Your First Communion

Dear Miri,

On Sunday you had your First Communion.

Not in the traditional sense, no. And if we're honest, every day is a communion of sorts, an intimate sharing as our gazes lock, as our skins warm each other, as our voices collide and even harmonize. But on Sunday, in the plain stuccoed walls of our small town meetinghouse, our radical reformation Protestant selves took communion, in the form of homemade round buns that tasted like crescent rolls and small cups of grape juice.

I missed most of the liturgy, bouncing you in the cry room. But a server brought the trays, and I watched for the right moment, and I ate the bread and drank the juice at the proper times. ("This do in remembrance of me.")

And surely I am not the first mama to contemplate this, to write about it, but it occurred to me that when you nursed later that afternoon, you too consumed those elements. The books all say to watch out for alcohol, for caffeine, for cabbage. They tell mothers to vary our eating and thereby introduce a nursing babe to a wider range of flavours. So why should it not be the same with that meal? Whatever I consumer trickles down to your sweet small belly.

As I said, you have been born into a Protestant tradition. We Anabaptists, in general, don't go in for transubstantiation--that bread and wine (er, juice) is, in our imaginations, still primarily simple carbohydrates, sugars, never mystically transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ. Still, we believe the Lord's Supper is a grace. We believe that it represents Christ to us--the bread of life--and also unifies us around a common table, in a common experience of remembrance. This is partly a remembrance, a reminder, that we, the beloved community, now are the body of Christ. Our actions on this earth, the love with which we live our lives, manifest the presence and love of the Most High.

This is one reason why our congregation generally shares not only a symbolic meal when we celebrate Communion but also a potluck. The bread and juice and poetic liturgy give way to an abundant meal in the basement, where children spill things and plates are refilled with laughter and the dishwasher steams up people's glasses. Our love for God and each other and the world takes the shape of a feast and holds out hope for feasts to come.

Miri, this is crazy talk to many people. That is something else that I will have to tell you about: I know better than to believe all these things. My rational mind baffles at the confession of faith I nevertheless claim. And yet my heart burns within me at the story of an Infinite Creator who took on the humble glory of flesh and bones and language in order to commune with human beings, who calls us into a communion with the Spirit and with each other. I know better, and yet I am compelled by such a tale of sacrifice and love. It changes everything. And so I believe.

I hope to teach you to appreciate these holy mysteries. Faith cannot be forced, and you will have to choose for yourself. But I hope to live my life in a way that manifests the cosmic poetry of that kind of love, that kind of hospitality. I hope that you will grow up knowing the radical goodness of a table spread simply for an always expanding crowd, knowing the sweetness of celebration and hope. I hope that our household will be a place where you learn joy and welcome and safety and risk.

For now, with lungs that have known five weeks of breathing, with a milk-white tongue and eyes that already smile each time you open your mouth wide to be fed, I know that you taste, through me, through my body, that bread and that juice (and that potluck, too). (This is my body, broken for you.) Taste it, Miriam. Taste and see that the Lord is good.