Ramblings about bread and wine

It is something I’ve done since I was 13. Before I was baptized, eating the cracker and drinking the grape juice was strictly forbidden. I don’t know why.

Well, actually I do know. I call it practical transubstantiation.

A little while after we married, my bride and I moved into a parsonage planted adjacent to the church building in a small town. After services one Sunday, we both watched as a lady smacked around her small son who had gotten into the leftovers of the Lord’s Supper. He cried pitifully, not understanding just why this was a bad thing.

The sad thing was that those stale crackers and miniscule amounts of grape juice were minutes away from being thrown away.

My extremely friendly Catholic friend at work considers the bread and wine (like all Catholics) to be the literal blood and body of Jesus. That’s Transubstantiation. I had not realized that some in my little protestant group practiced this view of the Lord’s Supper.

At least that’s the only rationale I can think of for beating your kid for eating left over crackers and Welches grape juice; if you really believed that was Jesus’ blood and flesh…

I am wondering how, after all these years, that little boy ever decided to love Jesus or to appreciate remembering him through eating a little bread and wine with other believers.

One of the things that strikes me today – as it has for many years – is why the insistence on the morbid funeral-like atmosphere surrounding the Lord’s Supper?

Are we remembering the dead or living?

My wife tells me that in Russia – her native land – that during Easter people will visit gravesites (very much like “Dedication Sunday” in the American South) and have meals and kids will run around – stuff like that.

And then a most unusual thing will happen: strangers will approach each other and say (in Russian of course) that Jesus is risen? The retort is always, “Indeed, He is Risen!”

Maybe that’s not so strange from Christians. But to receive that answer back from Atheists is a little strange – but I like it. Of course, it may have been out of respect for the “atheist” to answer that way; cultural norms are hard to break.

I believe that Jesus rose and is very much alive and I don’t like the way we treat the Lord’s supper.

Regardless, when I remember my dad’s life I don’t remember the funeral. When snippets of his life that intersected mine play through my mind like a YouTube video clip, I see him alive and interacting with me or someone else.

It was raining when we got back to the house after the funeral. And Mobile Gas had disconnected our service for non-payment while we were all at the gravesite (which was a nice touch with the rain and funeral and all). But I only remember these things that because of this article.

But here are a few things I do remember when I think about him:

He died a few days from my sister’s birthday in 1983.

I remember going with him to a used-car parts place in Plateau, Alabama – where you rummage through an ocean of automobile carcasses and find the one most like yours and see if the part you are looking for is still there, or has been harvested by someone – like that movie Coma. Only, these automobiles aren’t on life support – they are dead!

I watch him sweat and maneuver under the car carcass and find the part he needed. He then removed it from the donor car and walked to the guy up front to pay. I don’t know why, but I didn’t grasp the idea. I didn’t know why we had to pay when my dad had done all the work of finding and removing the part. He patiently tried to explain that the car belonged to the owner of the salvage place and why shouldn’t we pay? It belonged to the other guy and now it belonged to us – we paid for it. But all I could see was the energy exerted by my dad to get the thing.

Thankfully, I later understood, otherwise a career in burglary and petty theft might have awaited me. But I was never any good at political speeches.

I also remember lots of drinking and shouting and fighting. Once we were driving in Mobile and he half-heartedly was talking about his drinking days and said, “You probably don’t remember that part son.” Well, yes I did. How could I not? I got mad and slammed the car door when I got out to pump some gas. I was mad that he would even try to simply wish that I hadn’t remembered the years he wasted drinking and hurting himself and his family.

But I remembered and later learned to forgive.

That took way too much time.

I remember that he quit drinking, and that was good.

I remember that he grew a beard after surgery at the VA Hospital in Biloxi and we all came in to see him. He looked strange with a beard.

And I remember the day an ambulance pulled into our driveway and put him on a gurney and took him to Suburban Hospital in Satsuma. I thought that this would be like all the other times before; he would just go in and they’ll fix him up a bit and he’ll be back home.

But he didn’t come back home.

I remember the Christmas that he bought me a pretty good box of tools and sat on the sofa with my mom staring at me. He said that I was a “pretty good mechanic.”

I had never been so happy to be called “a pretty good mechanic” although some would later doubt that.

I was sad the day he died and sadder the day of the funeral.

But my memory of my dad is always reflective if his life, not of his death.

And he is not living.

But Jesus is. And that brings me back to my original complaint.

I don’t want to sit in introspective solitude and be as quiet as a church mouse as the clanking of metal plates with crackers and grape juice echo in the auditorium.

I want to remember that he lives and maybe talk about what he did when he was here and what he is doing now.

When I sit with my sisters and brother (which is rare) we sometimes might talk about some memory involving my dad. I don’t think about the funeral because it sad. And why sit around being sad when you can rejoice that you have a memory – a chapter of his and your own story.

I want to be full of joy at the memory of Jesus at communion.

A writer published a book a few years ago entitled, Come to the table. He addresses this concept that I’ve tried to in artfully describe here. He tries to get people to see that the Lord’s Supper as a quiet and individualistic taking of wine and bread is counter to the joy filled communal meal in early Christianity. He calls on a revision of the Lord Supper based on biblical values.

I agree.