A Taste of the Holy

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. (Thomas Merton)

Oct 09, 2021

Let me tell you.

For all the times God has not shown up in the ways I begged, demanded, implored, or insisted, there remains a mysterious maddening category of moments (even widening, ever wondrous) where God Shows Up in the unexpected, and last Sunday was one of them.

Minding my own business, not bothering anyone, when suddenly I start to notice (one of the holiest practices I know) something strange happening before my eyes.

A woman is holding a silver plate. To each stranger who steps forward, hands outstretched, she presses the thinnest sliver of what we could call bread (except we don’t call it bread) into their palms. At the same moment, she does something miraculous. She searches into their eyes and she speaks these words—slowly, strangely, as if they are the newest words she knows.

The Body of Christ, she says. Over and over, a hundred times to a long shuffling line of strangers—except it doesn’t sound the same every time, like a tired refrain. It sounds fresh, like she has looked at each face and figured out exactly what they need, and it is this.

Her eyes are searching, and suddenly I can see nothing else in the room but her shining face, shining on theirs.

I am sitting nearby and I can’t stop staring. I know it’s not polite but I am certain we have taken a giant leap past politeness because this is the holiest thing I have encountered in ages.

She keeps pressing the bread-not-bread into hand after hand, and she goes so quietly, so reverently about her task, searching in her silver plate for the next piece to offer, as if each person must be met with the right one to fill whatever is missing or broken or empty or lost inside of them.

Then she looks each one full in the face and finds the words again—The Body of Christ—except for the life of me, I tell you that the words sound nothing like what she told the last person.

I cannot stop listening. I want her to keep speaking because I have never believed anything as much as I believe right now.

I do not know whether she is new to this ordinary/extraordinary ministry or whether she has done it for decades (though I have a hunch). What I do know is that her eyes see nothing but the person in front of her and their reaching hands, and this is the laser focus of love. When Jesus of Nazareth walked the dusty earth, he must have looked nothing like her, but neither did he look like the Body she holds, so I am wondering if I am only starting to glimpse what is real.

The only time she pauses in this holy feeding of hungry people is when a small child comes forward, arms crossed or held in another’s arms. Then she stops everything she’s doing and bows toward them and blesses them. The whole church just listened to a Gospel on welcoming children and a homily on welcoming children, but here she is doing it, widening the welcome, feeding Christ in our midst, and it is unfolding before my watering eyes.

I want to be the crazy one who leaps up and yells DO YOU SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE but I do not want to miss a minute of what she is doing. So I sit quiet, at the feet of the holy, and I watch everyone become what we receive.

I can’t believe I have never seen like this before, and I cannot stop thinking about her, hours later, and I wonder if anyone else noticed, even though I know the whole holy point is that it doesn’t matter if anyone noticed because she was revealing God to each person, which is always and everywhere enough, even when no one sees.

But right now there is so much missing and broken and empty and lost inside of me—and within you, too—that I cannot keep quiet about the holiest thing I have seen in ages. So here you have it, if I could only find the words fresh for each of you as she did.

What is even more miraculous, if I could leave you with this, is that for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was like when she spoke to me. I only remember watching her speak to others, the whole long line, her joy growing until the very last person received, when her solemn face blossomed into a smile. In that second I let out the long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, and I thought clear as sunlight: if I had to spend eternity waiting in a line only to get here, I would do it.

So there is a story that makes no sense, that of all the places I beg God to show up, I always return to what is before my eyes. Slow and quiet and unnoticed, hidden and held and holy.

Is this how we become what we receive, when we least expect it?

The Holy Labor

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