The Mass, or the Eucharist, is the central act of Catholic worship, Anglican worship, Eastern Orthodox worship and, increasingly, of the more formal Protestant traditions like the Lutherans and "High Church" Methodists. In the less formal Protestant traditions this worship form is less central and less regularly observed.

Churches interpret this liturgical act in a variety of ways. The Roman Catholics teach Transubstantiation, i.e. the bread and wine, once consecrated, become the body and blood of Christ. The Lutherans teach Consubstantiation, i.e. the worshipers receive Christ in the bread and wine. Anglicans are the ones I identify most with the "doctrine of the real presence," i.e. Christ is present in the Eucharist, but we don't quite know how to explain it. Anglicans like to proclaim "it's a mystery" when they get to something that doesn't lend itself to rational argument.

I find the Eucharist a powerful symbolic act of Communion with God through Christ. As one of God's people, I also find it important to eat together in worship as a way of symbolically sharing the presence of Christ. I don't worry much about whether anyone understands what is going on. No human being understands God, but that does not stop us from seeking God's presence or walking the Christ path. Maybe the Anglicans are right. Both the meaning of God and the meaning of the Eucharist must remain in the realm of mystery. Enjoy that mystery. One final thought: Whatever the Eucharist is, it should be an open table with no rules for who is qualified to receive the sacrament. I loved the sign I saw on the wall at Redeemer church in Morristown, New Jersey, that read: "The only prerequisite for receiving communion in this church is that you be hungry." Occasionally a church gets it right.

—Bishop John Shelby Spong
shared with us by Mirabile Dictu

A Little Child Shall Lead Them: The Meaning of the Eucharist

Several weeks ago, I was asked by the Washington Post to comment on a minor brouhaha in the heart of America's news establishment. The dean and best known face in American television news, Tim Russert, had died suddenly and, at age 58, prematurely of a heart attack. Shock gripped the news industry and their obvious grief was processed quite publicly with long segments on his very creative life on every network. America had lost perhaps its finest interpreter of our common life. Those who had read Tim Russert's autobiography, Big Russ and Me, knew quite well of his family's deep roots in Roman Catholicism. The funeral was held in Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the Georgetown section of the District of Columbia and was obviously a must attend event for both the media and political stars. Senators Obama and McCain were present and at the request of the Russert family were seated side by side. Most of television news' best known talking heads were in the congregation. The funeral service was a Requiem Mass with the homily delivered by the winsome Cardinal Archbishop emeritus of Washington, Theodore McCarrick. That part was easy for the entire congregation, Catholic or otherwise, to understand and in which all could participate. All went well until the mass moved into the invitation to the faithful to come forward to receive communion.

Who are the faithful in a public service? Is this a Catholic rite or a public rite? Sally Quinn, a prominent print media and television personality, as well as the wife of Ben Bradlee, the retired editor of the Washington Post, the same Ben Bradlee who presided over the Watergate story, joined the procession of mourners and received the sacrament. She is not a Roman Catholic. Raised religiously in an interdenominational military chapel environment, Sally Quinn is today a seeker after truth, not an advocate for it. She had, however, discussed religion in general and communion in particular with her friend Tim Russert. As their conversations deepened, over the years Russert began to call her "Sister Sal" and to say that he was "winning her over!" She is, however, not Catholic nor does she have any known religious commitment. I suspect that there were many at that service who were not Roman Catholic and some like Sally Quinn of no religious connection, who received communion at that service, drawn by their ties to Tim more than anything else. They could hide, however, in the anonymity of the assembly in a way that Sally Quinn could not. Her participation in this Catholic mass was noted and she became a subject of a minor dispute.

The Roman Catholic Church has long reserved the privilege of receiving the sacrament for those who are both knowledgeable about and submissive to the authority of that Church. No non-Roman Catholic qualifies. In recent years this policy has been used to punish Catholic politicians who did not support that Church's position on public issues such as abortion. During the 2004 presidential campaign several bishops said that they would exclude Senator John Kerry from communion. To use the "Table of the Lord" as a place to enforce ecclesiastical discipline is a strange tactic that very few non-Roman Catholics either understand or appreciate. Indeed, it makes little sense unless one accepts the premise of the Roman Catholic Church that there is only one true religion, namely Christianity, and there is only one true version of Christianity, namely the Roman Catholic Church. That concept defines the Eucharist as "the meal for God's people," but it limits the definition of God's people to those who are obedient Roman Catholics.

Quite obviously I do not subscribe to those ideas, so in my response to the Post I defined the Christian Eucharist as God's Table, not the possession of any particular Church, and suggested that neither Sally Quinn nor anyone else was to be excluded from God's Table. I quoted a poster that I had once seen on the wall of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Morristown, New Jersey, that proclaimed "The only prerequisite to receiving communion in this church is that you be hungry!" I suggested that this was one congregation that had finally gotten the meaning of the Christian Communion service right.

This issue came up for me in a new, deeply personal and compelling way about two weeks later when my wife and I were worshiping in one of our favorite churches, St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Fairlee, Vermont. This small rural parish hardly ever has more than 50 people in attendance, but is served by an amazingly competent, sensitive and understanding priest named John Morris. We attend this church three or four times a year because we have five-year-old twin grandchildren who live six or eight miles away. For a variety of reasons, the mother of the twins, our daughter-in-law Julieann, has had rather negative reactions to her own religious upbringing in the Roman Catholic Church. Its attempt to control through guilt, its unwillingness to reach out to her when she needed its help in a series of crises in her young life, its attitude toward women's issues, its recent history of priestly child abuse and its unwillingness to stop protecting priestly molesters in high places have left her so disillusioned with the church of her youth that she wants no part of it or of any church. Our son Brian, who was raised in the Church, has also found little meaning in religion in his adult life. So this couple is among the rising unchurched majority in our increasingly secular society. They have no objections, however, if we take the twins to church with us, and this church in Fairlee is so child friendly that the children enjoy it and we, their grandparents, enjoy having them with us.

The first time we took them to church they were only three. It was to a service devised by this able priest especially for children. Katherine, who is quite dignified and ladylike, sat quietly, sometimes coloring with crayons we had brought, remembering earlier experiences with other grandchildren. Colin, however, who at that time was a robust, testosterone-laden typical three-year-old boy who would rather drive his tricycle into a fire hydrant than around it, did not know the meaning of sitting still. As soon as he escaped my grasp, he dashed up to the altar rail and began to climb it. Before I could reach him, he was over the top and fell head first down onto the floor of the sanctuary. The sounds he emitted did not remind anyone of one of the hymns of the church! John Morris was completely at ease and accepting of this disturbance. "A children's service," he said, "must embrace the behavior of children." I remembered then something someone told me years ago, "If the church allows the noises of children to be heard in the church then perhaps someday the church's noises will be heard in the children."

When the crying stopped and the head had been sufficiently rubbed by a comforting grandmother, the time came for the children to receive the sacrament, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. I do not know how well Katherine and Colin understood this action, but we all got in line together to walk up to the altar rail. We received the bread, dipped it gently into the wine and put it in our mouths. Then we returned to our pew. That is, all of us but Colin returned. Instead he went back to the communion rail, having decided he wanted "seconds." Once again, this gentle priest fed him. As a result of experiences like these over a couple of years, these two children have begun to feel comfortable in this church and going to church with Grandma and Grandpa has become a regular anticipated feature when we visit.

We went up very recently to join in the twins' "graduation" from Kindergarten on Friday and Brian's 40th birthday celebration on Saturday. It was shortly after the Tim Russert funeral. We stayed over for Sunday so that we could visit St. Martin's again with our grandchildren. For the first time and to our great delight, Julieann agreed to go to church with us. Except for a funeral I suspect this was the first time she had been in a church since her wedding seven years ago. This Sunday morning it was not a children's service and Colin was especially restless, so after a relatively short time, he went with his grandmother down to the nursery, where toys and coloring occupied him. Katherine made it a little longer, but the sermon proved too much for her endurance. (It was in fact quite brilliant, on the parable of the wheat and the tares which must grow together. John Morris said, "You cannot declare those whom you do not like to be 'tares' that can be set aside and not engaged." He added, "This is what the Archbishop of Canterbury has done by not inviting Gene Robinson, our openly gay bishop of New Hampshire to the Lambeth Conference. He has defined Bishop Robinson as a 'weed' with which we do not have to deal.") With great effort Katherine managed to sit with me until the sermon's end and then I took her down to the nursery to join her brother and grandmother. When it was time to receive communion, my wife brought both of them back into the church and we joined the line to go to the altar. Julieann was not yet ready to take this step. Just coming back to church that day was quite enough for her so she stayed in the pew. Colin did not understand why his mother was left behind and urged her forward. "Come on, Momma," he said in a voice that everyone heard. She remained seated, however, and Colin and Katherine went to the altar with their grandparents to receive by intinction, the bread and the wine. My wife, Katherine and I consumed our dipped communion wafer, but Colin did not. He rather took a bite out of his. I did note that his bite consumed the part of the wafer that had been dipped into the wine! Then with resolute purpose he returned to his seat and fed his mother with the other half of his communion bread. I watched though emotional and tear filled eyes, as Julieann received her first communion in years from the hands of her five-year-old son. Colin doesn't know much about theology or ecclesiastical policy, but he does understand that no one is excluded from the Lord's table, especially those who, like his mother, have been hurt by ecclesiastical figures who want to limit God's welcome at God's table in the name of their version of "true religion."

As Jesus once said, "A little child shall lead them."

— Bishop John Shelby Spong
shared with us by Mirabile Dictu