#takethisbread

It wasn't official Eucharist. It was real communion, with all the incomplete, stupid, and aching parts still there. Made by human hands, out of meat and hope, incarnate: what the Russian mystics called 'a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, where none are left behind.'

'God couldn't care less about the church. We don't understand the Eucharist, or that bread and wine live within us, so we ritualize the things that hold the mystery. We focus on the container and formalize the mystery. But you don't have to do that.'

But for now, it was like time out of time; each earthly detail incredibly vivid, with the eternal hovering right there in the middle of it, side by side with the suffering, and a huge peace beating slowly like the heartbeat of God.

My spiritual crisis returned me to the fundamental practices that had stayed central for me, such as just following what Jesus did. Putting the Word into action, in ordinary life, unmediated by religious scripts, raised the stakes.

That growing, changing, unruly flock of Jesus's was the only force that could reform the church: When you let the wrong people in, the promise of change could fully come true.

All of the bullshit of what church life is about, some of which is very necessary, none of it has ever been able to wash away that love I had for Jesus. It's not about good times only; its about my bad times and longing and desire when it's not fulfilled.

To understand ourselves, individually and as a church, being rescued by strangers and foreigners, by the wrong people. To understand ourselves, individually and as a church, as beaten, hungry, hurting, lost at the side of the road. Called to touch the parts of ourselves that are strange and damaged and needy. Called to receive love from people we don't know and have no reason to trust. And only then, in turn, being called to the second part: to go and do the same thing - knowing it will change us in ways we didn't plan and may not like.

“The Word of God,” he said, “is what’s heard by the people of God when the Bible is read.” That meant the Word was living not because it was magical but because over and over, down the centuries, believers wrestled with tests, adapted them, edited them, interpreted them, swallowed them whole, and spat them out. The stories in the Bible were records of human attempts to understand God - attempts that were hopelessly incomplete. But, through words and acts, we kept trying.