Drop the Mask...Come Home
One of the most difficult things about online church during the initial months of the Covid-19 shut down was not receiving Holy Communion. Though ‘spiritual communion’ was an option while attending virtually, I like things embodied, able to be perceived by my five senses, and I just didn’t experience communion quite the same way as when I was finally able to receive it again in person. When I returned to a makeshift ‘parking lot’ sanctuary and received the bread dipped in wine, my heart overflowed my eyelids. I had been too long without this bodily experience.
The priest wore an N-95 mask.
Hand sanitizer sat alongside the candles, bread and wine.
We lined up six feet apart.
Outside in the open air.
We took turns stepping up to receive the bread into our palms, then turned and walked away from the priest before dropping our mask briefly to eat the bread.
I continued to notice this weekly. For all the precautions and care we take, ingesting the body and blood cannot be done without dropping the mask. Covid-19, and the pain, chaos, division, shame and fear that tagged on its heels has taken its toll on us and cannot be eradicated soon enough. Much of the past year we’d like to forget, but having now worn a mask for most of it, the image has become an icon and I’m thinking about this phrase ‘drop the mask.’
Perhaps the reason it resonates so much with me is my propensity through much of my life to step into roles rather than show up as myself. I’ve put on masks and said my lines and performed on the stage that was supposed to be my real life. The problem with a false self, though, is that it serves a false god. If you’ve followed this blog for the last few years, you know that I’ve been on a healing journey of dropping false narratives and shedding a false self.
About two years into that process, I wrote in my journal, “When you’ve played a role most of your life, it is really hard to take off the costume, lay down the script, and walk off the stage. It feels like death, like the show can’t go on for everyone else.” It feels that way because it is a kind of death. There’s grief work to be done, and it’s difficult for those with whom you are in relationships.
After studying family systems theory in seminary this past year, that makes even more sense. Systems like to be stable. When one thing changes, it disrupts the whole system. The effects of personal transformation on relationships and community is inevitable. We can only pray for awareness and grace to navigate the journey with those we love. Thankfully, the ones that matter most to me have withstood the instability within our system and patiently supported me, allowing their own growth alongside mine, but that has not always been easy.
One of the phrases that echoed in my head in the sleepless dawns of the winter of 2018 was “I’m coming to set you free.” At the time, I thought it was walking alone that I feared. Turns out, what I really needed freeing from was what Scripture calls ‘the fear of man’ - what others thought, expected and wanted of me and the false self I’d constructed to serve that idol. Now as 2021 begins, I find myself still in that process of being delivered.
Masks have taken on a whole new meaning in the last year. We cover our faces to protect ourselves and our neighbors from Covid-19 when we are out in public, but most of us hate wearing them, breathing our own stale air and not seeing the smiles of our neighbors. Too much self-protection is its own kind of bondage.
We have stayed home way more than we normally would because at home we can take off those masks and breathe freely. At home we can smile at our loved ones and share a meal at the same table. Home is the place where we can be real, be vulnerable, be sick, rest, and heal. Lately, I’m listening to Sandra McCracken’s “All Ye Refugees” and thinking about this opportunity to come home. Holy Communion is an invitation to come home, to be at the table with loved ones, to drop the mask, show up as our true, vulnerable, sometimes ‘sick and sorry selves’ and receive the rest and healing we need.
Brene’ Brown says, “Not everyone has earned the right to hear your story,” which is to say that some boundaries and self-protection are necessary; but we can’t live without fresh air and food and smiles. We have an invitation to come home. Home to God, home to our true selves, home to a table where is He is the bread and wine and everybody drops their masks.
