Broken for You

This spring break, I traveled to Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico with a group of 5 other college students and our fearless leader. We enjoyed a week of prayer, contemplation, conversation, reading, and hiking. On our last day, we all gathered to reflect on the week. Our leader asked what had been one of the most important moments for us, and I, a thoroughbred Protestant, immediately thought of attending Mass.

I may never be able to explain in words what I experience in the Eucharist. I have an unusually high sacramental understanding for a Protestant, I realize, but the importance cannot be lost on anyone, particularly when the question of ecumenism is raised. During the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, back in January, the mainline Protestant campus ministry groups and our Catholic Student Center held an ecumenical vespers service each night. During discussion one evening, we were asked where we saw unity in the church and where we saw disunity. My answer was one and the same: at Catholic Mass. That conversation started a longer reflection for me that reached a mental climax at Christ in the Desert.

Mass exposes both unity and disunity in the church. As I participated in the liturgy of the Mass, my senses were heightened by the spoken word, the incense and the bells. I was fully alert, even after having attended 4:00 a.m. Vigils and 5:45 a.m. Lauds. I was very much a part of the sacrament—I felt like I could almost reach out and touch the body of Christ, not just on the altar but in the gathering of people in that sanctuary. However, when it came time to receive the elements, I was obliged to cross my arms over my chest to be given a blessing by the priest. Moving towards the altar, I wanted to laugh with joy at the beauty of the moment, and at the same time I wanted to weep for the divisions that keep us apart at table.

No matter what the theological interpretation of what exactly happens at Eucharist may be, the communion table is (or should be) a central point of Christian worship and life together. Christ institutes the Lord’s Supper himself with a command: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19). Then, too, it was in the breaking of bread on the walk to Emmaus that the disciples recognized Jesus (Luke 24). In his book Torture and Eucharist (which I read at the monastery), William Cavanaugh makes this observation: "It was not uncommon…for the ancient church to connect failure to recognize Christ in the consecrated bread and wine with failure to treat others as brothers and sisters in Christ." Understood seriously, the communion table is a place not only of communion with God but also of communion with each other. Whatever the future holds for the ecumenical movement, it seems to me that the question of unity relies greatly on table manners, on where we recognize and honor Christ in the sacraments and how we recognize Christ in others.