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| Noah at his first communion class |
My First Communion revolved entirely around a floor-length white dress, a lace veil and a sheet cake with pink and yellow frosted flowers.
I was seven years old. I didn’t understand the significance of the bread and the wine. I didn’t get how the sacrament related to the ancient Jewish celebration of Passover. And while I may have heard the story of the Last Supper in one of my CCD classes, I certainly didn’t understand its importance.
I’d like to say I’ve matured from a dress-veil-and-sheet-cake-obsessed child to a more spiritually grounded adult with a deeper understand of Holy Communion. But that wouldn’t be the truth.
The fact is, I’ve never felt particularly moved by the act of receiving Holy Communion. I’ve tried to contemplate the gravity of partaking in the body and blood of Jesus Christ himself, but I’ve never quite wrapped my mind around it. I’ve tried to tap into an emotional connection with God in the quiet moments following Holy Communion, but I usually feel distracted.
A few weeks ago Noah and I spent three hours in a Southwood class to prepare for his first communion. As Pastor Sara began the class, she asked each of the fifth graders in the room to share what they were most looking forward to about their first communion. “I’m not really looking forward to anything,” mumbled Noah when it was his turn. “It just feels sort of boring.”
Avoiding the eyes of the other parents at our table, I shot Noah my most irritated, “Are you kidding me?” look. Then, sighing loudly, I crossed my arms over my chest and slouched in the chair, forgetting, of course, that was only the dress, the veil and the cake that had engaged me 35 years ago.
By the end of the three-hour class Noah had changed his tune about Holy Communion…and so had I. Together we poured over the verses in Exodus that describe how the Israelites fled in the middle of the night to avoid the final and worst plague, after eating a quick meal of unleavened bread, bitter herbs and roasted lamb.
“You’re the first-born,” I reminded Noah, when we read aloud God’s promise to “strike down every first-born son and first-born male animal in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12), saving only the Israelites who had marked their doorposts with the blood of their slain lambs. He nodded solemnly, eyes wide.
We then compared these verses from Exodus with the ones in Matthew 26, in which Jesus led the Passover meal to make a new covenant with his people.
I’m not sure how much Noah really understood of the connection between the verses in Exodus and the ones we read from Matthew. After all, at 42 I am just now beginning to wrap my own head around it. But I do know this: it was a gift to walk through the history and significance of Holy Communion with my son and to glimpse even a shadow of understanding flicker across his face.
And it was a gift as well to realize that it’s never too late to catch a glimpse of that holy understanding myself.
Do you ever feel disconnected from God during the sacrament of Holy Communion? What do you think might be the cause of that distance?
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