Reading Mother Teresa--"Holding God between my fingers"

“This is my body, which is for you; 

do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Corinthians 11:24

It sounds draconian now, but I remember those Sundays, the Sundays when we celebrated communion, when my father stayed behind after worship to meet with the church consistory and run through the list of members. I was a kid, so I never attended those sessions, but I knew what went on behind closed doors. What the elders tried to determine was who was – and who wasn’t – present for the sacrament.

Back then, the church governed far more than what happened on Sunday mornings. The authority of “the church” was formidable, and that may be understatement. It offered untold blessings to those who walked steadfastly on the paths of its righteousness; but, like Dame Fortune of ancient iconography, if she turned her lovely face away, what people saw was yet another face, something altogether hideous.

Some people I know have spent lifetimes licking wounds created by a church determined to identify wheat and chaff, a church that only rarely refused making judgments.

My sense is that era is long gone.

Back then, when the elders did a headcount of who was and who wasn’t present for the sacrament, they were making judgments they believed they had to, given the fact that, on earth, they’d been given special privileges along with what we called “the keys of the kingdom.” Furthermore, it was their belief that the supper was, in fact, a “means of grace.” Those who weren’t present, weren’t just skipping church, they were refusing Christ.

Today, those post-worship meetings sound draconian. I doubt that many fellowships practice anything similar today, except perhaps congregations where little or nothing has changed in the last half century
.

But when I read Mother Teresa on the blessed sacrament, I wonder if my father and his ecclesiastical brothers (not sisters) weren’t on to something. After all, what prompted their post-worship headcount was a sacred regard for the sacrament – the bread and wine were not to be missed. Back then, at the evening service, four cordoned-off pews up front, left side, were made available for a repeat if you or your kids were sick in the morning. Communion, a sacrament, was simply not to be missed.

“Some days back – when giving the Holy Communion to our Sisters in the Mother house, suddenly I realized I was holding God between my 2 fingers,” Mother Teresa once explained to one of her spiritual guides (283).

There’s something about her shocking discovery that is marvelous to me, so rich a realization of the reality of Christ and his gift of the eternity of our existence. In the host, she felt God almighty between her fingers. Amazing.

But it’s neither my language nor my experience. And it may never be.

The church I attend these days likes to call the Lord’s Supper a feast, a celebration – and it certainly is. We do it more often, too. If people don’t come, no one notices. I’m not sure anyone cares. It’s all a joy really, a kind of divine party. The wine is gone these days – an AA thing – but the bread is wonderful, homemade, not just Wonder Bread anymore.

At the moment MT determines that God is there between her fingers, she glories in “the greatness of [the] humility of God,” she says. “Really no greater love – than the love of Christ” (283).

After all, there he was between her two fingers.

There Jesus was, right there in her hand. That’s how immensely low he stoops to conquer.