A pause for spiritual reflection.

I went back to church yesterday.

Now, I don't mean this as the announcement of a turning, or the marking of a milestone, the way that this phrase might have been uttered in past phases of my occasionally erratic life. It's true that over the past four years, I've often deconstructed and reconstructed my faith in a way that, a bit humpty dumpty-esque, didn't always add back up to an even sum. I left and rejoined the Church in fits and lurches, fitting with the pendulum swing of my soul.

That was true until a year ago, when the pews and kneelers of St. Ignatius in Seattle became a fitting nesting place, and I slowly grew back into the goodness of the faith I had been raised with.

Since moving to Egypt, however, a few factors combined to make it difficult to find a church to pray in every week. First of all, weekends here fall on Friday and Saturday, not Sunday. Inexplicably, many of the English-speaking congregations (of which there are few) persist in meeting on Sunday, when I'm at work. Another time I attended a mass that was technically conducted in English, but the priest's thick Polish accent and the poor acoustics of the church rendered the mass completely incomprehensible. All this to say that, excepting a pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, participating in Christian community has been something largely limited to the occasional spiritual conversations with friends and roommates.

That changed yesterday with a visit to an Episcopalian church in Maadi—which, in terms of liturgy, felt just one pope shy of the masses I had attended at St. Ignatius. It was coming home. Inexplicably significant was taking communion for the first time in four months. Now, maybe this is just evidence of Catholic teachings leaking into my Protestant theology, but after so much time gone by without it, the bread and wine felt somehow more powerful, somehow more holy, than mere symbolism would suggest. For whatever dualists might maintain, it seems to me that the line between the physical and the spiritual is increasingly doubtful. Body is soul. Soul is body.

I came across an NPR "This I Believe" essay today as I was preparing lesson plans for an English class where the author relates her relationship to communion. I thought I'd include it below.

by- Sarah Miles
Until recently, I thought being a Christian was all about belief. I didn't know any Christians, but I considered them people who believed in the virgin birth, for example, the way I believed in photosynthesis or germs.
But then, in an experience I still can't logically explain, I walked into a church and a stranger handed me a chunk of bread. Suddenly, I knew that it was made out of real flour and water and yeast — yet I also knew that God, named Jesus, was alive and in my mouth.
That first communion knocked me upside-down. Faith turned out not to be abstract at all, but material and physical. I'd thought Christianity meant angels and trinities and being good. Instead, I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.
I came to believe that God is revealed not only in bread and wine during church services, but whenever we share food with others — particularly strangers. I came to believe that the fruits of creation are for everyone, without exception — not something to be doled out to insiders or the "deserving."
So, over the objections of some of my fellow parishioners, I started a food pantry right in the church sanctuary, giving away literally tons of oranges and potatoes and Cheerios around the very same altar where I'd eaten the body of Christ. We gave food to anyone who showed up. I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, bishops — all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people.At the pantry, serving over 500 strangers a week, I confronted the same issues that had kept me from religion in the first place. Like church, the food pantry asked me to leave certainty behind, tangled me up with people I didn't particularly want to know and scared me with its demand for more faith than I was ready to give.
Because my new vocation didn't turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays and declaring myself "saved." I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects, sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, take the firing pin out of a battered woman's Magnum and then stick the gun in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car. I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends, and the prejudices and traditions of my newfound church.
But I learned that hunger can lead to more life — that by sharing real food, I'd find communion with the most unlikely people; that by eating a piece of bread, I'd experience myself as part of one body. This I believe: that by opening ourselves to strangers, we will taste God.