I Wept at the Table

I wept.  I came to the Table, and I wept.  Perhaps the Table was not set, the feast not set out yet, but my soul came close to Soul Food, and my only response came in tears.  I was preparing and practicing for my practicum service, the Holy Week chapel at Perkins.  As I played through the organ piece that will intertwine with the procession of the elements, I felt tears on my face and a lump in my throat.  My spirit's eye saw the bread and the cup coming to the altar, the meal being prepared.  And in that place, the Supper I typically engage with as providing food for the hungry, equality for the marginalized, care for the suffering was all those things, yet something more.  It was terrible and sorrowful for the very fact that I knew what had to happen for the prophecy of that meal to come true.  Perhaps it is not a new thought, but it was a new spiritual place for me.  To think that when we break the bread and pour the cup--eat the Body and drink the Blood--we prophesy what Christ did and is doing, while receiving the nourishment for all that is to come in Christ.  Should the joy of the meal not also mingle with tears at His suffering?  When we come to the thin place between things of earth and things of heaven which intersect with the pain and joy of the human condition in this meal--should we not greet it with silence and shouts of joy?  I have no clear ideas or arguments for why this is or is not.  Only elusive reflections on the layers of divine meaning found in what seems mundane to clumsy human eyes and hands.  But this I know--if scales must be torn off, if tears must be wept, if healing touch must occur, I do not care.  In the deepest part of myself, I long for spiritual eyes to see, spiritual ears to hear, spiritual hands to touch and heal, a spiritual nose to breathe in, and a spiritual tongue to taste and know and speak the most beautiful gift into the lives of hurting people:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.