communion
About a month ago, just after I started blogging, I had an unusual experience while taking communion. I was thinking of Graham Greene’s protagonist in The Heart of the Matter, who saw communion as taking God in his mouth. When I got back to the pew, my mouth felt peculiar, like there was a mild and subtle chemical reaction going on inside it. I thought, Hey, something is happening in my mouth; maybe something will happen inside all of me. Presently, I had an unfocused, intuitive feeling that God was in fact moving pieces around in the world, working to redeem my life. I couldn’t see it yet, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to see it for a long time, but at that moment, my mouth throbbing, I felt the tremors of it and sensed a vague, undefined hope, however wispy.
chalice & paten
Why should I have felt that? Was it some projected wish generated by the increased casey activity? It was an event to start blogging, to get readers, and to find myself remembered and welcomed back by “assville.” It was an odd species of resurrection to think and write about all that again – like 14 years ago, but so severely different. I’m remembering and grieving the past (grieving the fact that it is past), and yet, in the act of writing for readers, I seem somehow also to be looking outward and forward for other connections.
That day, kneeling in the side chapel where M’s ashes are, I felt, in addition to the usual near-suicidal grief and crushing tears, a longing to have a purpose, like M had in his job; to do concrete good, and to be contained by a benevolent organization like he had been. And I was overwhelmed with tears for MW (the protagonist of my current novel), and prayed that I could fully realize him, this boy with such an over-bursting heart, and I sobbed with the pain of love for him, as for M.
