What Does (Communion) Look Like?

This is a question that I am asking a lot these days regarding many questions and issues in life. There is the theory of things, the technical part of ideas and issues but what does the practical walking out of some of these particulars look like?


The senses have so much to do with how things are known and experienced, yet when this part of our humanness is shut down, it seems that our very soul cannot really “know” and hold onto what an experience truly is. Is that too harsh to say? Is it too dogmatic?


Maybe in a rather convoluted way I am trying to make sense of the shift in some very sacred experiences in my life. Communion is one of the most profound at present: profound because it feels holy and it looks like a sacred moment when I go forward to receive it.


How can it be that something I have done all my life is looking so different through the windows of my mind, my heart and my senses? Something that was such ritual all my life in my exclusive fellowship background, has now become something mystical that moves me to tears each time and I am unable to explain it. This mystical table is calling to me and as I move forward to receive communion my soul is simultaneously dancing and weeping. Why is it when the officiate looks into my eyes and says “this is Jesus body broken for you” that there is a wailing inside me that I keep silent, and a groaning that would have me drop to my knees if I was not so aware of others around me? Could it be that Jesus is becoming very very real and present to me here?


All my life I have taken communion yet never before have my senses been so engaged. Could it be that when one moves out of the numbness of keeping the senses shut down you actually begin to experience God?


Most of my life has been spent in silencing my senses – the very way in which I was created to experience life, breath, love, pain, joy, celebration, ritual and indeed to experience God. For the first 42 years of my life every Sunday was spent in church. For the last 6 years church has become a daily way of life and being and now, with my new husband, I am again attending a church. But now it feels different and it looks different. In the last 6 years the journey of life has taken me to places of such confusion and despair and as Parker Palmer writes, “the illusion has been broken and truth has been found”. I am fiercely passionate about living life as a sensual being: to hear, see, touch, taste, and smell life enough to be thoroughly intrigued by it.


The only way I can really know God, with a knowing that is hidden within me, is by being able to let my senses experiences things like the wind, the breath of God, the presence of the Spirit. To see a day being born and be held enthralled by the colours that are drawn across the horizon from as far as I can see to the left or the right or directly in front of me – then I see God. To see the laughter on the face of a friend whose scars of addiction and prostitution have left her with diseases that are killing her – then I see Jesus who was afraid of no one and whose touch gave dignity and honor to everyone. To hold in my hands the cold, wet sand on the beach and listen to the waves inhale and sigh in a never ending movement and know that some things are just too beyond my understanding yet nevertheless they are very real. When I hold that piece of bread, a symbol of a broken body, I feel how small my life is in this universe, but I am still called tenderly by my own name by the Creator of it.


What does Communion look like? It looks like the sacred table/altar which silently invites me to be part of ritual and know Holy Presence. It is to know my own kitchen as a sacred space where I prepare communion of daily bread for the guests who come to sit there, inviting them to experience life in sacred ways that only the wind of the Spirit can deliver. It also looks like these symbols of bread and wine that were part of the commitment and vows that David and I made to each other a short time ago. Symbols of sacrifice and honor that God shared with us and we are called to share with each other in our marriage.

Deep peace of the running waves to you,

Deep peace of the flowing air to you,

Deep peace of the smiling stars to you,

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,

Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you,

Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

This ancient Celtic blessing is one I have heard often in the last year, and one we chose to have read at our wedding in September. On this day it comes as a gentle wind of truth to me along with Jesus words to his followers (as Mark records it) about the subject of power.

In a recent road trip I heard a radio interview that discussed the subject of women in refuge camps and the stories of rape that continue. Inner rage at this age old story of war has prompted me to do more research on the subject. My first reaction to the interview was that once again women not only seem to be blamed for war, but they pay a lifetime price in that blame. Some not only bear the scars that rape leaves but they must also live with the rejection that their culture puts upon them. WE bear the scars of this – all women wear them as each of us identify at some place in our lives where our own sexuality has been scarred in some way. Rape has been spoken of in biblical stories of war and power struggles, and every war in time has done so. Every place I looked at this subject it is known as a “war crime”, one that is rarely ever brought to a place of justice it seems.

Yet my question is how I hold this crime,those who have been affected by it, those who have inflicted it, and Jesus call to live life being fill with love and peace and letting it flow out from us to all humanity.

Jesus’ friends John and James wanted to know if they could have a place of significance with him in the Kingdom but instead Jesus told them that the place of significance was living life as a servant. In fact he told them off for wanting to hold power.

Power – the hunger for it that leads to war, to abuse, to anything but the peace and love and justice that I am seeing more and more as the heart of God. Peace and justice that is not easy to find in our "Christian" world.

I still don’t know what to do with what I am seeing as this crime of mass destruction to women, and young children. The Deep Peace poem speaks of the earth and the Creator that offer peace – not mankind! As I sit with learning “deep peace” and the One who holds and gives “deep peace” I wait for the Spirit to show me what to do with this knowledge. And as I sit with it I must also continue to hold injustice, these crimes of mass soul destruction, and figure out what “righteous anger” looks like for me