Holy Memory

It seems I'm talking and thinking a lot about memory this week. Fitting, I suppose, given that this is the week we remember events many centuries past. Tonight, at our Maundy Thursday service, I'm asking people to share memories of receiving communion. There are more of my own than I will not speak tonight.

On a mission trip on an Apache reservation in Arizona, never knowing I'd live here ten years later, we hiked up a mountain in the last light of the day. We sang, we prayed, and we ate together. The bread that day was of the Wonder variety and the juice poured from the water bottle was pinkish Crystal Light. It was no less holy.

In a skeezy hotel room in Richmond, Virginia, three of us sat on a hotel bed together. The skeezy part was totally my fault. I booked a cheap hotel room at a chain that really can go either way. It went the way we'd have preferred it didn't. We had traveled there for the wedding of two friends. They had invited us to church the following Sunday morning, of course, but we all needed to get on the road sooner than church would be over. So we bought bread and juice the night before so we could have a simple worship service on our own. And we did, circled up on a bed in that hotel I'd never, ever stay in again. Come to think of it, the bride, two of the people in that hotel room, and maybe that groom as well, were all up on that mountain in Arizona.

Each place where I worshipped for a long time is marked by taste. There are the tasteless chiclets of my youth, served with itty bitty shot glasses of grape juice. College communion was warm, yeast banquet rolls, at least the really good communion days. Early morning communion at the nearby church in college was marked by wine, the only place I've regularly worshipped that used wine. My seminary used a recipe from a local monastery. That bread and Hawaiian sweet bread dipped in grape juice are two of the best tasting things I've ever had.

My childhood church served communion once a month at most. I think, when I was very young, it was less often than that. Maybe because of its rarity, there was a great amount of ritual attached to it. Looking back, it was strange in that community that eschewed formal liturgy and a formal priesthood. We had a pastor, of course, but he never touched the communion table. That was left to the elders, as it often is in the tradition I serve now. The brass trays, the kind that nestle inside each other, were covered over with a white cloth. It was carefully removed and folded before serving, and carefully replaced after. Think of the formality of folding a flag, and you'll have a good gauge for what that part of the service looked like. I never even received communion in that church, but those memories remain crystal clear.

This sort of memory matters, too. It's not the dangerous nostalgia that many churches deal with, including longing for the full pews of fifty years ago. It's holy memory that ties us together, that teaches us we are part of the body of Christ. It gives us a piece of home no matter where we worship. Holy memory moves us closer to whole. Especially for my tradition, we hold table memory dear. The best of those memories prod us to Something beyond us.