It was a communion Sunday. I didn’t take it.
Nobody noticed, or if they did, nobody said anything. That’s not really what I’m writing about. What I’m writing about is that it was the first time I have ever passed on it in my own church, and that I knew before the service started that I was going to.
In July I sat through a Requiem Mass and stayed in the pew when everyone else went forward, and I knew exactly why. That was conviction. I could have explained it to anyone who asked. This was different. This was my table, the one I’ve always said was mine, in the building where I learned what it meant. And I sat there with my hands in my lap anyway, because I have been far from God for a while now, and taking the bread felt like it would be saying something that isn’t true right now.
I don’t mean one bad week. I mean a slow drift I haven’t named out loud until this sentence. Prayer that thinned out. Scripture I read for lessons and not for myself. The kind of distance that doesn’t announce itself, it just accumulates, until one Sunday the bread is coming toward you and you realize you don’t know how to hold out your hand.
Part of why it mattered so much is what I believe is actually happening at that table. I don’t think it’s only a symbol. I said in July that I don’t believe the bread becomes something else, and I still don’t. But I don’t believe it’s just a memory aid either, bread and a cup to help us think about something that happened a long time ago. Something happens there I can’t fully explain. Christ is present in it in a way that’s real, not just remembered, and I don’t think the right response to a mystery like that is to treat it casually.
So it isn’t a ritual I can go through on autopilot to keep up appearances. If something real is happening, then coming to it while I’m keeping God at arm’s length everywhere else felt less like faith and more like disrespect. Paul says those who eat without discerning the Lord’s body eat and drink judgment on themselves. You don’t write a sentence like that about a symbol.
The verse I had in my head the whole time was Paul’s.
But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.
I examined myself. I didn’t like what I found. So I didn’t eat. That felt like obedience in the moment, maybe even reverence, a kind of honesty I owed the table.
But reading it again tonight, I notice how the sentence actually ends. Examine yourself, and so let him eat. Paul doesn’t say examine yourself and, if you find yourself lacking, stay home. The examining is supposed to lead you to the table, not away from it. The Corinthians he was warning weren’t people who felt far from God. They were people who felt fine, eating like it was any other meal, while the poor in their own church went hungry.
I know the thing I’d tell one of my kids if they told me this. The table was never for the people who’ve closed the distance. It’s for the people who can’t. They that be whole need not a physician. I’d say it gently and I’d mean it.
I’m finding it much harder to say to myself. Part of me thinks staying in the pew was the most honest thing I’ve done in weeks. Part of me suspects it was the garden again, hiding in better clothes, calling it reverence because that sounds holier than avoidance.
I don’t know which it was. Maybe some of both. What I do know is that I don’t want this to become a habit, a second Sunday and then a third, until not-taking-it is just what I do.
So that’s the report. I didn’t take it today. I’d like to be the kind of person who comes back to the table next time, not because the distance has closed, but because I’ve finally believed it was never mine to close.