Acts of Communion

Recently I responded to a writing prompt for “Hands”. And now a couple of weeks later it has me thinking about Communion. Here is the piece “Hands.”

Hands…they are nouns but often find appearance as verbs. Hands that reach. Hands that withdraw. Hands that hold. Hands that slap. Hands that clap. Hands that hold babies and guns, hands that hold other’s hands during grief or love. Hands that sometimes say, “don’t touch me.” Hands that push away. Hands that pray.

The hands of those I remember…my mother’s hands as she reached for mine crossing the road - to protect; my father’s hands as we walked the beach - I was so safe with that hand holding mine; sunburned hands of my best friend after our beach day; my grandmother’s hands, spotted and a little tough, strong, resilient from all she had lived; my aunt’s hands right before she died - a strange leaving of essence off to somewhere else; hands of intimacy - my first loves, tentative, mostly tender, and unsure - we were young; hands exchanging rings with promises of forever.

The hands of strangers every day…building, boxing, shelving food, fixing cars, cleaning rooms and floors and toilets; the hands of an artist who created the drawing I purchased last week; the hands delivering mail and gifts; the cracked hands of firemen and police; the tender and rough hands of gardeners and landscapers.

The hands of those I’ve never met. Still I wonder.

Hands as our physical expression signify us as human and our desires, from our infancy - reaching for life, touching, exploring a newly birthed world - through the work of adulthood - and finally the last touch of everything and everyone we have ever loved.

What is it to be in communion with others and with our world. For many communion is the act associated with the Act of Communion in many, but not all, Christian faiths - that is the taking of the bread and wine to signify communion with Christ’s body and blood offered in sacrifice for the sins of humankind.

It seems that a wider association, and perhaps a more secular meaning, of the word “communion” is in order - our hands as symbols of an Act of Communion - it is not union for which we seek which can minimize our individuality - hence the UNITED States of America is probably not the most apt description of our 50 states. As many of us are currently wondering “united by what exactly beyond geography?” A valid question. Maybe, only maybe, a union might emerge but not before communion.

In communion we converse, we enter into dialogue, we interact, we experience. It is in these spaces where all our individualities converge. In a bow to Hannah Arendt, where natality emerges - that is movement and relation in a uniquely, and always surprisingly different arrangement than any particular individual experience. The paradox is that it is exactly our individuality (Arendt would say our “plurality”) that is the necessary ingredient to the recipe.

Quantum Physics also sheds light on these interactions revealing that literally the observer and the observed are tightly intertwined - in fact one may not exist without the other.

In this book, Helgoland, (2021) Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, states:

We think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities (in physics, we call them “physical systems”): a photon, a cat, a stone, a clock, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies . . . These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.

… The world that we observe is continuously interacting. It is a dense web of interactions…

Our refusal to understand ourselves in relation to others, to our world and to nature not only suppresses our creativity but reinforces a now age old Western philosophy of individuals as separate entities - Descartes and Locke (Individualism), Hobbes and Rousseau (Social contract theories), Kant (the ethics of individual moral agency). Again, the mention of these is not to deny our individuality nor suppress it; it is simply only half of nature, of who we are as a species - also social, connected, cooperative, creative and adaptable.

So from Arendt’s politics of plurality to Rovelli’s application of Quantum Theory to all relations, a secular understanding of communion arises. Still, let’s not overlook the centuries of religious and theological teachings that also instruct us:

Seeke not to crucifie your Sauiour againe, by seperating your selues from the Communion of your fellow members: for in so doing, you diuide his bodie into parcels, who ought to bee respected entirely one, and identified in your soules, without the least rent or scandall.

W. Vaughan, Golden Fleece, 1626

"What you do to the least of your brothers, you do to me"

Jesus Christ, Matthew 24:40

How many ways do we have to hear the message of Communion to act in communion?

By Susan Wright, Democracy Is Us Board and Council member