Jitterbugging for Jesus

In a Q & A session with the great interviewer Krista Tippett, the esteemed actor and devout Catholic Martin Sheen articulated so well the love he feels when standing in line at worship:

How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith.

This explains the mystery, all the love.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.

In re-visiting that interview (read or listen to the whole thing here), I was reminded of why I’ve loved taking Holy Communion since I was a kid.

I was raised in the kind of small Texas town where everybody knew everybody or knew about everybody, or liked to think they did.

Even as a kid I was struck by the power of communion to draw many of the most powerful, and some of the most arrogant or intimidating people in town, to kneel at the altar.

At the communion rail, these powerful townspeople were willing to get down on their knees in front of God and everybody and expose all the human vulnerability that they generally weren’t comfortable showing.

For that matter, I was struck by the power of communion to bring people around to forgiveness — my parents included.

I’m thinking of a particular time when my parents had engaged in a bitter marital fight over something one weeknight. I could feel the awful distance and silence between them for days.

Then on Saturday night, we were in the den watching TV. As my dad got up from his recliner and headed down the hallway to bed he said, “We’ll all get up and go take the Lord’s Supper tomorrow.”

I looked over at my mom who sort of grinned and said, “I guess we’ll get up and go to church tomorrow.”

It was a reassuring and powerful thing to see my parents, who worked hard and mighty hard at making love work for better than four decades, get down on their knees together in front of God and everybody.

Whatever awful feelings there had been between them were left at the communion rail.

That’s what Martin Sheen was alluding to: the mystery of the body of Christ to draw people together in the healing power of love.