The Bread | The Christ

Daniel Bonnell, Eucharist, 2024

At the end of just about every service, our community has left over communion bread and juice. There’s always been a question of what to do with these elements that, just moments ago, were treated with such sacred wonder. A friend's church had a special drain built for theirs. The remaining bread is eaten, and the wine is poured down their dedicated sink, draining into the soil of a garden at the end of the drain. The Catholics ensure their priest consumes all the transfigured elements. But in our down-to-earth community, we set it out next to the donuts for kids to eat. The youngest seem to enjoy it most—they don’t yet know what a donut is. The torn beige body, laid beside sugar-laced icing and colorful sprinkles.

I wonder which we prefer.

The juice? That just goes down our normal drain like everything else. The blood of Christ, finding its way into the systems meant to carry away our death, our decay, and everything we’d rather not touch, smell, or see. The blood of Christ mingled with human waste.

While for many of us who hold a lower view of these elements, as a pastor I’ve tried to consider more sacred ways of disposing of the body. I think I’m afraid the way we’re doing it now is a little too honest, a little too close to the truth of our world, and Christ’s place in it.

A few weeks ago I thought I had found it.

I collected the half devoured bread on a Monday morning. By now it was stale—the beginnings of decay, death and time. It seems nothing escapes its grip, not even God. I head outside. To where I don’t yet know.

We once had some stray kittens living in our bushes. They were likely dumped there in the hopes that church folks like us might have half a heart or at least enough Protestant guilt to deal with the needy creatures. A fitting end to Christ’s body. Be consumed by the birds of the air and the animals of the field. I thought I was so clever, gently placing the elements into the bushes in the hopes some creature might find some sustenance from it, or that it might decay into the ground and give life to the earth. I made sure it was tucked away from view, we wouldn’t want to dirty up the landscape with Christ's body parts.

I felt self satisfied.

The following Sunday we had missed our usual donut delivery. So I found myself on a quest for those sprinkled icing delights. They were delivered but not to our door. How can we worship Jesus without sugared pastries?

Hurrying down the sidewalk between our church and the church next door I was stopped in my tracks. On the ground, mangled, gnawed, soggy from the exposure to the cold and the rain, the bread. Drug from its tidy hiding place and dumped in the middle of the sidewalk for all the world to see. It was grotesque, confronting. My search for fresh pastries was derailed by a disfigured, half consumed loaf.

Consumed by what?

Us.

All of us.
The world.
And death itself, it would seem.

Laid out for all the world to see.
To behold.
To consume.

Christ.