from our Lay Leader
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, communion is
– the act of sharing;
– the Christian sacrament in which consecrated bread and wine are consumed as memorials of Christ’s death or as symbols for the realization of a spiritual union between Christ and communicant or as the body and blood of Christ;
– intimate fellowship;
– a body of Christians having a common faith and discipline.
I tend to use the word communion for the second and fourth meanings, but in this essay I would like us to reflect on communion as the act of sharing or intimate fellowship. These simple understandings of communion intensify the purpose of the sacrament, reminding us that we are one, that we share everything in common.
We as humans have a core of commonality that is our unity. All our differences are for the sake of making us a complete whole; we need and celebrate our differences because that is what completes us, gives us all things. As long as we share our diverse selves with each other–the broad realm of our natures, our talents, our skills, our vocations, our interests, our possessions, our lives, our love–we live together in harmony, fully alive, full of joy. That is what it means to be human.
As Christians, we recognize that Christ is the connective tissue that runs through us all. When we receive communion, the consecrated elements of Christ, we are practicing the act of sharing and celebrating the intimacy of being fellow beings, sharing the one life that is in and through Jesus Christ.
I’ve found that I focus on communion as an act of repentance; as an individual act, where I repent and seek forgiveness from Christ for my individual shortcomings and transgressions, so that I might be received by Him and accepted into the communion of saints. What if, instead of kneeling at the altar after receiving the elements and lamenting our failings and seeking our personal redemption, lost in ourselves, we joined hands and lifted our voices together to praise God for making us one with another, all of us connected together with Christ, our Savior and Exemplar. Would this help us to remember the overarching purpose of communion?
The last definition of communion (a body of Christians having a common faith and discipline) focuses our commonality on like belief and practice, which overlooks or minimizes the fellowship that we have as human beings–all sharing in this thing we call life, experiencing this thing we call reality, on this planet we call earth. We share all those things as miraculous living beings in this beautiful, mysterious, awe-inspiring universe, loved and guided by a Benevolent Creator who specializes in goodness and beauty. This is the communion that we pray for when we say, ” Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Let us practice communion not just once a month for a few minutes. Let’s practice communion — the shared intimacy of life together– every moment of every day and let eternity start now!