A Profound Mystery

I recently read Lauren Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne 2012).  Winner told the story of finding faith in an earlier memoir, Girl Meets God.  Since then, she got married, got divorced, and her mother died.  In the turmoil, she found herself struggling with faith and doubt, and she shares those struggles in this book.  One of the things I most appreciated about this book is that in the midst of her doubt, she continued practicing her faith—she didn’t give up on the church, on spiritual disciplines, or the sacraments.  She kept at it, trusting that someday she would find God/God would find her again.

In one of her notes, Winner tells the story of being the chalice bearer during the Eucharist at a small Episcopal church.  Towards the end of the line, an elderly couple came and knelt at the rail.  Each one of them took a wafer from the priest.  When she came to them with the cup, the wife dipped her wafer in and ate it.  Then the husband dipped his wafer in.  But he didn’t eat the wafer.  He handed “the Body and Blood to his wife” and she ate it for him.

After the service, the priest told Winner that this man had been suffering from a wasting disease for 12 years, leaving him unable to digest most food.  But that wasn’t what Winner saw.  She only knew “the couple’s hands and mouths, and that I am seeing one flesh.  I have read about this, heard sermons about a man and a woman becoming one flesh; and here at the altar, I see that perhaps this is the way I come to know such intimacy myself: as part of the body of Christ, this body that numbers among its cells and sinews an octogenarian husband and wife who are Communion” (38-39).

Winner’s story reminds me of Ephesians 5: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’  This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32, NIV 2011).  These verses come in the context of a longer passage about husbands and wives, and the clarification that Paul is actually talking about Christ and the church actually seems rather abrupt. 

And yet its abruptness is welcoming.  It points us away from this just being a household code of rules and regulations about who can do what around the house.  It points us to the truth that anyone can be a part of this relationship between Christ and the church; married or single we are united with Christ in baptism.  We are not all in a good marriage where we get to experience being one flesh.  But, as Winner points out, we all find intimacy in the body of Christ—with Christ and with each other.  When we are united with Christ in baptism, we are also united to the Church, to the body of believers.  This couple is united to each other and to the others in that congregation and to Winner and to us.  Together we are mysteriously “united in love, so that [we] may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that [we] may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ” (Colossians 2:2-3, NIV 2011).