Not a Cozy Eucharist

A recent invitation to share the eucharist with Fr. Jim Cooper at Virginia Seminary startled me. At this writing we're not sure if this is acceptable to Jim but for me it changed a colloquy format into something a lot cozier.
At first I greeted this invitation as naive and out-of-touch with the bruised history I have with Trinity Church and its Corporation. (I will have been to court with them twice by this appearance.)


As I said my first thought was the ritual pushed an intimacy on me (cozy) which I wasn't ready to embrace. That I would portray it that way confronts my expectations of the future and the fantasy that I really control my own anger. The Seminary led me into paths of better awareness when I was there and, I suppose, it could be said that's still true now. In my riper years I could load thoughts in about being ready to be "at table" with an antagonist but that simply intellectualizes an act Jesus conveyed as mystery. It may be the sole action which, as Henri Nouwen used to say, was the deo rea phyisca, "what makes it all hang together."


But I am committing a greater mistake by perceiving this as solely a personal experience...what I'm ready to do. Jesus's offer of himself in remembrance was an offer to the disciples, yes, but it was an embrace of all uncertainty and brokenness for which he offered himself as the means of transaction...violence and sacrifice. 


Trinity's biggest flaw on December 17th was not just the specifics of missing the point of postponing worries about trespass in favor of an encampment and hospitality. No, it was being mainstream religion's fall guy, once again deferring to the unsaid contract with a societal order which keeps wheels turning and so many disenfranchised.


It is what brought us to jump the fence at Duarte Park and the tension the Occupy Movement won't let us dodge, "the development of a set of strategies that call attention to, and oppose, the reproduction of inequality."-Tidal, Issue 2, page 10, http://occupytheory.org


That's alot of brokenness; even more reason to hope for wholeness through a eucharistic moment set in the mystery of what God has in store for all of us. Here's hoping.