Friends,

Thanks so much for reading my blog. 

I just wanted to let you know that I'll be taking a break this summer to focus on some other writing projects, but I will be back in the Fall in full force. 

Please check back then, and I hope you have a wonderful summer!

Kelly

You may be shocked to discover that the most sacred moment in the worship service of many traditions has been at the heart of some of the most traumatic fights in the church. Ironically, one of the scant texts in the New Testament describing how early Christians practiced the Lord’s Supper specifically mentions that bringing the church together was a major purpose behind communion.

“Because there is one loaf, we who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf" (I Cor. 10:17, NIV).

This became so important to the early church, that as congregations outgrew their initial meeting places and resorted to satellite congregations, the bishop in town baked one huge loaf of bread, and then distributed the pieces called the “fragmentum” to each group as a sign that though the church met at different locations, they were still a unified body.

And it’s clear from the picture of the first Lord’s Supper that Jesus celebrated with his disciples that more than anything, Jesus meant for the meal to be a moment of grace.  Just look at the group he gathered that night.  It’s safe to say that all of them were having doubts about Jesus, especially after that very challenging week.  And for some of them, the disillusionment went even deeper.   And yet, they were all invited to this meal where Jesus stood and said, “This is my body, broken for you…. This is my blood, shed for you.”

Jesus offered himself body and blood, bread and wine, to a group of skeptics, sinners, apostates, and one downright enemy.  And then he commanded the church to “do this in remembrance of me.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take very long for the church to forget. 

Read more: Body Broken: How "Take and Eat" Divided the Church

Patrick is one of those ancient saints who became larger than life.  His charismatic personality and the scant material about his life motivated many later biographers to colorfully fill in the gaps.  And thus rose legends about Patrick where he performed fantastic miracles, including driving out all the snakes from Ireland and single handedly defeating the Druids, resulting in large numbers of fans crowding bars every 17th of March to drink green beer in his honor.  As fascinating and nefarious as these tales are, we should be careful not to discount the real Patrick who may not have had all the glamour of the mythical Patrick, but who nevertheless was a thoughtful poet and a courageous adventurer.  Though it is hard to sift fact from fiction, what we can piece together of Patrick's life reveals a man worthy of remembering.

Read more: Snakes and Green Beer: the Real Saint Patrick

One of my favorite pastimes growing up in New Orleans was crabbing, which is a lot like fishing but without the slime.  To crab, you simply drop a specially constructed net in the water and wait for the crabs to find the chicken necks used as bait.  At the time I thought this was a little strange, because if crabs fed off of chickens, it seemed to me that the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain was a stupid place to live.

Now, there’s no art to crabbing.  You don’t watch a bobber dip under the water and tug a line just right to hook anything.  You just pull the net up from time to time to see how many crabs you’ve caught.  If something happens to be in the net, then the excitement begins.  For then you drop the net on the pier, prompting the crab(s) to scatter sideways in all directions.  The adults, sitting in their lawn chairs with sunburned faces, yell, “Get the crabs!  Get the crabs!”  The children, giggling wildly, make a mad dash for the crabs, which can move surprisingly fast.  They instinctively know the shortest distance to the edge of the pier as well, and every now and then a crab wins, rolling over the edge and making an obscene gesture with its claw before plopping back into the water. 

Read more: Dead, Living

I was in first grade the first time I participated in an Ash Wednesday service.  I attended a parochial school, and our teacher, a very stern nun, paraded us into the chapel where we all knelt and were told to be still and quiet, an impossibility for six-year-olds.  But we tried our best.  The priest walked in, dressed in a formal robe, and he approached each of us, spoke soft words, and placed an ashen cross on our foreheads.  I had no idea at the time what this meant.  I knew it was important, and sad, and it identified me as a Christian, but that was about all my little grade-schooler brain could comprehend.  I do, however, remember that it made me feel special—because this pastel-grey mark identified me with my classmates, and my faith.

The tradition of marking the forehead with the sign of the cross goes all the way back to the first couple of centuries of Christianity.   Tertullian (b. 160 CE) mentions it as a motion (much like we do today when we clasp our hands or raise them in prayer) that Christians utilized to set apart or bless routine events, beginning with the rise of each morning.  It was a way of saying, “this belongs to God” and to encourage a life of purity.  At first, it was done by simply marking an invisible cross on the forehead with a thumb.  Many centuries later, it will become a more explicit motion that tapped the forehead, chest, and then left and right shoulder if you lived in the West, but right to left shoulder if you lived in the East, providing yet another annoying little disagreement for the Latin and Greek Christians to argue about.

Read more: Ashes, Tattoos, the Sign of the Cross, and My Friend Connie