Please Leave If [vol. 13]: No Host for you!
Today is Friday, and here at joebunting.com, we dedicate Friday’s to helpful exclusion.
At Lauds today, like every Friday, we gathered in a circle around the host. Bread was turned into body, wine into blood, and one after another came to receive, with bowed heads, the sacrifice.
All but one. Her head bowed lower than the rest, she received a few words of blessing instead of God. A dear friend, being Orthodox, could not receive the host without breaking an obligation to her tradition. I watched as she passed the blood, brow creased and eyes misty but not raining. Rain threatened to mar my own face.
Because even though my head had not bowed quite so low, I had no such obligation, and the blessing that I received was already beginning to slide through my veins.
I love conflict, but the I can’t say we Christians do it well. How we managed to turn a table serving unity and forgiveness into a place of division is beyond me. I know all the arguments. I even agree with some of them, but they are insufficient. There is no excuse for thise crime we have committed.
My teacher, Telford Work, once said to me, “At this table, the problem that he has against us is much greater than the problem we have with each other.”
Worse yet, there is no one to be angry with. The Orthodox institution is a faceless beauracracy. The Catholic institution has a face, but he hides behind bullet proof glass and under the skirts of cardinals and other sentinels of tradition. The Protestant insanity is a mob of chaos.
Today is Friday, and here at joebunting.com, we dedicate Friday’s to helpful exclusion, but I don’t know who to ask to leave today? Luther? Calvin? The fools responsible for 1054? Or the greatest fool of all, myself?
No, today we will break tradition, because it’s a bad tradition that needs to be broken. “Peace I leave to you, my own peace I give you, a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.”
Related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Joe Bunting the Jerk, Joe Bunting the Sinner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on May 31, 2008 at 7:44 am Christi Bowman wrote:
AMEN…beautifully said!!!!