Parenting, prisms, and Corpus Christi

Last Sunday my family and I visited the church I grew up in. My parents are still there, the sort of people you could call pillars of the congregation, who between the two of them have taught almost every Sunday school class and participated in almost every ministry over the past twenty-some years. Because of that, even though I haven’t been an active member for over ten years, I still have an “in”—I mention my parents’ names and immediately everyone knows where I fit in the picture. People who have never met us know where my sister and I live and who’s had a baby recently.

I like coming back to the place where so many of my ideas about life and God and community were shaped. I have a lot of wonderful memories of love and friendship in those halls, and there are many people there who I look forward to seeing. My parents worship there. There’s hot chocolate mix and hazelnut creamer to put in my coffee during social hour—it’s like caffeinated Nutella. But there’s a reason—a lot of reasons, actually—why I haven’t been an active part of that church since I graduated from high school. Some of them I’ve mentioned in other posts, and some of them align with the theories of handwringing bloggers bemoaning the departure of millennials from the church.

My kids’ initial response to the service (it’s not like they’ve never been to my parents’ church before, but it had been awhile) was how I imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder accidentally stumbling upon a rave. But they caught on pretty fast and Queen Mab told me later that she “liked the music.”

When it was time for communion, I decided to stick with our own family rules and let the kids participate as they do in our home church. If you’ve seen my facebook posts about my kids and communion, you know it’s important to them. Mab wants to be a priest or a pastor when she grows up so she can give communion, and B will randomly point out the window at Church Across the Street to announce “Body’a Ch’ist” and will put tiny invisible pinches of something in my palm while whispering, “Body Ch’ist, daketa you.” So even though it’s not a thing at my parents’ church to give communion to little kids, I figured that since they both had been baptized (as infants, but whatever) and it wasn’t like there was anyone policing the aisles (the plates were being passed by guys from the youth group) I would go with my own best judgment.

Mab passed the plates and got her little cracker and juice cup like a pro, and B saw what we were doing and stuck his little hand in for a cracker as well. But then he did something he’s never done before.

Instead of putting it in his mouth, he tried to feed it to my dad, then to me. We both tried to explain to him that it was the “Body of Christ,” and I even tucked it in his palm with the usual “Body of Christ, broken for you,” to try to make it clear to him. But he just grinned at me and shoved it in my mouth, repeating, “Body’a Ch’ist,” and I realized—

He thinks this is a game. He thinks we’re only playing communion and doesn’t recognize it as the real thing.

I’ve always wondered what B means when he says “Body’a Ch’ist”—how does he define it? I’d been worrying that maybe he just thinks of it as “snack in church,” but apparently his definition is more nuanced. He’s taken it from Episcopal priests and Lutheran pastors, familiar faces and complete strangers, as a thin white cracker or hunk of chewy brown bread, standing in line or at the altar, beside a firepit and in the middle of 6^th Street, but this was the first time he’d refused it (not counting the time he held the bread in his cheek until the end of the service, then when the rector came around to say hi and held out his hand to B, carefully pulled out the soggy wad and laid it in the open hand. Sorry, Father Bradley!).

Apparently the ritual makes the difference.

My feelings on this are mixed. I’m happy that he’s learning to appreciate something that I’ve come to value deeply, and that his understanding is a *smidge* deeper than I’d been afraid. But in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi, she describes stories propagated to encourage lay piety and adoration of the Host which featured an innocent child refusing to participate in the Eucharist, thereby revealing that the Host had not, in fact, been properly consecrated due to the priest’s impiety. And I don’t particularly want my kids to actually think that this other way of celebrating communion is fake.

Ways of celebrating communion have been on my mind lately, because within our own home church, there are many parents who are making different choices about their children’s participation in communion than we are. It’s been traditional in this congregation to wait until 5^th grade, but participating younger is allowed. Our pastor would give it to every child who reaches for it, but she respects that other parents have their own reasons for letting their children wait. These conversations in our home congregation brought to mind a lesson my dad gave once about communion, years ago, at that very same church where B refused communion, standing right where the praise band was set up on Sunday.

He told us about coming to our denomination (which was then known as the Independent Christian Church) from having grown up Nazarene, and worrying about the new denomination’s practice of weekly communion. In the Nazarene church, communion is monthly, or even quarterly, which made it a special event, outside the everyday, and he was afraid that if he participated every week, it would lose its sacredness.

He discovered that any sense of specialness that was lost by partaking weekly was made up for by the constant reminder of Christ’s love and presence. But then, instead of announcing that our church’s way was the best way and he was glad to have switched over to doing it “right,” he pulled out a prism on a chain and let it hang in the air, catching the spotlights and scattering them like sparks.

Both practices, he explained, brought out different facets of communion and enhanced its beauty.  I’ve never forgotten the image of him in a dark suit, holding out that glittering prism.

It makes it harder to snark about a way of worshiping that I left behind a long time ago when I remember that this particular way of doing church is one of the facets on the prism that helps diffract the light into brilliant rainbows. A flawed facet, sure, just like all of them, and yet still clear enough for me to have met God there, over and over, in the songs and the prayers and the people, until I stumbled my way down the path that led me where I am now.  And it reminds me that the different choices that other parents make for their children often emphasize different truths. While I want my children to value the things that I value, I also want them to learn to respect the perspectives that other people take and to see how those perspectives help transform white light into dazzling colors. It’s not that everything is true or that everyone is right, but I suspect that there may be more ways to be right than to be wrong.