“This bread we break is the communion of the Body of Christ...”
Why, if the bread is you, Jesus, are you flat?
And what does unleavened even mean, a word I heard the preacher say in what I guess was a prayer before we all ate you.
You taste like flour and salt but still a little bit sweet.
Chewy.
I like you.
I always run to the basement kitchen to pester the deaconesses for your leftovers so I can sneak a snack of you, long pieces of your Body still unbroken, wrapped in years-old dusty waxed paper. I will find a corner between Sunday School rooms and break you up myself, piece by piece, repeating “the bread we break is the communion, the bread which we break, the bread, the bread, the bread,” faintly tasting the moth balls in the air of Ethel’s home that tinge the particles of you.
“This cup of blessing we bless is the communion of the Blood of Christ...”
You taste like the grape juice we have in my fridge at home, sweet, tart, and thick, but wouldn’t that mean your blood is also in my fridge and that I had you for breakfast yesterday?
I drink you down like I see the grown-ups, taking shots of you around the folding tables in the stained plaid orange-carpeted basement.
My hands still smell like the Love Feast’s roast beef that my Nanny Lois made and brine from store-bought kosher dill pickles. My fingers are gamey and sour but better than Mrs. Gene’s feet that I washed earlier.
Your blood goes down easy, Jesus.
One cup is not enough because your Body is still stuck between the gaps in my teeth, not yet grown closed.
***
“This bread I break is the communion of the Body of Christ.”
I used to sneak into the corner to eat you, used to find you in the bread, but now you’re all around, in everything and everyone.
We sing that song that talks about how great you are, or the other one that this is your Father’s world, in everything and everyone.
That last part is hard for me to really believe, because I wonder how you are in my much older camp counselor who breaks into the church to leave me secret love notes in the same corner where I used to break and eat you.
Rachel N. Pennington
I read them, hidden from the world, their words thrusting themselves inside the gaps of my heart and body, not yet fully grown.
“This cup of blessing I bless is the communion of the Blood of Christ.”
The first time he touched my hand was passing around the communion cups at a campfire. The second time, handing me cookie dough through the holes of the fence in his backyard at a campfire.
The third time, the fourth time, the fifth time.
Where were you?
***
“This bread you break is the communion of the Body of Christ?”
“This cup of blessing you bless is the communion of the Blood of Christ?”
Where are you then, Jesus, if not in the bread they taught me to eat, the bread they showed me how to break, gentle and wrinkled hands guiding mine to find you?
Your story is like holey bread, too many air bubbles, too much yeast, an errant proof.
And where are you then, Jesus, if not in the cup of blessing they taught me to drink, the cup they showed me how to swallow, head tilting back facing heaven and coming to earth again, a ring of you on my upper lip?
Your story is an empty cup, knocked about and spilled out, drained of substance.
***
“This bread she breaks is the communion of the Body of Christ.
This cup of blessing she blesses is the communion of the Blood of Christ.”
A small group of us are gathered in the silent house of Taize, a community of reconciliation. I’ve traveled here to find some.
She passes me a piece of the crusty bread.
I study her every move.
She breaks into the center of things, creating a gap to fill, placing a long strip of chocolate in the middle, then closes it.
Taking a generous bite, a smile spreads across her face.
I do the same.
The bite is crispy, chewy, creamy.
I wrap a second portion in a napkin to take with me and eat alone by the spring, a softly flowing brook of peace in wide-open meadow space.
After prayer, letting the rippling and cool water run over my naked feet, I unwrap the bread and break it into bits, washing each one down with the water from below.
***
“This bread which they break is the communion of the Body of Christ...
This cup of blessing which they bless is the communion of the Blood of Christ...”
“Give them this day their daily bread,” I plea, to who or what, I’m not certain. “But also yesterday’s bread and tomorrow’s bread.”
A communal “Amen” is recited and the doors of The Crisis Ministry in Downtown Trenton are open.
The same faces in the same place, day after day.
I shuffle to an intake room to assess the needs of the first fifteen people in the waiting room, cramped with little space and overwhelming need.
Client 1.
She cannot work due to disability.
She has no money for electricity.
She is capped for additional assistance. She skips oxygen treatments.
She is wheezing in the office.
Now her power has been killed.
Client 2.
He works three jobs with no days off.
He has no money for food.
He makes “too much money” for assistance.
He skips meals and drinks soda to kill the hunger pangs. He weighed 129 pounds when he moved to Trenton. Now he weighs 95.
Client 3. Client 6. Client 10. Client 14.
By noon the waiting room space has cleared and I head out for lunch, a greasy slice of New York style pizza, orange grease pooling on large slices of pepperoni.
I break it into more manageable pieces, feeling gratitude and guilt. “Give us this day, our daily bread.”
I don’t know how.
On my walk back, I open Audible and sync “Nothing Personal” by James Baldwin.
My Americorps advisor recommended it.
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time...”
***
“This bread which he breaks is the communion of the Body of Christ...
This cup of blessing which he blesses is the communion of the Blood of Christ...”
Carl is grouchy today and snaps at me as I ring him up, not allowing me to give him the food that will keep his wife alive. He comes in once a week to replenish and we play this game, do this dance where I attempt to send him home with pies on the house, met each time with stern refusal. Today he has a bursting bag of meatball marinara mozzarella pot pies, his favorite. He asks me what book I read most recently, his sincere attempt at small talk, before marching out the front door, needed elsewhere.
After Carl arrives home, he gives his wife a bath, gently stroking her sore muscles and cleaning her body with warm water, drying her and placing her back into bed.
He heats his oven to 400 or so. warming a pie, just a bit, so she can swallow it without pain, the pain that has broken her body. Her body is now no longer in sync with her brain, preferring instead to be a stranger and not a friend, an inhospitable space.
Carl cuts the pie into bites. He brings her meal to her bed, settles upon the stool that has rooted itself in the foundation of their home. Feeding her, piece by piece, broken crust of baked dough, there is one excruciatingly fleeting yet beautiful moment when her body communes with itself, communes with his own, his hand on the fork that is feeding her mouth, washing down every morsel with tiny swallows of a 2003 Cab Sauv, notes of licorice, blackberry, and truffle, her favorite.
It is the wine that one day Carl will pour and sip on the day he buries her broken body into the ground. She will be made whole, the spaces within her that the pain has ripped apart grown back into one.
***
In its way, pie crust is bread. Flour.
Sugar.
Salt.
Water.
The butter is the leavening, that beautiful marbilization that twists its way throughout, melting, creating steam, causing a slight rise.
A flaky crust.
And if this is true,
that crust is bread,
then I have been fashioning you, Jesus, with my own hands,
kneading the butter into the flour
while those you love gather around hand-hewn tables
and bring you to their lips,
the bread and the cup,
the pie and the coffee,
that which we bless is the communion,
The Body,
The Blood.
***
Rachel Pennington is a baker and writer living in Charlottesville, VA. Her passion is using sugar and syntax to bring comfort to those who partake of either (or both).
