Sunday 21 October 2007

what grace maybe means

Returning to my thoughts on bread and wine and community. I'm increasingly struggling with a doctrine that dictates that Fiance, as an Unsaved Person, should not take communion in church with me. Certainly, I understand that communion is essentially about Jesus drawing all of his followers as one into his body. But I think that, for Jesus, the desire to make everyone welcome came before any attempt to define who was or wasn't on his side... after all, he had Judas there beside him at the Last Supper.

I went up to take bread and wine on my own again this morning. Fiance gritted his teeth and buried his face in the church notice sheet.

This evening, though, we had our communion. We (meaning Fiance, the all-rabbits-friends-and-relations of his family and I) had decided earlier in the week to go to my local curry house. The restaurant was at bursting point with a big Punjabi local wedding, but they still managed to squeeze us in. Was it because they recongnised me as that woman from down the road who has worked with their daughters at that religious place they don't know much about? Or was it because we looked hungry, whoever we were?

Echoes of the prophesies and parables of Messianic wedding banquets and feasts. Thinking about the Christian tradition that calls the sharing of bread and wine the eucharist. Eucharist being from the Greek eu-karist-o meaning, literally, "I activate grace rightly" and hence, figuratively, "I celebrate". If grace is taken as meaning what God has given us (and I risk oversimplification here, I know) then celebration can be defined as merely a putting into action of what God has given. A putting into action of what God has given. That sounds very much like this evening's curry house squeezing us in on a makeshift table in the corner and serving us extravagent leftovers from the wedding buffet.

So Fiance and I (and all the family) got our communion together, after all. Garlic naan, dipped in tarka dhal, washed down with mango juice.

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