From the Editor: Altar Call

Recently I wore a nice tie to church—maybe that explains why the senior usher collared me and my wife at the door to ask us to take the elements of bread and wine to the altar during the Offertory. A small duty and honor. Still I felt jittery about going up the center aisle among 150 people carrying true God from true God.

The day before, I was reading a little book about the reputed modern demise of metaphysics in theology and belief. The book argues that the idea of God as power and grandeur is giving way to the image of God as friend who cares more about ethics and behavior than details of doctrine.[1] I know people who instinctively feel that way. They’re weary of images of divine omnipotence that are exploited by people to bully other people.

Many Christians can’t identify with the word Christian anymore. No wonder the New Testament mentions “Christian” just three times, as if reluctant to endorse a term that would become so easily exploited or distorted. 

But now was not the time to sort out the latest deconstructions of faith. The liturgy was barreling onward. At the back of the sanctuary my wife and I were gently handed the containers that held the wafers and wine. The music surged. People stood. Our cue was given. “The end of metaphysics” would have to wait. It deferred to the forensics of this cathedral-like interior, the DNA of generations making the weekly altar call of Eucharist/Communion, their prayers wafting in the stain-glass air. 

I felt grateful to be part of this sacred history even as I couldn’t help ponder what exactly we were now carrying, these elements of bread and wine. A symbolic memorial of Christ? The soon-to-be transubstantiated body and blood? A consubstantiated substance that depends on the believer to give it meaning? I tried not to think too hard about it, for fear of getting dizzy and spilling the Christ-remnant into the pews and ending up on the internet. 

No matter: the trek up the center aisle was centering—like everyone else there, we were off the grid, out of range of polemics and jargon, just taking a walk with Jesus. The faith is not some brainy abstraction after all. It’s about pursuing God “on earth as it is in heaven,” trying to do right by it, move forward with it.

We got to the altar without incident and carefully passed the consecrated goods to the waiting minister, who sweetly whispered to us that we could now do a little bow if we liked and then exit stage right. 

When the postlude benediction was finished, I felt that after-church lightness. Buoyed. Eager to greet others. Spiritually reset. Also slightly suspicious that I got away with something. Annie Dillard writes about the “unwarranted air of professionalism” of dignified Christian worship, the preposterous gap between our human attempts to invoke God and the inconceivable notion of the Creator of all life.[2] She says we should be praying in fear and trembling, wearing crash helmets, and drop this charade of knowing what we’re doing. 

Yet grace abounds anyway, she admits.

“Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes the disciples’ dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, It is all right—believe it or not—to be people.”[3]

On the way home, I could feel the instantaneous world rushing back into my brain, the spiraling media jet stream. In it religion is served up as just another data point, a commodity traded for purposes of access, provocation, revenge. The word Christian itself becomes radioactive in the detonations of American politics. Many Christians can’t identify with the word anymore. No wonder the New Testament mentions “Christian” just three times, as if reluctant to endorse a term that would become so easily exploited or distorted. As far as we know, Jesus never used any such terminology. Apparently it didn’t matter to him. But everything else did: people, for instance, their material circumstances, the wellbeing of their hearts.

Whenever I take communion, the world seems to reorder itself around it. The wafer becomes the coin of the realm. I find an equilibrium between a frantic week and a world of spiritiual sanity calling beyond that. I seek this momentary mysticism wherever I can … Christmas season, that incarnational immersion. Easter Vigil. The sound world of Arvo Pärt. The horn and vocals of Louis Armstrong.[4] The moment of truth (to face or not, to reckon with or not) in the eye of someone who happens to be struggling.[5] Such encounters aren’t sentimental or otherworldly but tough-minded earthly pushback. They rebuke the zombified modern malaise that would negate our souls or excuse us to be inhuman to other humans.

Into these fraught circumstances we asked the writers in this Reflections issue to share their own ways of belief, in their own language of the heart and mind and soul. Some found the invitation a dicey proposition, since so much can go off the rails when the subject is religion in the contemporary world. Yet they all listened for that inner voice of conviction that is beyond the reach of distraction and hysteria. They all took the elements of their faith to heart, and brought forward their gifts.