Communion

Here visiting Detroit and staying at Manresa, I took a long pre-dawn walk trying to urge the digestion of a full dinner and a full day, unprocessed in a night of sleep. After three miles my stomach and my mind were both still busy trying to sort out what had been put into them. At home I have a habit of waking up empty, the first thought like a the drop of dew on the morning blade of grass, coalesced from night’s mist, pulling into itself all that is around it, the universe in its tiny crystal sphere.

My walk here in the dark before robin song took me again and again along the river that winds through the neighborhood around the retreat center and finally over a 20’ dam, tumbling down a series of steps that turns the flow into drops, the drops into mist, white noise, white water.

As I turned back toward Manresa, I realized that my mind was like the downstream side of that dam, my thoughts spilling over, not coalescing but dispersing, not becoming discreet but dissipated.  Our visit has been a tumble of conversations with people we left back here when we moved north. Catching up with the past year that we have not shared and arriving at the present, we realize that our car does not come to a clean stop in the present, but rolls a bit into the future, leaving us hanging in the unknown, the front wheels of our minds turning, turning, turning over the precipice, nothing to grip.

The future is unknown, of course, but I was struck this morning that the future in a busy life is a jumble of unknownness, while facing death made the unknown future so clear. Life in the tumble of the river is a jumble of indistinguishable concerns. Living in the face of death is like waking up to that single droplet and seeing all of life. We spent last evening with good friends who like us had faced the prospect of death. And like us, their brush with death had simplified life, brought it into focus. And like us, they now face the unknown future of retirement, our front wheels turning, turning, turning over the precipice beyond the life of work.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Jesus died was to bring us this gift of pulling us away from the tumble, the jumble, the rushing river of indistinguishable and unstoppable concerns, and bringing us to the silence of that single drop, reflecting all of life.

I imagine communion as receiving that single cool drop on my tongue.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.