Communion
Communion: 15 September 2021
I woke up in the middle of the night and, as so often happens, couldn’t get back to sleep. I gave up at 3:30, got dressed, fixed the kids’ school lunches and left at 4:00 a.m. to work in Dad’s house until I needed to take Jack to school. We’re making progress, but it turns out that you can accumulate a lot in 85 years. Especially if you’re loath to throw anything away.
As someone keen on environmental stewardship, I often remember my friend’s statement that really, now in this global community, there is no ‘away’. Our plastic creates an island on top of the ocean and is also found in its deepest trenches. So I’ve been recycling and finding good homes as best I can.
One treasure I found recently is a beautiful little traveling communion set that belonged to my maternal grandfather. He took it with him when he visited the sick, the lonely, the imprisoned. I’m delighted that my church is willing to accept this gift. Our pastor is pleased to use it as well as to put in rotation for our Extended Communion, when we’ve tamed the pandemic enough to start that back. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, also called Communion or the Eucharist (“thanksgiving”!) is always meaningful to me, because it is intended to nourish me as an individual, but it also calls the community to the hard work of togetherness. As one source said, “Coming to the Lord’s Table the faithful are actively to seek reconciliation in every instance of conflict or division between them and their neighbors.” That’s a tall order.
Reconciliation seems in short supply these days. I will need spiritual nourishment to tackle my end of that because last week, it occurred to me that I’m living with a constant, low-level fury.
This is new for me. I’m generally a more even-keel kinda person, a more belief-in-the-goodness-of-humanity kinda person. In about third grade I told my mother that I wanted to meet every single person on Earth because each person was so interesting and God loved them so I wanted to, also. Aside from the fact that when I confided that there were a mere 4.3 billion people on Earth; the past 18 months have battered my interest in most of the current 7.9 billion.
It’s much harder for me to believe in the basic goodness of folks when I witness so many people claiming that their personal freedom is more important than my child’s very life. Not to mention all those folks with underlying medical conditions. And here’s the real gut-punch: so many people are using their Christianity as a defense.
Warning: you might not like what I’m about to write. We can disagree. But if you disagree and click away to read something more palatable, then your unwillingness to hear my legitimate complaint is, frankly, part of the problem. I don’t think I’m the only one who is exhausted from staying open to other people’s opinions while being denied that same basic courtesy. I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings.
I’m not proud of this wrath that I’m confessing. I know it’s unworthy of a disciple of my Lord. But right now I’m privileging the virtue of honesty.
I’m furious.
I’m angry at self-righteous people who refuse to be vaccinated because of some sham of personal freedom. I'm disappointed in people who won't go to church if they have to wear masks. I’m enraged at people who won’t wear a mask in the grocery store, let alone a classroom. I’m outraged at Christians who claim ‘faith over fear’, as though they are not the ones living in fear—distrustful of 20 years of vaccine science, cowering in front of Fox News double-speak (whose employees are required to submit vaccination status, by the way, per the holding company’s mandate), insisting that their faith somehow sustains them. Except that they overwhelmingly are filling the emergency rooms and mobile morgues across the South.
I’m angry at the unvaccinated people overwhelming our local health care systems (statistics for Prisma and St. Francis here) who, in most cases, brought this on themselves by their stubborn arrogance—not by their unflappable faith. But now that they are sick, they decide they do, in fact, believe in science and medicine and are also praying to get well. Well well.
I’m dismayed at my uncompassionate thought that willfully unvaccinated adults should have to wait until the regularly scheduled elective surgeries and routine exams allow medical staff the luxury of caring for people who have made health care workers’ lives hell for a year and a half. Oh, we’ve thank you for your service-d them. Disgraceful platitudes. I appreciate what I heard one doctor say: “You’ve called us front-line workers and for months we were. But we’re no longer the front line in this crisis. You are. We are your last resort. You are the front line. Get vaccinated.”
I’m furious that our governor and his Republican colleagues are insisting on the exact opposite of traditional Republican policy. Traditionally Republicans have insisted that local governments should decide what’s right for their communities, that businesses should be allowed to run their businesses without undue government influence. They have agreed that vaccines are legal, valid, and important for public health and safety. But, with COVID, Republicans have insisted that local school boards cannot mandate safely protocols. They have insisted that businesses cannot decide what is allowed in their own establishments.
I can’t help thinking that if this horrible disease had favored children at the outset, like polio did, that we would be in a very different place 18 months on. We would have demanded the vaccine and been first in line to protect our children. But it favored older folks first, and they cared enough to get vaccinated first. Many of these were from the Greatest Generation— a generation of service and dedication to the concepts of duty and shared sacrifice and community before the individual. Where are our COVID Victory Gardens?
I’m angry because my family sacrificed for the larger community.
Last July, when my husband was recovering from colon cancer surgery and my father was awaiting colon repair and liver cancer surgery and my children were stir crazy from social isolation and our family wasn’t able to go to Montreat and my work was topsy-turvy in a search for a new Executive Director and our adult daughter was living with us and preparing to teach in-person in the Fall and there wasn’t yet a vaccine…last July the public school system declared that parents must decide by July 27th whether we wanted to choose 100% virtual school. So we did.
We couldn’t risk infection with our medically compromised family, and we are fortunate enough that we knew we could handle helping our children through a difficult year at home. We knew that other families weren’t so fortunate and needed the stability and childcare that in-person school affords, and so we chose the greater good. We chose the community. In no small part we chose the community because that, people, is what Jesus teaches us to do. The Jesus that many of us claim to follow, but whom many of us merely worship.
It was hard, but in March there were vaccines! Hallelujah! Mark, Spencer, Jack and I got vaccinated as soon as we could. Such freedom! Such joy! And how wonderful to be doing something that quelled an immediate personal anxiety and that was also so good for all of society. Best of all worlds! It was truly an answer to prayer. Finally—the solution! Except there was, and is, still no vaccine for Emma.
We struggled through the rest of the school year. We gloried in our summer. And we were excited about in-person school! But. By August 2021 school was less safe than it was in August 2020.
Wait. What?!?
Here’s what I want to say to the faith over fear folks. The anti-vaxxers overwhelming the health system. The it’s hard to breathe with a mask and I’m not sure COVID really exists people. The folks who gloried in Trump’s “Warp Speed” vaccine production but then, when Biden rolled it out, refuse to take it. Here’s my truth: I sacrificed for you. It’s your turn to sacrifice for my kids to have safe school. I’m tired of your excuses. Your personal freedom ends where my child’s health begins. It’s. Your. Turn.
Communion? We sure don’t seem to be actively seeking reconciliation in every instance of conflict or division between ourselves and our neighbors. I count myself among the recalcitrant.
But that, I think, is precisely the value of the sacrament. We have to be called back to community, back to our best selves, back to humility and nourishment outside our own woundedness. I’m talking to myself, here. But maybe, also, to you.
Wendell Berry is a living prophet, and these days, these words have been speaking to my soul. A shared-humanity, Victory Garden, Communion prayer.
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. —Wendell Berry, 1969
