Just when I thought I was smart...

So I was at a training session for Lay Eucharistic Ministers (LEM) at church this past weekend, and I had a bit of an epiphany, or maybe even more than one. I should start by clarifying what a LEM is. At our church, they are the people who take the consecrated host and wine to people who can’t make it to church on Sunday. At other churches LEMs are the people who help at the altar. So in case anyone needed to know, that’s what that is at Trinity, and that’s what I was being trained for.

Anyway, part of our training included going over what happens at the Eucharist so we understand the magnitude of the work LEMs do. While we were going over the service in the prayer book, Fr. Charlie asked us what we believe happens during the sacrament. So I jumped in and said something about how I was raised Catholic and thus was raised to believe in transubstantiation. We had been joking about some church words being more expensive than others, like “liturgical” being a $5 word, so I threw in that transubstantiation is a $10 word. It’s a biggie. And Fr. Charlie asked me to explain what it meant to make sure I wasn’t just opening my vocabulary wallet and showing a bunch of Monopoly money as the real thing. If you are Catholic and went to Catholic school, you can define this word while you balance cups on your head and at the same time work a hula hoop while standing on a balance ball. I spouted out that it means that the bread and the wine become the actual body and blood of Christ, that they are changed (trans) into the flesh and blood (substance). This led to a short side conversation about ritual cannibalism and what other issues people have with this belief. Fr. Charlie got us back on track by joking that I’d get the gold star for knowing my terms if we gave out gold stars, and asked us what else the Eucharist can mean.

Another member of our group spoke up next. This woman is a wonderful help in church, from volunteering at our soup kitchen to helping in the office every week to singing in the choir. And this woman is one of the most humble people, and caring, you could ever meet. She has been bringing the consecrated bread to a woman who can not come to church due to the cold and ice and snow for fear she’ll fall and be hurt. She said something like this:

I don’t know about the expensive words and I’m not educated like Kristin, but when I bring the bread to this woman, after I’ve given it to her, she just gets a look of peace on her face. It’s as if she takes a deep breath and relaxes after she’s been given the bread. It’s magical and holy and wonderful.

This was my first epiphany. I may know the $10 words, but that isn’t what the Eucharist is about. It’s about the mystical quality and holiness of being “fed with the spiritual food” of this sacrament. Fr. Charlie went on to explain the spectrum of beliefs surrounding this sacrament, and pointing out that both of us who responded were right, but that we were touching on different aspects of the spectrum. I’ll add that one of us did it much more eloquently and with feeling. That person wasn’t me.

But this wasn’t the end of the epiphanies. The next day, Sunday, I was serving on the altar. I had given Fr. Charlie the chalice and helped him wash his hands. He had handed me the water pitcher and the other items he didn’t need, and I had gone back to my post beside the altar. I listened as he said the prayers over the hosts and wine, lifting each up at the right time, and I heard the Sanctus bells ring at the right moment. But at some point when he was going through the prayers, a voice in my head said very loudly, “You don’t believe in transubstantiation. You’ve just been parroting that because it was what you’ve been taught.” Wow. Just like that. I don’t believe that. I don’t. After the priest and the congregation have prayed for the world, said the words from the Last Supper, and said the Great Amen, I think the bread and wine are special and blessed and holy, like holy water in Baptism, but they’re not flesh and blood. At least not to me. Who knew? Not me, evidently, and not my friends who sat with me the training the day before.

It doesn’t mean that the sacrament is less special to me now; in fact, I thought about my revelation a lot that day, and it’s been on my mind throughout the week now. It is special. It’s so special that I am prayerful in giving the wine to people at the altar. It’s not passing out drinks at a party. It’s so special that I understand why we don’t toss out the bread after we’re done, but we eat it all or make sure the birds do. It doesn’t go to the garbage disposal or the waste bin. And the wine gets finished off or poured onto the ground, the earth God created. It doesn’t get put back with the wine that hasn’t been prayed over. And it means that taking the host and wine to someone who cannot be at church, someone who needs them so much that he or she asks for them to be carried to the nursing home or apartment, is a very special and humbling task.

Just when I thought I was secure in my beliefs, that I could put them down on paper, as I’ll have to shortly as an assignment for my discernment committee, I was wrong. I do need to think carefully about the difference between what I’ve been taught to believe and what I really do. There is a difference. And the true beliefs are what I need to cull out and ponder. I guess I’ve got some work to do.

Prayers

I ask that during this time of really, really deep cold, you keep the homeless and those who have a hard time getting or paying for heat in your daily prayers.

I also ask that you pray for peace in Israel and Palestine. Whatever your beliefs, people are truly suffering on both sides. In just three short weeks, a lot of blood has been shed.

I just remembered...

We had our first discernment committee meeting this week. Most of what we covered, I was expecting. I’ve been reading a lot about the diaconate in the past two months or so, so most of the information went right along with that, and I’ve served on a discernment committee before, so it was what I remembered, more or less. I will go into the logistics of what this committee is and what it will do, but I wanted to write about something that the meeting triggered for me this week.

First a little background info. I grew up Catholic, and was in the same church from Baptism until I moved away to go to college. And I went to K-8 at the church, so church and school were the same for me, same place and same people and same worship twice a week for most of my life. Then priests all knew me and my parents were really active in helping with youth group and my mom made banners and helped at school, so I was in touch with a lot of people whether I wanted to be or not.

There wasn’t a huge population of nuns in my church since by then fewer people were going into Holy Orders, and nuns had become a bit more liberated, so they weren’t all as easily recognizable as nuns. Some of them wore veils and dark clothes, but none wore those habits we tend to think of nuns traditionally wearing. There were a few, but not many, nuns teaching in my school, but the principal was always a nun. I took for granted that they were there, that they lived in a house and shared a car just like the priests had a house, but each had his own car. I didn’t think about becoming a nun much, but I didn’t think much at those ages about careers or callings to Holy Orders. Plus, the nuns’ car was orange and had plaid seats, which wasn’t cool. I didn’t analyze it much, but you can tell what stuck with me. That vow of poverty was embodied in an orange car with plaid seats.

But this is what I remembered this week. The priests, or others, or my parents, realized that there was something different about me. I had leadership qualities and a spiritual side. I liked church, the liturgy and ceremony of it. And I liked people, being in front of them and participating. So during my freshman year in high school, I was chosen to part of a diocesan group of youth, girls and boys, who met at the diocese offices to pray, study and discern if we were called for holy orders. I don’t think that was ever voiced in that way, maybe it was called a “leadership” group or something, but I participated in it for at least a year. It never came to anything, and by sophomore year, my best friend I knew we could never be nuns because of that whole chastity thing. We liked boys way too much for that.

I remembered this group as I was thinking about the committee this week, probably as I was driving or doing dishes. But this memory triggered an even earlier one.

When I was really small, maybe before my sister was born when I was five, small enough that I had to stand on the kneeler because if I kneeled I couldn’t see anything, I would mimic the priest at the altar during the Eucharist. I mouth the words he’d say, and hold up my hands like I was holding up the chalice and host. This isn’t anything weird, probably, since I’ve seen Fr. Charlie’s little daughter do this too at different times during coffee hour with the small altar in our parish hall. But I don’t remember seeing kids in church do it very often. They are usually interested in anything but what is going on up there like what color lipstick Mom has in her purse, or where the crayons are to color in the hymnal. My sister would dance in the aisle during the procession as her form of participation, but that’s not the same. And sadly, I had no chance to be at the altar as a kid since girls weren’t allowed to serve. And nuns don’t serve at the altar, so when I was mimicking, there would have been no hope for me to ever be up there except as a person to come up afterwards and help hand out the hosts and the wine.

I don’t why I bring this up except as a comment to Chas’s comment on my last posting. He mentions that he has watched me grow deeper in my journey. Maybe I’m not going deeper, but going back. Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a child-like quality even though I can be very mature. Maybe as I go through this process I’m connecting with something my child-self knew but couldn’t possibly interpret or analyze. I wanted to be a part of that mystery on the altar, a mystery I was barred from even taking part in at all until after my First Communion in second grade. And somewhere in that childhood others recognized that maybe I was supposed to be on this path, but the path just then wasn’t right for me, and wasn’t the right path. A whole series of forks lead us into our adult lives, but all those forks are connected. I’m really interested to see what comes of this new, clearer discernment that I have been called to, and what forks are up ahead for me.