During snack my son spent most of the time feeding me his Cheerios and grapes. He ate a fair amount, but about half were offered to me. Some he offered and took back, smiling, a baby joke. This is our usual routine before nap, but it occurred to me today was Maundy Thursday and what we were really having was communion.
Once I heard a woman share a story about having a homeless man bump into her tray of food at a Burger king as she was settling down to eat breakfast. He knocked her coffee onto her french toast sticks. She was mad enough to ask him pay for a new breakfast. She scanned the Burger King and saw the man sitting with a friend. As she got up she noticed the homeless man's friend wore a priest's collar, and that the homeless man had also knocked the priests coffee into his breakfast. The priest was sitting, eating the soggy breakfast acting like nothing happened. So the woman went back to her seat and ate her french toast ticks reflecting to us that they tasted "A little bit like bread and wine".
My friend went to mission field training in South America. One day everyone was put into groups and told to find elements of communion, but that it didn't really matter what they used. Sometime in the future they would be on the mission field and feel prompted to have communion and need to use what they had on hand. This was practice. So my friend found some yellow soda and some plantain chips. Everyone laughed, the brightly colored bags and bottles did not jive with their conceptions of the sacrament. In that was communion.
As I've grown communion has moved out of the church as a sacrament and into the hum and drum of my daily life. In part this is because I am not in church much these days, but also I think because even though it is a sacrament, it is really eating and being together. In Cheerios and grapes, coffee soaked french toast, pina soda and plantain chips, in bread and wine, we remember that we belong to each other.
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