Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi (The Body of Christ). I have spoken and written a fair amount over the years about the Eucharist. My article “Listening to the Wind in the Wheat” says much though not all of what I believe is important about the Eucharist. I also give a talk on the Eucharist using four images: Eucharist as Extravagant Gift, Dangerous Memory, Holy Deed, and the Great Giveaway. Like so many things about Jesus’ vision, life, and teachings, I think we have tended to sand smooth the danger of the Eucharist and its implications for anyone sincerely trying to transpose Jesus into this place and this time. The consequence has been, on the one hand, to reduce it to a private devotion, a me ‘n Jesus moment only, or on the other hand, little more than a “happy meal.”

One of my favorite books about the Eucharist is the little gem by the late Catholic theologian Monika Hellwig Eucharist and the Hunger of the World. Sara Miles spiritual memoir Take This Bread is a great, provocative read and should make every Christian squirm as this former atheist makes an almost immediate connection between the Eucharist and feeding the poor and ruffles the feathers and exposes the contradictions of a well-known, seemingly progressive Episcopal Church in the San Francisco area. The novel Love Feast published separately as well as in Frederick Buechner’s tetralogy The Book of Bebb is a wise and wonderful depiction of what the Last Supper might look like in the post-hippy times of the 1970’s if Jesus’ words “Do this in memory of me” were actually taken to heart.

One of my favorite pieces on the Eucharist is Andre Dubus’ essay “On Charon’s Wharf,” which can be found in his collection of essays titled Broken Vessels. These moving, earthy, deeply personal essays were written between 1977-1990. Considered one of the greatest American short-story writers of the 20^th century, this was Dubus’ first collection of essays and established his credibility in this genre as well. Suffering a near fatal accident in 1986 when he was hit by a car while helping a stranded motorist, Dubus lost the use of one leg and had the other leg amputated and spent much of the rest of his life until his death in 1999 in pain and in a wheelchair.

A Catholic, Dubus is a poignant, earthy, and perceptive writer who frequently writes of the underlying mystery and sacramental nature of everyday experience—encountered in both its struggles, tragedies, and losses, and in its joys, sensuous pleasures, and simple moments of celebration that are secretly laced with grace if we have the eyes to see or the awareness to grasp the fleetingness of life and the certainty of death.

“On Charon’s Wharf “ begins “Since we are all terminally ill, each breath and step and day one closer to the last, I must consider those sacraments which soothe our passage.” In this short essay Dubus, a regular morning Mass-goer and a daily communicant, addresses the weave of love and mortality and the sustaining nature of the Eucharist mediated through the sacrament of touch. A respecter and weaver of words, he knows their power and potential and their limitations as well. He writes:

This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, and the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal.[1]

Assuring the reader he has no antipathy for this life and earth, and is not talking about immortality or eternity, he continues:

No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh . . . [and] in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking . . . the silent touch . . . affirms . . . and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.[2]

This is brave talk—sacrament not as magic potion or escape from the dilemmas of human living or a private me ‘n Jesus moment but rather that which holds life and death together in one action. Dubus references a scene in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal when the knight, who has been told by Death he is going to die, sits with a couple and their child. The woman offers the knight a bowl of cherries. Dubus writes of this simple act—

. . . he has been given an eternal touch: eternal because, although death will destroy him, it cannot obliterate the act between him and the woman. She has given him the food. He has taken it. In the face of time, the act is completed. Death cannot touch it now, can only finally stop the hearts that were united in it.[3]

A broken vessel himself, a man familiar with many types of work, marriage, children, divorce, disappointment, loss, physical pain and suffering, Dubus’ theology is grounded in the rhythms, routines, responsibilities, and simple gestures that make up a day and a life we might recognize. And he sees, perhaps because he saw death up close, the “quotidian mysteries” and the holy communions that keep us alive and that each day brings if we but have the eyes to see. He explains:

. . . I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.[4]

What the dying too often realize too late, what the dead try to speak back to us from across the river, is that a bowl of cherries passed and received, scrambled eggs cooked for and eaten with someone we love “is everything,” is sacramental, is holy communion, is the touch of love. We don’t go to a church and gather around The Table of New Life because that table alone is holy, nor because that exchange of life and love in the form of bread and wine can only happen there. We go to be reminded that all tables are holy if we pay attention and consecrate them with love and humanity and reverence. All the tables around which we gather with partners, families, friends, classmates, work colleagues, and strangers are potentially sacred meals if we are present and grateful and aware. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said “One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar.”

The Christian communities still disagree on the number of sacraments—two, three, seven, eight? I would suggest that these numbers are all too low and maintain that to dwell on or debate the “official” number shows a lack of imagination let alone a lack of faith. It misses the point. Each sacrament is unique and interconnected to all other sacraments as actions of love, encounters with Christ, rendezvous with the Divine. And each sacrament should accentuate and allude to the fact that the

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;[5]

It is important to note that the opposite is true as well. Only those who take off their shoes see. Only those who hold a reverence for the spontaneous touch, the small gesture, the simple act, the kind word, the gleam of light, the mournful whistle of a far-off night train, or the wolf’s howl see and hear it for what it is—the song of the flesh or the morning sacrament or evening’s consecration reminding us we are alive. We are touched. We are blessed. We are dipped in God.

Dubus understands this better than most just as he knows it is not realistic to suggest we could “live so intensely as lovers so that every word and every gesture between us was a sacrament.” But he offers this suggestion as his parting shot for how we might “live in constant touch with our mortality, as we all should every day,” and how we might honor life, and love one another, and consecrate simplest moments, the smallest acts:

We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of all sacraments between man and woman, that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: We are, we are, we are. . ..[6]

It is through these Eucharistic moments embedded in our days and nights that give us an eternal touch. And it is everything.

[1] Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels: Essays, p. 77.
[2] Ibid., p. 77, 78.
[3] Ibid., p. 78.
[4] Ibid., p. 78-79.
[5] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from “Aurora Leigh.”
[6] Broken Vessels, p. 82.