By Martin L. Smith
On the day that the vintage had begun, my brother and I treated ourselves to an afternoon of wine tasting at one of his favorite vineyards of Martinborough in the Wairapa Valley, where some of the most celebrated wines of New Zealand are produced. We could watch the members of the owners’ family deftly snipping away every bunch of grapes as we sat sipping wines and enjoying superb bread straight from the oven. It set me thinking later as I took my daily walk by the ocean, about bread and wine and the Eucharist; a priest’s meditation about how hard it is to prevent the Eucharist from becoming disconnected from the fabric of everyday life.
Those who have explored the history of the sacraments become painfully aware of their vulnerability to mutations that distort their original meanings and weaken their impact with all sort of compromising adaptations in the name of efficiency. I suppose my reflections were triggered by marveling at the way wine is becoming more widely appreciated than ever, available as it is to ordinary people in a dazzling profusion of variety. And yet as more and more people love wine and make it part of their lives, most churches are stuck in a groove of convention that dictates that ‘communion wine’ must be a special cloying, sticky product that can be tolerated in a single sip, but would disgust us if we had to drink a glass of it.
And it is not so different with bread. There has been in the fast few decades a reaction against the bland industrial product and a demand for wholesome, fresh baked bread has grown up. The trend continues with the opening of more and more neighborhood bakeries that provide every day a range of breads that once only those who traveled to France would ever have encountered. And yet in church we present as bread a product that doesn’t resemble any bread eaten anywhere in the world, odd white disks that appear to be cut from paper and taste of nothing.
If there had been a deliberate campaign to isolate the Eucharist from everyday life, and seal it off a in a purely ritual context, the results could have hardly been more successful. But of course there hasn’t been. It’s just that the desire for efficiency and an almost superstitious concern with what we suppose to be reverence have created conditions for severing the roots of sacramental practice from our everyday lives. Wafers can be efficiently counted and stored, they don’t make crumbs. They don’t require any effort, simply being delivered by mail. The sickly fortified wines marketed by the ecclesiastical supply houses keeps indefinitely. We have dozens of excuses to justify using these customary products as the elements, and we would prefer not to examine the spiritual losses we incur. At home we can savor wonderful wholesome bread, and appreciate even modest wines day by day as the glorious distillation it is of earth and sunshine. And then we go to church and find unique ecclesiastical stuff being used that has no connection with what we love to eat and drink normally.
And in church, even the actions of eating and drinking have become something unrelated to meals. A lot of us refuse to drink at all (we’re hygienic), preferring to dip a corner of a host into the chalice. And eating the wafer isn’t even like normal eating, more a kind of special technique we deploy to prevent it from sticking to the roof of our mouths.
Our meditations could easily take in the Baptism as well. The robust practices of the early Church, in which the plunging of converts into water really looked and felt like the symbolic drowning it was meant to be, have been almost universally replaced by the scattering of a few droplets from bowls or miniature fonts that more closely resemble ornamental bird baths than anything our ancestors would have recognized as suitable for the sacrament of death and rebirth.
It is a challenge worth exploring in depth, because the introduction of authentic bread into the Eucharist, the use of wine that is actually like the wine we drink, the encouragement of real eating and real drinking, the expansion of the use of water from fiddling with drops to real wetting and plunging, won’t take on if reduced to the level of liturgical tinkering, as in the wretched game of ‘guess what the Rector is trying to foist on us now!’ The purpose of the sacraments is the transfiguration of our everyday lives and experiences, and the challenge is to undo the damage inflicted by generations of compromises, asking ourselves at every level: How can we restore the intimate connections that the symbols we use in our worship should have with the fabric of our real lives?
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.