine, but she doesn’t
seem like a tea drinker to me at all) and talk to them about what they saw. From
books like Eating Beauty by my former
professor Ann Astell (whose book is just gorgeous and who would also be a
lovely person to drink tea with), I realized how much of these female mystics’
connection with Jesus came through encounters with the Eucharist.
The convolutions that medieval theologians got themselves in
to try to construct an iron-clad defense of the Real Presence of Christ in the
Eucharist was more silly/desperate than anything. But I try to give people the
benefit of the doubt when they describe their experiences to me, even if those
people have been dead for six or seven hundred years, and somehow these women
(and many others of a mystic-bent, both male and female) did meet Jesus there.
When I first read these narratives of seeing visions of
Jesus in the Host, or hearing his voice, or being denied by the priest, only to
be served by Jesus himself, it was totally foreign to me, whose experience was
limited to cracker chiclets and grape juice in plastic cups, informally passed
up and down the rows in wide, shining plates (identical to the ones we had just
used to collect offering) after a two-minute devotional. The lights were
lowered and there was meditative music, and at some point it was moved from
before the sermon to after. I think it was supposed to be less like
service-filler and more like the climax, but for me, that just made it feel
more like an afterthought. As far as I could tell, it was simply intended to be
a weekly reminder of Jesus’s sacrifice.*
Later I was a member at a church where communion was still
symbolic, but the weight of their practice was on “guarding the Lord’s table”
against it being taken “unworthily.” This meant it was held infrequently and at
odd times (almost never during the morning service), and so after nearly ten
years there, I could count on one hand (and still have fingers to spare) the number
of times we communed there.
In contrast, while the medieval church had also guarded the
table even more fiercely, even those who only watched the mass without communing were expected to experience the
presence of Jesus more intensely than I ever had.
During the Grail Quest, Sir Lancelot is struck down by a
giant hand (or dwarf, thanks to Sir Thomas Malory’s fortuitous misreading of Old
French) just for daring to cross the threshold of a chapel during the elevation
of the Host. He then spends several weeks lost in visions. While ordinary
non-Grail-Quest-knights were obviously not expected to see the Holy Trinity
suspended over a priest’s head as a matter of course, this narrative demonstrates
that Lancelot is blessed like other mystics who have had similar visions of the
hidden spiritual reality of the ritual, not that he is insane.
***
The priest of the Episcopal church we attended in Lafayette
for a few months before we moved, when inviting the congregation to participate
in the Eucharist, told us that “we don’t know how it works! It just does.” Which sounds a lot like what Church
Across The Street’s denomination says: “In this sacrament the crucified and risen Christ
is Present, giving his true body and blood as food and drink. This real
presence is a mystery.”
When the Great Thanksgiving begins, I get a little thrill down my spine
I don’t always feel like I believe. But every Sunday as I
stand or kneel and put a little wine-soaked wafer on my tongue, I still taste
and see that the Lord is good, and he’s there.
* I did a quick Googling of the theology of communion in the
Restoration Movement, which was where I grew up, to see if there was more
conversation about it than I was aware of, and there was little discussion of
the significance of communion beyond that it should be done weekly—I’m sure
there is a rich theology behind that practice, but it was not foregrounded in
my experience.
