Holy Week-Wednesday
In Anne Lamott’s memoir Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith she describes the bohemian culture of Northern California that she grew up in. One of the uniting factors of the culture was its counter-culture—a rejection of the institutions of post-World War II America. One of the especially rejected values of this era was religious faith. Despite almost unanimous appreciation for a lack of reverence—-or because of it; Lamott practiced her own kind of rebellion. She prayed. Conventionally. Anne felt a tug toward spirituality that certainly looked like pluralistic California; as well as looking a lot more like what her parents rejected than they were comfortable with.
“Most people who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians—people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful. I saw something once from Jewish Theological Seminary that said, “A human life is like a letter of the alphabet. It can be meaningless. Or it can be part of a great meaning.” Our funky little church is filled with people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside on their knees, and they are home writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.”
Christian Ethicist Marty Marty in his short book, The Lord’s Supper, speaks directly to a culture that is skeptical of organized religion. He does so through a traditional expression of Christian faith.
“Long ago, so long ago in fact that the story can include a streetcar, a pastor pulled his overcoat collar up close to his neck and ears and headed around a Boston corner into the icy northeast winds of a winter evening. Hearing a commotion, he looked up and saw a crowd gathering, despite the raw chill of the air. The people were huddling around a body that lay in agony in front of a stopped streetcar. The minister hurried over to the crumpled heap and pushed his way past the people to where a police officer and a doctor who had been passing by were tending to the injured man.
When the doctor learned that the newcomer to the scene was a priest, he said, “It’s too late for me to do anything, Father! You take over. You’d better administer the last rites.” The priest knew exactly what to do, even though he was barely out of seminary and had not as yet faced many emergencies. He got out his little black book and the materials he needed for the rites. Then he set out to address the writhing and now desperate man.
“My son, are you of the Catholic faith?”
“Yeah. Yeah…”
“Do you know that you are a sinner against God?”
“Uhuh. Yeah…”
The end was near. The pastor hurried along, with an eye to getting in all the words in the book.
“Do you believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?”
The wretched man had just enough breath to gasp, “Say, what is this, Father? Here I am dying, and you want to run me all the way through the catechism?”
The late Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston used to tell variations of this story about himself as that young priest. He wanted to get across a very important point that he learned through the seasoning of long years, as he got further from the books of rites and closer to the people for whom they were prepared. Last rites and Holy Communion were for dying people – which means everyone – in their daily needs. The ministry of the church has more to do with persons than with things.
Whoever has thought or studied much about the Lord’s Supper knows that its story includes many things. For the man on the Boston street, these “things” would have meant being “run through the catechism.” Every catechism deals with doctrines about the sacrament. Libraries are full of things called books of dogma, which define teachings about the Lord’s Supper to protect it from misuse. There are other things as well, such as the many disputes that attach themselves to the means through which Jesus Christ is present among us. Most of these controversies were of the ugliest sort to be found in all the volumes about the Christian past. The Lord’s Supper is also involved with things like committees and commissions, which set the rules for who should come to a meal that they all call the Lord’s. More attractively, talk about the Lord’s Supper includes suggestions about music appropriate to its celebration, books of direction for how to administer it, and attempts to remodel churches in order to make its impact more vivid.
Yet when sinners line up to receive the body and the blood of Jesus Christ with the earthly bread and wine – the two things that are always bound up with the act – we must picture that they have something on their minds that the literature does not address. When these believers are alert to what their very presence is shouting, if they are serious, they get right to the point: “Here I am dying – and I do not want to run through the catechism. I want to be the receiver of the gifts of God. I have the right to get to the heart, the person of Jesus Christ.”
…The catechism and stories about the Lord’s Supper are of interest only when they “tell you about you.” To say this is to risk playing up to one of the uglier features of modern religion. Today many people arrange the whole universe around their own egos. Some analysts say that their disease is narcissism, named after the Greek god Narcissus, who came to be literally spellbound by his own mirrored image in a pond. Narcissists can use religion, including Christianity, to become similarly spellbound. They will work every conversation around to the point that they can tell you how they were “born again.” Only gradually does it become clear that some of them do this to show not how great God is but how great they are for having found God. Others will look for the latest fads or frills in the spiritual marketplace. They are saying, if they hear the story of the Lord’s Supper at all, “Tell me about me.” And then everything ends there.
“Tell me about me” can, however, mean something that is much better than mere self-serving. The me who receives the Lord’s Supper is a human who in the presence of God is learning to become more human. But this meal does not merely teach; it is not a cookbook or a menu but the food itself. To share it is to experience eating and to gain its benefits. The me of this experience is becoming part of a larger we in the act of sharing the meal. The Lord’s Supper is often called “Holy Communion,” a coming together of bread with body, wine with blood, God with creatures, and believers with one another. To realize through Communion that one is a social human being who shares common miseries and joys is a benefit of this meal. It serves to lift a person beyond mere me-ness.