Do This in Remembrance of Me

Jesus sat at a table with four fishermen, a skeptic, a wealthy tax collector, a political activist, and an embezzler who would get him killed.  He passed out some bread and wine and gave them one poignant instruction: do this in remembrance of me. 

Weekly, the pastors of my past would recreate this scene in my mind as I held a small plastic cup of grape juice in my left hand as my thumb traced the edge of an oyster cracker.  Modeling those around me, I knew that to eat these things in remembrance of Jesus meant to call to mind all of the awful things I had done that required his body to be broken on the cross for my sins.  I often hung my head in shame.  Once I got chastised from the pulpit for laughing with a friend during this portion of the service, for it was not one of joy and laughter–but one of somber heart and mind.  On the worst days, when I felt I couldn’t even cultivate the sense of shameful sorrow laced with gratitude, I would let the elements pass by me.  I was not fit to remember Jesus.  

But Jesus sat at a table with four fishermen, a skeptic, a wealthy tax collector, a political activist, and an embezzler who would get him killed.  If these men were fit to remember Jesus, maybe there was something unfit with my approach to remembering, not something unfit with me. 

I’d always associated the word “remember” with the act of calling something to memory, until Cathy Cox–a courageous mentor in the faith–expanded my view.  “Member” is defined as an animal, person, or plant belonging to a particular group–a piece of a complex structure.  To dismember means to rip that structure apart.  The prefix “re” means “back or again”.  Remembering involves a restoration back to belonging.  To be unified again. Sometimes we do that by recalling a moment within our mind, but sometimes we do that by action

God so loved the world that they sent their one and only son to re-member Love on earth.  Remembering Love involved bringing back together again what had been ripped apart, so humanity and divinity coalesced.  Love sought no division; there was no need.  In Love, all pieces find their integrated place.  
I think there’s a beautiful purpose that Jesus first said this famous line to such a rag-tag group.  We can become guilty of picturing them all as fishermen.  It helps me to modernize the image. 

God sat at a table with a factory worker, a fast-food employee, a mechanic, a maid, a curious professor, a corrupt government official, a ponzi schemer, and a protestor.  He passed them bread and wine.  And then he told them, “This.  You are all around the same table with the same bread and the same clean feet.  This is what I urge you to do to remember God. This is where you can start with restoring Love.  You all belong together, again.”

“Know Thyself,” Said Love

My tightening throat caught the words as my thoughts came to full formation.  “The way you see me,” I choked out as tears gathered on the edges of my eyes, “makes me want to know myself more.”  A reverent silence hung in the early morning air.  Blankets wrapped tightly around my shoulders and the soft glow of my phone’s light illuminated my face.  Each weekend, I talk to my partner during her forty minute drive to work.  For years, these talks have been revelatory for both of us.  This weekend was no exception.

I have always struggled with shame.  I’m not sure which came first: the internal shame from myself or the external shame from who I called God, but they coalesced to create one tightly knotted ball of yarn that others call my heart.  That shame-ridden heart believed to its core that I am bad.  So I spent a lot of time trying to be something else.  Now I’m in my 30s, slowly unraveling that knot and trying to meet the true me that’s been in hiding. It’s exhausting work, at times, because it requires some serious self-reflection.  When you’ve hidden behind so many other personas for so long, it’s hard to trust which ones are the true you.  I often feel a bit like Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride with a bar full of differently prepared eggs in front of her, trying to figure out how she likes her breakfast.  She spent her whole life ordering the same as whomever she was with and lost herself within the mirroring.  

At the start of my own unraveling work, my partner’s eyes widened with a twinkle like she was taking in the most beautiful sunrise.  Her reaction made me want to see more of what she clearly saw.  I trust her as a realist who will blow no smoke up anyone’s ass.  If she was seeing something good and worthwhile, then there must be someone very good and worthwhile unraveling.  This is all still a work in progress, and it may continue to be for the duration of my life.  But as I laid in bed, hearing the sounds of her nearing her workplace, it all came crashing over me with a tidal wave of gratitude.

“That’s beautiful,” she responded with a tenderness in her voice.  We sat in peaceful silence for a few extra moments before she reflected.  “You know…” her voice had a twinge of curiosity to it, communicating to me that this thought was new to her.  “I think that’s a sign of health in a relationship: being so seen and affirmed that you want to know more of yourself.  Not being so seen that you must then have to hide pieces of yourself because the reaction you receive.”  Relationships should bring us into more internal alignment as we are loved and supported by another.  It should not ask us to slowly chip away at ourselves until we only exist in the other’s likeness.  That is not love. 

I don’t know from where my shame originated, but I know fundamentalist Christianity played a huge role.  So in this unraveling, I often go to root messages I received about love and have to rewrite them.  Believing twisted truths about Love on a cosmic level has some massive trickle down effect.  I once believed God saw my whole self and winced.  I believed God then asked me to hide, contort, shave off parts of myself to earn affirmation once I existed in His likeness.  I called this love.  
But on a teary Saturday morning at six o’clock, I am choosing to believe I was wrong.  The gaze of another that produces unraveling, unhiding, and expansion… that is love.