Blest or Unblest?

I heard some stories lately and they went like this….

A while ago while we were at a group home celebrating a communion service with the residents, one of the consecrated wafers fell on the floor. No one knew what to do, and so we looked to the priest for guidance. “Throw it outside on the ground,” he said. “Let the animals eat it.”

A choir member noticed a wafer had fallen into the hot air register and wondered aloud, “What should we do about that?”

One chancel guild lady was talking to another before an adult education class, and I overheard her saying in a worried tone, “I’m always afraid I’ll get the bles wafers mixed up with the unblest.”

My immediate reaction to all of these stories was, “Does it really matter?” That was enough to start me thinking…

The words of the Eucharistic prayer are not magical, nor does being said by a clergy-person make them so. The wafers and wine, over which they are said, do not have special properties. Indeed, for me, it is only necessary that the person telling the story does so from the heart, from a lived experience, not that they be ordained.

The role of the celebrant is to recall, to the people who are gathered, their story, to remind them of who and whose they are, to help them to enter into the ‘presence of the holy’. We are re-enacting, if you will, the last supper as well as all those other meals which Jesus had with his friends, his disciples, the outcasts. We are casting our lot with Jesus, with his understanding of the inclusive nature of the Kingdom of God.

The bread and wine become sacred only when they are used in this way, when they become an integral part of our story.

Whenever we meet over food, sharing whose we are and what are our responsibilities for the Kingdom of God, that meal becomes a sacred time as well – a time that feeds both physical and spiritual hunger.

So for me, there is no problem with mixing the blest with the unblest wafers, for the 'real' blessing occurs as they are used.

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