Advertisement It hasn’t always struck me that way. I don’t know how many pieces of bread I have swallowed, but usually it has been a functional act, or a hungry one. And I guess joy often has been around it, too, like when I was a child and would sit with my brothers and cousins and eat PBJs.
It’s the same with the Eucharist. I have often received it as function, or with curiosity. On only a handful of occasions, I have received it with tears and suffering. But the act never struck me in the holy way it did last week.
Standing by an altar, I set the wafer on my tongue and it felt like the most intimate thing in the world. It was hard to put words around the experience after I walked outside of the church. I began noticing people’s tongues more when they talked, which made the people seem more vulnerable than usual.
And the bread on my tongue and the wine in my throat returned to me at strange times, like when a flock of birds burst across the sky and my tongue suddenly felt slimy and exposed, like the mouth of a baby bird receiving food from its mother.
The more that intimacy with bread awakened something in my experience, the more I wanted to know about others’ experiences of the Eucharist.
I called a Jesuit in New Jersey, who spoke about seeing plates with bread that fed the hungry at a Catholic Worker House one day. After the meal, he was at Mass, and when the same plate with the same bread came to him as Eucharist, he wept.
Over the weekend, I washed dishes and listened to an old episode of “Speaking of Faith,” in which radio host Krista Tippett discusses with Don Saliers, a Methodist scholar, the meaning of Communion.
“Some traditions have made this an extraordinarily elaborate ritual because they want to honor God for this great gift,” Saliers says. “Then others come along and say, ‘Oh, too complicated. Too many layers. Too many symbols. Too many gestures. We want something plain and simple.’ And that’s going to be the rhythm of the point-counterpoint in the history of this meal to our day.”
On Thursday, preparing for this column, I called both an Eastern Orthodox priest and an elder in our community who helped me better understand Saliers’ ways of knowing the Eucharist: the mysterious, divine way and the simple, fleshy way.
The Rev. John Chagnon, pastor at St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church, said the Eucharist is something Orthodox Christians, whom he described as Eucharistic people, spend their lives coming to understand.
“We don’t try to seek to define the Eucharist so much as we want the Eucharist to define us,” said Chagnon, who pointed out babies receive the Eucharist in his tradition. “It’s not so important for us to understand everything. We do want to be transformed by it.”
Later in the day, on the recommendation of the Rev. Larry Berger, I called Virginia Thompson. The Roman Catholic 81-year-old receives the Eucharist most days, and I asked her why.
She described how “it’s very personable for people to go up to the altar and take bread because you have a relationship with Christ.”
“If you would come to my house, I would serve you a bowl of soup and a chunk of bread,” she said in her grandmotherly voice. “And because I went to Christ’s house, he’s going to give me a piece of bread. And I buy real good bread, too, from the Co-op.”
I asked her more questions, and she said if I really wanted to know, I needed to come to her house and chat with her over bread and a bowl of soup.
So I went, and I knocked on her door, and while we’d never met before, she invited me in and led me to a place at her table she had set for me. She gave me a vest to keep warm, and I forgot to ask any more questions about the Eucharist as she stirred the chili. We talked about other things, like our families and how young people don’t go to the church anymore.
Then she blessed the food and me, and we ate.
More on the Eucharist
“Eucharist” comes from a Greek word meaning “thanksgiving.”
Thomas Hart, in “The Art of Christian Listening,” has this to say about the ritual of Communion: “Just as the great commandment summarizes (Jesus’) life and teaching in a verbal formula, the last supper epitomizes it in a symbolic action. In giving the bread and the wine, Jesus tries to compress into a pregnant gesture everything his life has meant.”
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
Michael Welch wrote on Mar 12, 2008 1:14 PM: