RW -- Communion Circle (a story) iii

At a conference in Alberta, where I was the speaker, the whole crew--maybe 50 people, circled up one night after a speech or sermon and took communion from whoever was standing next to each of our left. Then, once served, we turned to our right and served the next in the circle. I'd never taken communion like that before, and I found it quite moving. That was years ago, and it's not happened since. There are rules, but some rules get left behind at retreats. That service is, as you can tell, central to the story.

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Anna Terwain knew nothing and everything. When she saw them in the parking lot, she didn't hesitate for a moment. She went to them, the two of them bundled in each others' arms, and she took them both on, wrapped her arms around the whole bundle.

Anna Terwain is an old woman, maybe forty or fifty pounds overweight. Pete was a city bus driver for most of his life, although in the last years he worked at the Christian school, a custodian. They'd never had a lot of anything, but two of her kids were divorced--Lord only knows how many prayers she'd sent up in their behalf and still did. Pete was dead three years already, a man who never said much at all while he was alive, but whose absence created an empty silence all around her.

Marian Anderson, that black gospel singer of long ago—it was Marian Anderson whose voice always came back to Anna in the middle of her woes. "Nobody knows," Miss Anderson used to sing in a way that Anna herself used to mimic when alone, "nobody knows the trouble I've seen-nobody knows but Jesus."

Those were the only words that came to her, so those words were the ones she used on the two women bugging each other in the parking lot. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen; nobody knows but Jesus," she told them, and she took them, both of them, back towards the sanctuary, to the celebration.

Pastor Jake de Meester missed it all, as did, by far, the majority of parishioners of Bethel Church, because the whole thing-people handing each other the grape juice and the bread-it didn't go as smoothly as de Meester would have liked. Half the congregation was finished before a quarter of the congregation had even seen the elements. He'd have to have an extra set next time and choose the spots to begin more wisely, he thought.

He didn't notice the three of them sneak back into the sanctuary, and neither did he realize how it was that Anna Terwain stood between those two women and made sure each of them dipped the bread. In fact, he didn't realize-and no one else did either-that Anna didn't partake herself because she was making very, very sure that the two of them looked straight into each other eyes and knew what it was they were doing and saying. "The body of Christ," she said to Tracy Leonard, "broken for you."

Tracy Leonard dipped the bread into the cup of grape juice and did what she thought she shouldn't-couldn't. She took it despite herself, took it because she knew, really, what it offered was so much more than her own sin, so much bigger, so much greater, so much more to be prized. And when that soggy bread was in her mouth, it tasted, as it never had before, like Christ himself. She took the cup and plate of bread from Anna, but instead of turning to the right like everyone else, she turned back to Anna Terwain and said, "The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you."

And then Anna participated too, smiling.

Pastor Jake de Meester thought the whole celebration was something of a success, figured, with a little better planning, he could try it once again sometime when he started to think of things getting too routine.

MaryJane Amundson cried all the way home. She told her husband, who kept shoving her Kleenex, that she didn't remember ever in her life being so happy.

Tracy Leonard told Will she didn't feel like making dinner. "You know that great little Middle Eastern place we heard about on Marley Drive?" she said. "I been dying to go there-just you and me."

Anna Terwain went home to her apartment alone, praising the Lord.

And that's just one of the stories of a single Sunday's fellowship at Bethel Church.