do this in remembrance of me
It’s been a good weekend so far. I spent some time with some people I love and had some good conversations, about which I’d like to post, but later. I think good conversations come about when you don’t lie. Like, when you see a friend and you haven’t seen him or her in a long time and they ask you how you are and what you’ve been doing, you tell them, actually things are pretty crappy for me on many levels right now and the thing that keeps me busy most is reading theology and writing in my religion blog.
NB — People are more likely to open up re: religion and spirituality while drinking.
What I want to write about right now is communion, that essential Christian sacrament. Even I, who is willing to toss out many things concerning Christian tradition, will call the sacrament of communion “essential.”
The thing is, I really hate how it’s done at my church. We do it in the ultra-sanitized way, with silver trays of tiny plastic cups filled with Welch’s (the Official Juice of Communion). The bread comes on silver trays as well — carefully cubed morsels of tasteless, nutrient-free white bread. Communion is, and indeed always has been, the only time I eat white bread. (As a child, I was raised on whole wheat, and as a nutrition-obsessed adult I eschew all products of the oven that are not whole-grain and heavy enough to be used as a blunt object weapon in case of burglery). For a while in the ’90s we had little pieces of matzoh bread, but some time during my sojourn away from church they switched back.
The pastor always makes a statement before the cup is served to the effect of, “Don’t take communion unless you have a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ™,” as though if you do take communion without a PRwJC™ something very bad will happen to you, like the bread will expand in your stomach as it would when it’s fed to the ducks at the park, and you’ll die.
I’m exaggerating. The pastor actually always makes the statement in a very nonchalant, casual style, but it always sticks in my brain. Especially because I never really know if I’m a Christian or not.
I’ve written earlier about how Gail Ramshaw’s book Under the Tree of Life spoke to much of my experience in terms of many aspects of religious life and practice. This passage about communion was no different:
The single-swallow shot glasses prefilled with wine that one encounters at some communion services these days are an American God-for-me invention that shrinks the communal largess into a dose of medicine for me: one tablespoonful once a week, and my devil will vanish. Rather, the point of God-for-us is that my access to God is communal, my reception of God is communal, my participation in the divine life is communal. (71)
I don’t know how my fellow churchgoers feel look at communion on an individual level; actually, I don’t know how the senior pastor really feels about it. Maybe we just do it this way because it’s the way we’ve always done it. I’m certainly not assuming that the people in my church look at communion as a tonic, as Ramshaw, perhaps too cynically, describes. I sincerely doubt it, actually.
I wonder sometimes if I should go back to the way I did things during my unChristian phase, on the rare occasions when I would attend a service. I would pass the dishes long without taking. I can honestly say I don’t care what the people around me think, so that’s no burden to me. (If they’re watching to see who takes from the plate and who doesn’t, that’s their own problem.)
But that wouldn’t solve anything at all. I believe, as Ramshaw does, that communion isn’t something you can do by yourself. It’s group activity. And maybe that’s what I’m frustrated with — that the single-serving juice-and-bread is diluting the aspect and keeping me from experiencing the true reality and meaning of communion in the way I would like to.
I’d consider asking people in my Bible study to take communion with me, but that’s the kind of thing that can get folks in the church really riled up. In my experience, if you do things like communion or baptism outside of the conventional contexts, you get in trouble. A youth pastor I know (who will remain nameless unless he chooses otherwise) got in trouble for serving communion to his youth group with the only available foodstuffs at the time, Doritos and Coca-Cola. On one level I can empathize with the church leaders’ freakout. On the other hand, Doritos and Coca-Cola are to 21st century teenagers what bread and wine were to first century disciples.
For me this isn’t an aesthetic issue. I just want a little more authenticity.