|
The communion table travels from place to place, making every site sacred — whether church sanctuary or bedside or prison chapel. I watch in awe as the communion elements are distributed and received.
In the United States, my minister colleagues carry the home communion set to the houses of members who cannot attend the worship service and who wait at home to be served. As a hospital chaplain, I carried the elements in a box and served those who seek the elements, both on Sundays and in the sacred moments of their lives. Food trays became communion tables as the Word was read and the elements were served. I also served in prisons and carried the elements, watching the spaces therein become sacred.
Why does the communion table evoke my awe? The community that nurtured my faith ordinarily celebrated the “table feast” (balla bojanam) in a sanctuary once during the Sunday worship service. We longed for this sacred meal and found ourselves helpless when our access to it was restricted. Then I moved from India to the United States of America, where I found home almost two decades ago. In this new home, I often oscillate between the feelings of being home and out of place, simultaneously or alternately. The experiences of dislocation and integration evoke both by attention to and awe at the traveling table.
In both contexts, the table is always local, featuring elements from the immediate surroundings. By and large, the table also is global, symbolically set with one loaf and a common cup, although its names, meanings and practices vary in each context. The table lifts us beyond ourselves whenever we read the Word and pray for the pouring of the Holy Spirit upon the elements. It also moves from place to place, making every site sacred. It calls us to be local and be moving: to love the world as God loves it and yet remain aliens and sojourners in this world.
| 
