It's All Bread and Wine
A year ago this week I was in the hospital. A friend called to check on me on Jan. 19th because I’d been sick for a week. She then called her doctor husband, who called a pulmonologist, who called me, asked a few questions, told me to put my husband on the phone, and told him to bring me to the hospital immediately. Eleven days later that pulmonologist stood in my room and told me that maybe in a few days, if we could get my need for oxygen below a certain number of liters, I could go home.
If you hadn’t gotten in here when you did, your heart wouldn’t have lasted twenty-four more hours,” he said. “You didn’t leave me many bullets in my gun.” (He’s a hunter.)
I told him, “You didn’t need but one shot.”
The sheer grace in that one snippet amazes me, and there are many of those kinds of stories from last year. Stories where the body of God came to me; and one bite and one sip at a time, Christ healing me - body and soul.
I hold a high view of Holy Communion. I belong to a church where the sacrament is celebrated every Sunday, where we kneel at the rail, hands held up in the posture of a beggar and receive the body and blood. And yet, when no one but medical personnel with masks, gloves, and gowns enters your room for thirteen days, flowers and books and cookies and crosses, blankets and fresh oranges and cards and letters become sacramental. These ordinary things become the grace of God to you.
The words people pray, sometimes nearly identical words, from people who do not know each other, speak of an exquisite interlacing that is nothing short of miraculous. I could see it in my mind’s eye, a spider web nearly invisible but glistening with fresh raindrops in the morning sunlight, fragile and beautiful, but so easily unseen. Unless, of course, one is being still and looking about for beautiful spiderwebs.
That same friend who set the wheels in motion that got me to the hospital sent me a pewter crucifix about a week into my illness. Along with it came the message, “Look at the Cross.” She had no idea that during that first week of my hospitalization, in my mind’s eye, I’d been lying there in the dark picturing Jesus on the cross. A God who chooses to suffer. Nothing about my suffering was willing. A friend in Nashville prayed that I would know Christ in his sufferings “whatever that means” he said. I’ve thought for a year about what happened and what it means and I still don’t know, but I know what I experienced. A solidarity in suffering. A knowing that He knew what it felt like - that mountain between me and every inhale, that pain of being separated from those you love, and that somehow he was letting me touch his suffering. It was the image of Him on the cross that fed me.
I held that pewter crucifix in my hands or it lay next to me in the bed the rest of the journey. I was raised in a tradition that only displayed or wore empty crosses. “He didn’t stay there,” my childhood self would hear people say as they frowned upon a crucifix. I’m certainly not denying the importance of the resurrection, but an image of an empty cross wasn’t sustaining me in the hospital. It was a crucifix. (My husband called it my “Catholic Jesus”). It was Christ’s body on the cross.
Suffering is not easy to look upon, nor is it an easy subject to write about. We are quick to say of our troubles, “It’s not as bad as so-and so.” Counselors call that minimization. While we may think it helps us “move on”, what it really does is short change our receiving the grace, the strength, the power, the joy we need from Christ in that moment. When we minimize, we do not open ourselves up to grace that is coming, to the fragrance of bread and the warmth of the wine that could be ours if we stayed on our knees for just a moment, held our hands up, and received the grace infused in the ordinary.
Phone calls from friends and doctors “doing their jobs.” Sending flowers and cards. Praying prayers in the night. From one vantage point, these all seem ordinary, even small, perhaps invisible. But like the spiderweb glistening with dew in the morning sunlight, it’s exquisite beauty if you’re looking for it. It’s all bread and wine.
