Bread & Wine (Overview of The Sacred Meal by Nora Gallagher)

Nora Gallagher is a reporter and a writer. Personally, I don't think she was the best choice to write about this topic in this series ("The Ancient Practices"), but that wasn't for me to decide! Having read three of the eight books in the series, I think I have figured out that the editor (Phyllis Tickle) has asked the authors to include references to all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That's fine, but it does require slight modifications for certain practices, like changing the "Lord's Supper" to "The Sacred Meal." I guess you could call this being "religiously correct."

The topic at hand is hardly trivial. It's the thank-you meal ("eucharist") that Jesus instituted at the Last Supper when he told his disciples "Do this in remembrance of me." And so they (we) have ever since. Or, as Gallagher says, "[T]his odd, mysterious, ritualized eating and drinking...has been a part of the fabric of this faith in all probability since its inception" (xviii).

First the criticisms and then on to the decent points I think she made. One problem is her bent toward equating the Lord's Supper with a Soup Kitchen. She mostly restricts this to chapter 10, but references are present throughout the book. Another is her equating of activism with faith (see p. 36).

On to the better moments. For starters, she recognizes that, "[Communion] is meant to be done together; it has to be done in community. You can pray alone and fast alone. You can even go on pilgrimage alone. But you can't take Communion alone. More than any other practice, taking Communion forces us to be with others, to stand with them in a circle or kneel at the altar rail or pass a tray of grape juice and cubes of bread. We are forced to be with strangers and people we don't like" (12).

Also, I really like her three-fold division of "waiting," "receiving," and "afterward."

On waiting, she writes, "Part of waiting to take Communion is examining how we have been like the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, how we have been drawn into the empire's kingdom (how we have sinned) and at the same time, to check in on how we have been like the citizens of Jesus' kingdom of God" (34). In summary, "[P]art of waiting...is examining what we did last week to find the kingdom heaven in our midst and to help others find it" (37).

On receiving, she makes a great observation when she says, "Even when seeking words for rest, we use phrases like refueling or recharging, more appropriate to machine than to persons" (42). Her instruction for receiving is simple: open your hands (to receive the bread and cup). In so doing, she writes, "we would have done two-thirds of what needed to be done. Which is to admit that we simply do not have all the answers; we simply do not have all the power" (45). But, oddly in my estimation, she take a strange turn at end of the chapter on receiving and says that "Faith is a catch-and-release sport. And standing at the altar and receiving the bread and wine is the release part" (see p. 46). That makes no sense at all, because she just spent the whole chapter talking about "receiving," not "releasing."

On the time following the Eucharist, which she dubs "afterward," she writes, "[W]hatever happens during Communion, one of the ways to spend the immediate time afterward, after coming out of the experience, is to sit in silence and let it seep into your cells" (56). This sacred meal is more than a remembrance and more than a memorial. It is transformative, because "Transformation occurs in encounters, sometimes better named collisions, either with the self or with others or with the holy" (60-61).

Beyond that tripartite scheme, she ventures into theological waters that are over her head that attempt to shine light (but fall far short of actually doing so) on the long-standing debates of "Real Presence" in the meal and what exactly is transpiring during the ceremony and in the elements of bread and wine.

In closing, it seems that all we can say is, "The body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation." And strangely enough, that is sufficient.