Tag: communion

Thanksgiving time

Naps!

It’s Thanksgiving time. What am I thankful for? Gertrude Stein once said, “Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone.” It’s the usual stuff. I’m thankful for my wife, daughter, church community, and old friends (I mean OLD, for 50 or 65 years, some of them). Also, I’m thankful for reasonably good health, my knee notwithstanding, having Social Security, health insurance, and Medicare so far, and a primary care physician who hasn’t retired yet. 

I was thinking about what I wanted to write for the holiday, and then I napped. I’m thankful for naps. Naps are wonderful. 

After church earlier in the month, I told one of the choir members about a friend I used to work with at the NY SBDC library. They had been there longer than I had. I asked them how to use a particular database, and they  said, “Oh, that’s easy.” It irritated me because, having been friends before I worked there, I felt she was dismissing the value of her skills and wisdom.

After I woke up from my nap, I realized that I needed to be thankful for the things about myself that I tend to take for granted. Yes, it feels slightly boastful.

Where’s the grape juice?

I’m thankful that I get to serve communion fairly regularly at church. I like it; it’s a low-stress gig that involves setting up before the church, serving during the service, and cleaning up afterward. 

A person recently was preparing communion and had not done it very often, and they specifically asked me how to do the gig. I HOPE I did not say, “Oh, it’s easy.”  Instead, I showed them how the table should be set up, where the bread and juice were, and whatnot. I felt thankful that I could be useful.

I’ve spent a lot of time, particularly this calendar year, fretting about all the things I’m unable to accomplish in the world without embracing the fact that I know how to do some stuff, and it’s not nothing.

I’m thankful that how I sing, apparently with great enthusiasm, gives some folks joy. According to total strangers who were at our church recently for a baptism, I sing with gusto, whoever gusto is. It used to embarrass me vaguely, but now I’m trying to embrace it.

So basically, I’m thankful that I can be a little bit kinder to myself and have value to others in little ways and maybe in a manner that I don’t even know. If that’s a weird Thanksgiving message, then so be it. 

NFL

Oh, and since it’s Thanksgiving, which is my official day to begin caring about the National Football League, I am happy to note that my rooting interests for the Super Bowl, the Buffalo Bills (9-2), and the Detroit Lions (10-1), are doing quite well. However, Kelly’s point on the topic is valid; I don’t want either to lose. BTW, Buffalo is much closer to Detroit  than  New York City.

E is for Eucharist, communion (ABCW)

I can’t remember the word transubstantiation without thinking of Tom Lehrer.

EucharistWhen I spent five days caring for my sister Leslie in San Diego last month, we talked a lot about her conversion to Roman Catholicism. One of the fundamental questions she had to address in her religious training involved the Eucharist.

Specifically, how she felt about transubstantiation, i.e., whether “the change of substance or essence by which the bread and wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass, become, in reality, the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”

When I was a kid, I used to help my paternal grandmother, Agatha Green, pour the Welch’s grape juice into the little glasses (and unless I’m misremembering, pouring the unused juice BACK into the bottle; those were different times.)

Knowing that, I still felt from an early age that communion, as we Methodists and other Protestants used to call it, was a Big Deal, even if we believed the transformation was merely representational.

I certainly remember going to Roman Catholic churches and feeling excluded because we heathen Protestants didn’t believe doctrinally in the transubstantiation. There was an event at the Albany Cathedral of All Saints in the late 1900s, some anniversary service, when EVERYONE was invited to the Table. Some of my Protestant friends refused, but I figured, if thy’re inviting, I’m partaking.

I went to a Coptic church, the Egyptian Orthodox branch, in Albany around the same time. It was not expected that I should take the Eucharist, and I did not, though Roman Catholics could have. After the long service, there was a meal. I had a nice chat with a young man who kindly informed me that I would be going to hell for my Protestant beliefs. OK, then.

At my church in July 2018, I helped prepare communion for the first time. I had served it before, back when I was an elder over a decade ago, but the prep was during choir rehearsal. I HAD cleaned up afterwards in the past. We cut up the pita bread; there are also gluten-free wafers. Ah, still using Welch’s grape juice, I see.

So my sister chooses to believe in the possibility of transubstantiation. I don’t dismiss it out of hand. It’s true, though, that I can’t remember that word without thinking of Tom Lehrer’s irreverent The Vatican Rag from the 1960s, a song guaranteed to offend at least a few.

For ABC Wednesday

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