When I was Mormon and very much serious about trying to believe, which, as I look back on it, was a youthful philosophical stance that hoped to make sense of the world without actually having to pick through its thornbushes, wade upstream, or sleep on its stony ground, I suffered a persistent itch about the Lord's Supper, which we called the sacrament. Every Sunday we met as a congregation, which we called a ward, and took the sacrament like this: after an opening hymn and a prayer and the reading of "ward business", mostly announcements about upcoming events, we would sing another hymn while two boys about 16 years old tore slices of bread into small bits and piled them in chromed serving trays. At the end of that hymn, one of them would kneel down and read a set prayer into a handheld microphone, blessing the bread, making it holy in remembrance of the Son. Then the tray was passed around by a troop of younger boys, all in white shirts and ties. The same was then done with hundreds of tiny waxed-paper cups of water, one for each of us.
Most readers know that Jesus, whom we called Christ, broke bread and passed a cup of wine at his last supper with his disciples. We Mormons used water because we had additional commandments forbidding alcohol, and we understood, as we were taught, that any liquid would work in a pinch, if water wasn't available. Not wine, of course, but apple juice, for example, would make an acceptable substitute for tap water.
By extension, if not by explicit teaching, I understood that other solid foods could substitute for bread. I once asked a teacher, I was maybe 17, if breaded fried chicken would be OK in place of bread, but he didn't really answer. Instead, he admonished me to be more reverent. Anyway, I pictured standing up in front of the ward breaking peanut-butter sandwiches and trying to keep a straight face, or serving Coke, caffeine-free, of course, while contemplating the gravity of His sacrifice. I tried to banish these thoughts, which were so obviously unworthy.
But one itch remained, that I remember bothering me every Sunday: if any deviation from the orthodoxy of bread and water required some justification in never-described emergency, or food shortage, or extremity of circumstance, then why didn't we use bread like what Jesus Himself served to his disciples? Why had the orthodoxy settled on Wonder Bread? As these things usually happen, there was never any kind of official proclamation from the Brethren specifying Wonder Bread. It just came to be that way. And, true, some other brands of extremely soft American-style white sandwich bread did occasionally make it into the sacrament. But the families entrusted with providing the bread each week almost never brought anything but Wonder. Wonder was the sine qua non of sacramental bread, and to show up with anything else, I discovered, was to disrupt the pivotal holy moment of our life as a ward.
My family [always on the fringes of the ward: we were recent converts, my parents were educated, we never really did things the expected way] received the assignment one week to provide the bread. In our typical chaotic Sunday-morning scramble we realized we hadn't thought about the bread all week, so my father grabbed a frozen loaf of whole-wheat from the freezer and we rushed to the car. I suddenly fell into an adolescent terror. This frozen, brown, lumpy loaf, with its hippie artwork on the label and its several coarse grains, was not right. It would call attention to me, link me to my family's unorthodoxy, embarrass me in front of my friends, and disrupt the sacrament. My sister, just younger and far more shamed by the family even than I, suggested that we stop at a store and get "the right kind" of bread. My mother got agitated and pointed out that we were already late. When we got to the chapel, my sister, who had been hugging the loaf, maybe trying to at least thaw it, tried to hand it to me, but I wouldn't take it. I was so overcome by a kind of aversion, a mixture of shame and maybe even contempt for my family, that I turned around and walked down the sidewalk. My mother called something angry after me, but I kept going. Once around the corner of the building I sped up, and got away. I don't remember how I spent the next hour, but it was the first time I had willingly skipped a sacrament meeting. I just couldn't go in. I do remember considering walking home, but even my taste for drama wouldn't have sufficed: we lived several miles away, and it was well over 100 degrees in Tucson that day.
As I remember, I spent the time thinking about bread, and about how it could mean so much even before it was prayed-over. I thought of bread as a social symbol, and became aware, maybe for the first time, of the strangeness of the socio-economic trajectory of the coarseness of bread in America: how only the rich could afford white bread until industrial milling made it widely available, and how the relatively affluent and educated had chosen to return to the coarse whole-grain breads that their parents had happily foresworn. I certainly considered where this put me in the ward. Among all these lifelong Mormons, almost all of them from old Arizona pioneer families -a pragmatic, uneducated, unquestioning people- my family stood out for our education, our questing and questioning attitude, our New England roots, our fast-talking opinions, my mother's disdain for grooming, my father's sideburns. Eventually, I told myself that probably nobody would think about the unorthodox bread after sacrament meeting ended, and that it surely mattered more to me than to any of my friends. So I went back inside after an hour and slid into my chair in Sunday School, with all the other kids my age.
As it turns out, nobody ever brought it up. In my aloofness and severity, I had made myself unavailable for ribbing, anyhow, and I think now that the other kids had probably forgotten about the strange bread right away. But long after that hour of acute adolescent shame I kept thinking about how bread can mean something, many things; how full of import it can be; and how thoughtlessly we usually eat it. Years later, long after I had left the Mormon church for good, I made bread one day and served it to my kids. It was still hot, and we ate it with Irish butter and chokecherry jam, which I had also made that morning. The pleasure we felt completely united us for a moment. The kids set aside their Sunday morning squabbles and just focused on the pleasure of eating, and I thought: this is how we make simple bread holy: we set aside time to make it, we lean into it, we sit down together and eat it, and for a moment we are all completely in out bodies, full for now.
Now I see it like this: there are two ways to sanctify a thing. You can set any old thing, without regard for its origins or qualities, in front of you, and pray over it, thus transforming it into something sacred. This is what the Mormons [and Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol] did. Or you can find the finest components, from the best sources, with great ethical and aesthetic care, and apply effort and craft and then serve it with excitement and anticipation, and holiness will rise from it like steam.
I may be taking this too far, but I suspect that what separates these two ways is an attitude toward the world. The way of prayer is focused on an idea of perfection, and on the transformation required to achieve the ideal. The way of making is focused on the senses per se, and places its faith in the holiness of what is, right here, right now.
Two thumbs up for you Van- what an interesting story and weaving.
ReplyDelete