I Myself am the Bread of Life

This song has been on my heart this month. Why is this important? One of the tests of a leading is persistence. This song made some in its original audience uncomfortable. This went so far as some calling it heretical. This song is a bridge between bread and cup communion and the purely spiritual. Yet what makes it challenging can bring the deepest meaning to Quakers. We as individuals are the revelation of the holy to one another–the bread of life.  Collectively we bring the sacred in our joining as a community. It is not merely Christ that is the bread of life, but also God shining through us and being present by us.

The bread that matters most deeply in the moment of communion is spirit. This bridges the divide between bread and cup communion and spiritual communion. The Quaker notion that we can experience the sacraments without having to physically enact them says, Yes! Yet this song was written by a Catholic who would see the physical elements as important. 

God’s Kingdom can be made real to us as food. It can seem so banal and even disappointing, but the Kingdom can be present in a meal. Christ taught the nature of the Kingdom of God through dinner parties open to all people especially the marginalized and despised. In that moment everyone was welcomed and fed.

Our relationship with one another is a banquet. Feast on stories and connections. 

Communion

I have experienced communion in a lot of different forms. As a Catholic I experienced communion through the mass. Whereas my sisters were altar servers and my parents lectors, I was a eucharistic minister. I broke up our little flat homemade whole wheat bread and placed into people’s hands. I poured the wine and handed them the wine glass. While there were special prayers, chant and songs that came together along with the blessing of the bread and wine shared, I saw the transcendent moment when they ate the bread and drank the wine that meant so much to some people and was just routine for others. If you are an outsider, then differentiating between Catholic, Episcopalian, and even Lutheran communion might be difficult. There are a lot of similarities amongst the high church traditions.  Many low church communion services I have attended have been far less complicated when it comes to prescribed prayers. There’s a brief scripture quote and a few sacred words and that’s it. The most complicated outside of high church traditions I have experienced is the Brethren love feast including prayers, readings, cheese and fruit, a special soup called sop, and feet washing.

The bread and wine taken from the Gospels are abstracted to varying degrees. Wine may be actual wine, grape juice, or even some non-grape based juice. Bread may be a loaf of yeast bread or a compressed disc. At a Christian music festival I received a wafer and a single sip of juice in a small plastic package, but no human connection. My favorite type of bread that I have experienced in communion is a hand torn tortilla in a Mexican-American church, because of its cultural relevance. 

Frequency of communion can be once a day for religious orders, once a week, once a month or even just once a year like early Brethren.

Reasoning behind communion varies too. Is it a commemoration and reminder or remembrance to use the jargon? Is it an ordinance (a sort of rule set up to tell us how to be proper Christians)? Is it an encounter with God in the here and now or just symbolism? It holds different meanings to different Christians.

Beyond disagreements around what counts as bread and wine and beyond debates about the physics of communion are some basic truths. The priest, pastor, or other officiant speaks the words tradition says Christ spoke. Eucharistic ministers share the bread and wine as tradition says Christ did. People in the here and now are repeating the acts of Christ. We are Christ to one another in the moment.

So what is communion to Quakers? Quakers too believe that we can encounter God in one another. For us there are not necessarily designated members of the community nor specific words that must be used. And what of that moment when the wine or bread is shared? Consider this: what if we could take that mystical moment of receiving the bread and the wine and transform it so it lasted 20 minutes or even an hour? That’s the dream. 

So, do Quakers do communion? The short answer is no. The long answer is yes but. We don’t have rituals surrounding consumption of wine and bread as a way of experiencing and/or remembering Jesus. If you took a video of a Quaker meeting and showed it to a Catholic, an unprogrammed meeting might look like nothing happened. Even a semi-programmed Quaker meeting would be termed “just” a prayer service. This is where the no comes in.

There is something more that we experience and this is especially noticeable when you are there in-person. We seek a shared mystical experience connecting to one another and Spirit 

We gather as a community and when all goes right we experience the real presence of God. As a semi-programmed meeting we have a lot of the opportunities for connecting with God and one another that the other traditions do. We have singing, readings, prayers, and a spoken message. 

What really sets us apart is the time we spend in silence. Compared to other traditions with a fully immersive multi-sensory experience, Quaker waiting worship is a virtual sensory deprivation tank. In such moments vibrant visions may be painted and in the quiet the softest voice may be heard.

Past Quakers have decried the rituals of other Christians as empty or worse dead. As Quakers we have to watch out for being judgemental, arrogant, and seeing ourselves as superior. We need to at least hold ourselves to the same standards we put on others. If we are cautioning others against dead or empty rituals then how do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we keep our rituals alive and open? We start with an openness to anything happening. Instead of setting up rules or constantly eldering those who stand out with strange expressions of God we let our time be free flowing. Friends General Conference recommends a radical openness to what might happen. You may or may not have a message. Anyone could be led to share. Be prepared for messages to come after the waiting worship is officially over.

Friends General Conference also has a list of suggestions to “enrich” waiting worship that is instructive. We start with preparation outside of our weekly meeting for worship. “Spend some time each day in meditation, spiritual reading or prayer.” “Read Quaker classics,” do Bible Study, and even read from Faith and Practice. We are working on the Faith and Practice for our Yearly Meeting currently. 

I would add get to know the people of your church so you feel comfortable sharing with them.  Learn each other’s stories. Share your joys and sorrows. As the song says, “Lives broken open, stories shared aloud, Become a banquet.” Let yourselves grow close. Do not, however, become so insular that a new person can’t drop right in. There is a Jewish tradition of leaving a chair open for Elijah at the Passover seder. When he comes, Elijah would bring God’s message of redemption. Lean into that tradition, know that someone/anyone could show up as God’s prophet and deliver a message. Keep the chair open in your heart understanding  that you don’t know when it will be filled nor by whom.

In our reading for today, we learned about an old Quaker tradition of an “Opportunity.” The openness to an Opportunity means that rather than expecting worship to happen at exact times, we are open to the Spirit whenever we may be called to waiting worship. As Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, the Spirit blows where it chooses, but we do not know where it comes from nor where it goes. We may be called to sit in silence with anyone anywhere any time.

Andy Stanton-Henry writes in Friends Journal,  “The beauty of traditional Quaker sacramentology is that we recognize the reality of that background song: grace finds us. We are all involved in what Rufus Jones called the ‘double search.’ As we are seeking God, God is seeking us. As we search for the Light, the Light searches us. And God, or the Light, uses any means necessary (or anything consistent with the nature of Love) to reach us. So grace finds us. And we find ourselves in the midst of a sacramental universe.

We find grace, and are found by grace, in innumerable ways inside this sacramental universe: not only through bread, wine, and water but also through good novels, human touch, sunsets, well-timed words of encouragement or prophetic challenge, mountains, oceans, music, and on and on—world without end.”

Quakers traditionally have seen the holy all around us. This means that even though we do not have ritualized meals, we can still recognize the sacred in eating together. Gathering and conversation before worship with a cookie in your hand give you a chance to reconnect. Potlucks can go beyond just fun time together. In a meal open to all and building community we are sharing in sacred moments. This can be a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. At the next potluck take a moment to acknowledge the sacred in the meal and our community. See the holy in the face of another and our sharing. 

Finally, release yourself from Perfectionism. We cannot control when we will feel that deep communion with God and one another. It may happen one Sunday and not the next. Just the practice of setting aside time to listen to the Spirit is pleasing to God. As Voltaire warns, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Be grateful for what you have even as you work for improvement. The more you are open the more you can be in touch with the ever present Spirit. Don’t confine your openness to the Spirit to when you would prefer to have that encounter. Prepare yourself so you are ready when it happens.

Join together with one another and God. Find spiritual practices that are meaningful to you during the rest of the week. Be open to the movement of the Spirit. Let in the mystical. Don’t judge yourself if you don’t find what you’re seeking right away.

I leave you with these queries:

• What does communion mean to you?
• When have you felt mystical connection with the people of the church and God?