The Eucharist Repeated (Part 2)

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There were days when she felt like an uncontrollable child. She would fidget during the sermon, she would not attend to the mass of wordage they called "prayers". The music would push her away. And then the liturgy would begin, the story- telling, the blessing of the bread and the wine. Then they would all walk up to the altar, fat and thin, infirm and otherwise (if any otherwise). The priest would offer those things from the table and the people would swallow them, take them in. And no matter what -- no matter what -- she would return to her seat assuaged.

You could talk about the strangeness of a God giving as a gift what was not at all a separated gift but rather that God's own self. The words were ture but they were orthogonal. The Eucharist went a different way, did a different thing. It silenced the words. And she would return to her seat assuaged.

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On some Sundays the established families would plant themselves in their seats without even looking around. Had Christ sat next to them, had he even looked like one of the classic portraits, they would not have been likely to notice. In a separate fluttering group, remote and not quite estranged, the so-called seekers would sit as close to the door as possible, expressing with their bodies that they were there and yet not 100% there or at least not yet... and what a long patch of space and time that "not yet" surely covered! Indeed the seekers did not like to be categorized, not even as seekers. They hovered like hummingbirds over their own sweet tasting hestitation. Can I just plunge in? When will I know the answer for sure? Is it all right never to know? Is it all right to stay where I am forever?

And the established families and the seekers co-existed as if *too* comfortably, their mutual tolerance almost saying that this incomplete state was the best thing attainable, a sort of final happiness, not even to be questioned: a good as the enemy of the best. And Elf sat neither established nor a seeker, not exactly, nor could she say se was in-between the two. Perhaps God wanted more from her.

The service was always too long, the interim pastor liked his own voice so much too much, and the congregation tried to routinize its exaltation -- the presence of the Lord -- as if it could be automatically captured at the exact same moment every Sunday, as though exaltation could be trapped like that, or isolated from this other strange hodge-podge that we call human conduct. It was always there but it was elsewhere. So her mind wandered without rest. Then the wandering suspended and the Eucharist began. She rose from her seat, approached. And even before she reached the altar, it always happened.

She was assuaged. She couldn't help it.

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