In his farewell sermon to us given on the Feast of Corpus Christi, Father Rob James pointed out that when we receive Christ in the Bread and Wine, we do so not individually, but together. It is a bond which unites us, as different as we may all be. We are in communion not only with our Lord, but also with each other. “If we are fed by Christ, then we are also joined to one another,” he said.
I was reminded of the sermon when, just a couple of days later, my grandson called me to help him with a high-school project entitled ‘Eating together’. The aim was to compare present-day practices regarding shared meals with those of two generations ago. Who better for him to talk to than his grandfather?
Recalling those past times (which for me were spent in a working-class home in London), I had to tell him that we seldom ate together. There were several reasons for this. Working hours were much longer than today (and included Saturday) so that it was difficult to coordinate comings and goings. Also, houses were smaller and to the extent that families were larger, not everyone could sit at the table at the same time. So one way and another, shared meals were not looked for and seldom found – just once a week, perhaps. My grandson was surprised to learn all of this, for his experience (like that of his father and his aunt and uncles) has been much different.
If conviviality was sought in those times, for men it was found in the pub, and for women in the kitchen. As far as it was to be found in churches, it was not in the context of the Eucharist. Morning Prayer (or its Nonconformist equivalent) was the common offering of a Sunday morning, and when Holy Communion was offered, it was understood that the congregants would sit in the church so as to maximise the distance between themselves and so avoid disturbing each other in their personal individual devotions.
With Father Rob’s words still in mind, I was able to remind my grandson of what he had seen when he had recently accompanied me one Sunday morning to Eucharist at the Cathedral: how the liturgy had climaxed when the priest at the altar had blessed bread and wine, and then everyone had gone forward to share it by taking a little piece of bread and a sip of wine.
I told him that actions like that bring people together, even though in many respects the people are different from each other. They help them overlook those differences and instead regard each other as friends and neighbours, and even as brothers and sisters. Eating together means that we who are many are one body, because we share one bread, one cup.