Author: Al
Posted: 2007-06-25 18:22:38
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The Best Communion Ever
It's been a few weeks since Disciple class ended. The end was so spectacular that I thought I should wait for a month or more before writing about it, just in case my initial reaction was, well, reactionary. While a little bit of the shock of it has worn off, the novelty of it has remained, and in a way, has even grown some. The evening was far from perfect, and at the time, I thought that the bad parts were roughly equal the one awesome part.
Time has transformed the evening in my mind as time is apt to transform anything. Rarely, though, does the significance of a thing increase as life moves beyond it. This particular event has been an exception to that rule.
My horror started in full only a couple evenings before the class. I had agreed, along with everyone else, to go to this restaurant based solely upon the preacher's description at the previous class. It was a reasonably priced downtown restaurant with perfect ambiance for our needs. I strongly suspected at the time that no such thing as a reasonably priced downtown restaurant existed, but I did not have the presence of mind to check prices until two days before we had to be there.
Sure enough, the food was unrecognizable and well beyond our means. I sent an extremely blunt email to the preacher, and waited in hopes that the situation would blow up and we would abstain out of righteous indignation. Truth be told, I had been trying to convince my wife that we should quit the silly class for months, and I'm not the kind of person who will stick something out just because there is an infinitesimally small portion of it left. The exercises in our book looked to be much more asinine than what we had undergone thus far, and dealing with it did not seem to be worth whatever we would get for going to the last class.
Despite my best attempts to fan the fire, the situation diffused itself. It was agreed that no one would find it weird if we sat there and stared at everyone else while they ate. At the appointed time, I found myself dropping the kids off with the babysitter, and heading downtown.
The selling point for this particular restaurant was that it had an upper room. How that was supposed to be poignant, I do not know. Sure, there was mention of an upper room in the bible, but we were hardly the original twelve. There are all sorts of other places mentioned in the bible that the disciples visited at one time or another, and a downtown restaurant seemed about as appropriate as a tomb. In many ways it was less appropriate. Tombs still share similarities with their counterparts from antiquity. Restaurants have never shared much in common with houses from ancient times, even if there is a balcony of some sort involved. For one thing, while the original disciples of Christ were praying, I don't think that anyone was refilling their water. For another, if there was indeed music that could be heard in the upper room, I doubt that tinny solid state amplifiers and obnoxious tweeters were involved in its production.
At dinner Nik and I skipped right to dessert and shared a slice of cheesecake. The reaction from our fellow disciples was evenly split between indifference, indignation, and sadness. The sad ones were the people who realized that they had just paid thirty-five bucks for an entree that they didn't even like, and the format of the evening would prevent them from having any dessert themselves. The indignant were subdivided into those who do not tolerate our pedestrian habits, and those who, I think, were more angry than sad that they would not get any cheesecake themselves. The indifferent simply continued to refuse to see that we existed, as they had done for most of the previous class sessions.
The discussion portion after dinner was asinine on a level that I had never seen before. Usually these class wrap-up things are bad, but they have a point to them. This was just a steady stream of words loosely connected with no foreseeable end. Thankfully, the end of the discussion was much closer than anticipated. My trepidation was only due to its uncanny disguise as the middle of a sentence. I think when it jumped out from its hiding spot and yelled “Boo!” more than a few of us were frightened. Sure, we wanted it to end, but we were willing to wait a few minutes longer for a concrete ending. This foreign, post-apocalyptic, artsy, film noir, ending that we were given left the lingering thought that this was simply an intermission, and not an ending at all. Through the fear we trudged onward.
Then communion started. Methodist communion services, like most protestant communion services, are pretty strictly regulated. Preachers have been defrocked for using inappropriate food and drink at the service. The service is solemn and sad like all other protestant rituals. You can even thank a good Methodist, Mr. Welch, for the abomination of using grape juice in the service. I had harbored the secret wish that, since we would be in a nice restaurant, we would use wine in this service. I was pretty sure that such a transgression would have gotten the preacher defrocked, so I knew that it would never happen. Still, my heart sank when I saw the plastic container of Welch's Grape Juice sitting there on the counter in gaudy disparity with the earthen goblet and plate.
I've grown up on solemn communions. They are not sad. They are not happy. They are simply solemn. Everyone is quiet and orderly. Depending on the church, and the mood of the preacher, we might kneel at the alter for a bit, or we might just dip the bread into the juice and go sit back down. The latter service, intinction, is a wretched thing, and it is becoming more and more common. At least when you are served at the alter, you have a moment to pray and be thankful. To me, it is a memorial service more than a communion, but at least it has some value. With intinction, you find yourself more concerned with getting out of the way of those behind you than you are concerned with God or the ritual, or anything else. It is the epitome of what is wrong with protestantism. The ritual is so ugly that there is no religion in it.
This particular service was an intinction service, and immediately my mind went to pragmatic thoughts. What is it that they always say to me when they hand me the bread? Good thing I'm almost at the end of the circle because I'm sure that I would screw it up. I hope everyone washed their hands. I don't think I washed mine. What the heck is Jeff doing?
Jeff, who aside from Nik, had always been the highlight of these classes, was pretending to take large bites from the loaf of bread. Jeff is also the preacher's husband. His antics are more hilarious than average, because he knows that they have to be great in order to justify the expense of dealing with his wife later.
Everyone was stifiling giggles as he shoved the bread directly under the nose of the guy beside him. The requirement for self control increased exponentially as the bread and juice went around the circle. I don't think any of us had ever served the sacrament before, because each of us seemed to compound upon the errors of the previous server. First someone was given a tiny portion of bread. Of course everyone was watching her, so she had best not defile the juice by actually touching it with her fingers. With that experience fresh in her mind, the lady gave her husband a piece of bread roughly equal to four normal portions. He chewed on it for a good forty-five seconds, stifling laughter with the rest of us before being able to get out the words “This is the body of Christ..” to his communion buddy. Good thing we're not Catholic.
This pattern repeated itself three times, each one interrupted with our preacher shushing her husband before it was my turn to be served. I smiled a big smile at Jo. I'm going to get two and a half micro grams of bread if the pattern continues. But no, Jo decided to be original and fumbled with the average sized portion of bread until she nearly dropped it. I could see the beginnings of a swear word forming on her lips, but she steadied the body of Christ before it came to that. I heard another hushed “Stop it!” directed at Jeff, but I had been so attentive to my own service that I did not know its reason.
My turn to serve Nik. I repeated the prescribed litany in my head once for good measure. “This is the body of Christ...” That bread is not breaking properly. “... broken for you.” Yep, that is entirely too large. My thoughts at the time were an understatement. Nik put up a valiant effort though, and in the end, she won. If the Guinness people had been there at the time, I am certain that her name would be beside a new category “Most communion bread eaten at a single sitting.”
While the preacher was quasi-angrily putting the communion plate and goblet away some of my favorite words came to mind. I decided to share them with everyone in our circle. That goes completely against my character, but I did it anyway. “Everyone, that was amazing, and as Chesterton said, 'You can only reverence a beautiful lie, in real religion you will only find laughter and war.' And I truly believe that, so thank you all.” Not the most poignant thing I've ever said, but it contained one of the most beautiful truths you will ever find. It was greeted with a startling silence. Everyone looked at me in the same way that a dog listens to a high pitched sound. The mood was irrevocably gone, and I had killed it. That is why I never speak when I think I am being smart or relevant.
Next were the goodbyes. Nik and I aren't members of this particular church, but we attend their services at least a couple times each month. Everyone was hugging and on the verge of tears as though none of us would ever see each other again. Everyone, of course, except for Nik and me. We stood there and projected our awkwardness and abject refusal of physical contact as only we can. It was magnificent. People would light up, and begin to approach us only to stop cold when they saw our expressions. We left our upper room and went to the cash register where we exchanged more awkward moments of refusal. Then we walked outside where we had to fight off the crowd once more. “I guess we'll see you at church sometime?” they would ask sheepishly. “Yeah, you will.” was our flat response. Our entire demeanor suggested the phrase “Get a grip everyone.” But if we could refuse their attempts to make this parting something that it wasn't, they could refuse our attempts to bring them back from the fantasy world where this parting had meaning. |
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