Provide Christ With a Little Breakfast

In my usual broad range of reading---both some very light stuff as well as some academic---I ran across a wonderful little article by Mickey McGrath.  I don’t know McGrath, but was delighted to learn he lives in Camden, NJ where he is an Oblate of St. Francis de Sales.  Additionally, he “is an artist, author, retreat director, and art and faith tour guide,” as the biography informed me.  The title of the little article was, “Finding the body of Christ in different ‘spiritual communions.’” 

When I saw that title, I figured it was going to be about communion in the Catholic tradition (since the periodical I was reading was Roman Catholic) and their relationship to Episcopalians, Methodists and the like.  As interested as I am in that topic (it was a focus of mine in graduate school), I discovered an even more interesting approach.  The setting was the pandemic.  McGrath opened by telling us about his experience helping with worship in the Cathedral in Camden by livestreaming the worship service.  

Very soon he told me, “I would bring my sketchbook to the big empty church and draw my perceptions of this odd liturgical reality, and what the sketches revealed to me was an entirely new experience and understanding of Eucharist.”  Remember, he is an artist!  He added he was a lector---a reader---at these liturgical services.  As such, he comments, “This prayer invited the faithful-but-absent assembly to make a ‘spiritual communion’ since they were deprived of the opportunity to receive a hands-on ‘sacramental communion’ in church.”  

I laughed a bit, since the idea of a spiritual communion sounds very Quaker.  I was resonating with him.  Every time I enter worship, I hope to be in communion with God.  To be “in” communion sounds even more powerful than “taking” or “receiving” communion.  If I can be in communion with God, then I can also be in communion with those around me.  I think this is the direction McGrath was heading.  He confesses in a Catholic humorous way, “I found myself wondering how this "spiritual communion" business works: Can people be denied spiritual communion if they are divorced, gay or the ultimate evil trifecta: married gay Democrats?”  

While I was enjoying his musing about the Catholic Church, he turned a corner and said he “sketched the homeless folks outside my windows.”  With his artistic imagination, he continues, “The body of Christ grew bigger, deeper and way more colorful as I imagined a monstrance filled with body-of-Christ circles of bread in all the colors of human flesh, encircled by a spectrum of rainbow colors.”  For my non-Catholic friends, a monstrance is some kind of vessel used to carry the consecrated host (bread as the body of Christ) around and/or display it for veneration.  In sum, McGrath was envisioning a much bigger church---a catholic church in its universal sense.  We need to remember that the church is also the body of Christ.

He turned another corner when he quoted one of my favorite medieval saints, Hildegard of Bingen.  She said, “You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use all that is within you.”  This led McGrath back to his awareness of the homeless folks.  He describes watching one of them go through garbage cans looking for food.  He narrates the story of rushing out one Sunday morning just as one of the old guys was going to take a bite from some discarded lettuce.  McGrath offered to make him a peanut butter sandwich instead.

In a touching response, the old guy said, “I can't eat peanuts," he said, "and I don't drink coffee.  If you give me a dollar, I can get a sandwich at McDonald's.”  McGrath quickly gave him a buck and off went the man.  I love McGrath’s description.  “Off he went for a McMuffin and I returned to my porch, grateful that I was able to provide Christ with a little breakfast.”  I was touched by that idea of providing Christ with a little breakfast.  Talk about a host and hosting in multiple ways!  Again as a Quaker, this very much resonated with me.  I can provide Christ---wherever I find him---with a little breakfast.

It is worth hearing how McGrath finishes his own story.  “I was blessed to receive the holiest of Eucharists because a living monstrance appeared on our sidewalk in the form of a hungry old man with a peanut allergy.”  We can by cynical and say McGrath bought this blessing for a buck.  But I believe him when he said his blessing was a gift of holiness.  Again, he tells us, “The holiness I felt deep within didn't come from my having performed a good deed, it came because the body of Christ stopped to visit me in a most special Spiritual Communion and I said ‘Amen.’”

This is a wonderful way to understand spiritual communion.  It might happen inside the Cathedral.  It also might happen outside by the trash bin.  It will happen whenever we are aware the body of Christ stops by to visit us---in the form of any other person in the world.  But we have to be aware.  And we have to be willing to provide that Christ with a little breakfast.  Amen!