by John Kotre
My first Holy Communion was white. It was back in 1948 and the girls wore little bridal outfits and the boys white shirts and pants. The priest was vested in white and a white cloth covered the communion rail. The bread I received was itself white–a thin, almost transparent wafer. I let it dissolve on my tongue. “You don’t chew Jesus,” Sister Girard had told us. It was her way of saying “transubstantiation.”
I didn’t chew Jesus but I don’t remember talking to him either. My face was buried in my hands, and I was imagining what a softening host looked like in my mouth, far from my teeth. Sister Girard said that communion poured sanctifying grace into our souls, and for years I pictured that grace as milk. After each communion I checked my milk-bottle soul and saw that the level of grace had risen. It must have gone down between communions because I was never able to top off the tank.
In my teens the milk bottle gave way to abstract thinking. Now I could absorb concepts like transubstantiation, and so I did during six years as a Jesuit seminarian. Aristotle had observed that a thing’s appearance (its “accidents”) was something different from its underlying essence (its “substance”). That became a way of looking at what Jesus did at the Last Supper. His words changed the substance of bread and wine but not their accidents; they still looked like bread and wine. The clarity of the explanation was appealing.
But “accidents” had a power of their own (some of us call them “evidence”) and doubts began to creep in. I was distributing communion one Sunday, repeating the words “Body of Christ” and waiting for “Amen,” when I broke out in a sweat, overwhelmed by my lack of authenticity. By the time the ordeal was over I was shaken inwardly. I never distributed communion again.
That’s when the journey began. I still approached the altar and said “Amen” to someone else’s “Body of Christ” but I didn’t say it with conviction. What did that Amen mean? Amen to what?
I recognized at the outset that nothing I believed would change the reality before me. It was what it was, a darkness. So . . . I bowed. Just bowed. Just honored the darkness and what lay in it. All I did for years was say Amen to the unknown and the unknowable.
Finally a thread appeared, weaving its way back to the words of Jesus, “This is my body. This is my blood.” I didn’t know what he meant by them, but I picked up the thread and said Amen. I said it to his words alone, not to any written by Aristotle, not to any contained in later doctrine. Jesus didn’t say, “Explain this in memory of me.” He simply said, “Do this . . . .”
The doing led me out the door. A woman stood there one winter, bundled up in old clothes, selling a grass-roots newspaper that advocates for the homeless. Her name was Peggy, and she brought to mind other words of Jesus: “Whatever you did to the least of my brethren, you did it to me (Mt 25:40).” I wondered why Peggy and all those before her never became a sacrament of Presence like the one inside the church. Maybe she already was and I just didn’t see it.
I came upon a Lovefeast, a long-standing tradition in the Church of the Brethren. Here was a conscious re-enactment of the entire Last Supper–a meal, conversation, footwashing, and of course communion. I saw Presence there as well: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20). I came upon the Quaker mantra “that there is of God in thee”–divinity in the midst of “accidents.” I came upon Hindus who bowed to me in greeting. Not to me, actually, but to the divine spark within me. I reciprocated: “Namaste.” That brought me back to the Jesuit ideal of finding God “in all that is most hidden, most solid and most ultimate in the world”–the words of Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Either everything was a sacrament or nothing was.
It looks as though I’ve circled back to white, the color that contains all the other colors. If so, I say Amen to it. Amen to the mystery. Amen to the words of Jesus. Amen to Peggy. Amen to God in Brethren, Quakers, Hindus, everyone. Amen to substance underlying accidents anywhere and everywhere. Amen to it all.
John Kotre attends both Shalom Community Church (a Mennonite/Brethren congregation) and St. Mary’s Student Parish in Ann Arbor, MI