As of today, I have only six pre-natal vitamins left in my economy-size bottle. I started with 225 pills.
Actually, I started two bottles ago. Which means I have consumed nearly 600 pre-natal vitamins over the past 29 months: two economy-sized bottles, one smaller bottle, and many days of "screw this, why even take these damn things." 600 pre-natal vitamins and no natal condition to show for it. On the plus side, my fingernails are exceptionally strong.
I've just finished reading Take This Bread, an amazing and wonderful story of faith from Sara Miles. I'll be out of town next Monday, completely unable to access a computer, so I'm really sad to miss the discussion on the book at Rev Gals - and especially a chance to 'meet' the author during that time.
But, largely because of the book, and also because I just helped lead a confirmation retreat on the sacraments, I've been thinking sacramentally quite a lot lately. It's Miles' theology that God, present in the meal of communion, is equally present whenever we eat with one another - and particularly whenver our tables are filled with the hungry, the outcast, the ignored, and the generally-overlooked. I don't think this is Miles' position alone, of course. It's biblical in a million ways. Eating is an act of community, and of generosity, and of dependence. When we cook for one another we are expressing real care for real human bodies. We are engaging creation when we eat well: when we consider how deeply connected we are to one another and to the earth.
Miles writes about her own conversion experience, which came at the communion table and shocked her to the core. She writes this about her growing sense of what that meal means:
I didn't deserve communion myself now. I wasn't getting it because I was good. I wasn't getting it because I was special. I certainly didn't get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to share it. It wasn't a private meal. The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it. And sharing it meant I was going to be touching Christ's body at St. Gregory's, through Donald and Rick and the angry older deacon with the clenched jaw. Looking into Christ's eyes outside of church, through the cheery athiest yuppie with the sports car and the veiled Muslim clerk at Walgreens. Listening to Christ's voice in other churches, through the middle-aged woman with the annoying nasal whine, and the self-righteous homophobic radio evangelist, and the conservative African bishop. I was not going to get to sit by myself and think loftily about how much Jesus loved me in particular. I was not going to get to have dinner, eternally, with people just like me. I was going to get communion, whether I wanted it or not, with people I didn't necessarily like. People I didn't choose. People such as my parents or the strangers who fed me: the people God chose for me.
Then she writes this:
Conversion, isn't, after all, a moment: it's a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt.
What I loved about this book, besides the great writing and her wide-open view of communion, was the encouragment I found to think sacramentally, even beyond the sacraments themselves. I tried to express this a bit to the confirmation students at our retreat: that, in addition to all the other great things we receive during communion and baptism, perhaps God is also trying to give us another way to see the world. A way in which all things are gifts and God can work through the most ordinary of moments, events, people, and things. That if we practice seeing God in bread, wine, and water, perhaps after awhile we will be able to see God at work in other meals and other waters - and then in other places altogether. In books, in random conversations over coffee, in strangers at the airport, in parents waiting to adopt a child. Everywhere.
In 600 pre-natal vitamins.
In addition to everything else communion is, it's a meal of hope. We get a foretaste of the feast to come: a small, sometimes infitessimal, glimpse of the kingdom feasts Jesus envisions in the gospels. Everyone around the table, full of good things, without regard for economic status or education level or bad deeds or good deeds or deeds of any kind.
I take a pre-natal vitamin every day not because I think I might be pregnant, or even because I have any real reason to hope that pregnancy might happen naturally for us. In fact, I take that vitamin (nearly) every day in spite of the reality that a surprise pregnancy is simply not in the cards for us. And I do this not out of my inherant Scandinavian stubbornness, or unrealistic idealism, but as a sort of sacrament. I take that vitamin because, when I swallow it, I am acting out of hope rather than reality, out of the future rather than the past. Out of wholeness instead of brokenness.
Is it foolish to prepare your body for something that may never happen? Damn right it is. Sacramental foolishness. Holy imprudence. As foolish as it is to trust that a tiny, tasteless wafer and a small sip of fairly-cheap wine has anything to do with the very body of God or the presence of the divine in the world. But to think sacramentally, I believe, is to act more out of what we hope for than out of what we are told to expect. It is sheer idiocy to do this, except that it might also be the only way to flourish, when all is said and done.
This is why I am going to buy another bottle of pre-natal vitamins on my way home today. I am going to stand in the pharmacy aisle and close my eyes and remember the taste of the bread and the smell of the wine and the feel of a cross made of water on my head, and I am going to pick up that bottle of generic vitamins and trust in that which I cannot yet see.
Communion, conversion, and hope are, as Miles might say, all about process, and they keep happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt. Every time I eat that bread, drink that wine, see a beloved child splashed with that water, I participate in a way of life breaking into the world, telling us all that the table is so much bigger than we thought, and that the host simply can't stop inviting people to come and eat. Take in hope, right into your stomach and veins and muscles. You are what you eat, right?
In which case, I'm getting the biggest bottle they have.
