“Regarded properly, anything can become a sacrament, by which I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual connection.” -Barbara Brown Taylor
I grew up in a church that liked sacraments. We took communion every fourth Sunday. We sang doxologies. We had liturgies for baptism and for new members, and a service every year where the pastor smeared ashes on our foreheads to remind us that we came from dust, and to dust we shall return.
The sacraments, for me, have always had sacred meaning.
This month in Zambia, I learned new sacraments. New ways to understand and take communion.
Every day, I woke up around 6 to the sounds of the family drawing water. Our hosts drew water in the morning, and my team would draw water in the afternoon, standing around the tap 20 meters from the house with plastic tubs and buckets, letting the neighborhood children teach us how to carry the full tubs on our heads. As I moved carefully, balancing a sloshing bucket of water, I understood a new aspect of the living water Jesus offers us.
On laundry day, my team plunged our dirty clothes into buckets of detergent and water and hung them out to dry. We hand-washed each other’s clothing, each person filling a role in the soapy, wet assembly line. It felt a little bit like prayer, like maybe saying a rosary would feel, as I scrubbed the fabric against my knuckles and was reminded of each of my teammates in turn.
When Rachel and I cooked dinner, we sat on stools around the coals we cooked with all month. We peeled potatoes and skinned chicken and talked. Cooking dinner over coals takes longer than on a stove or in an oven. We had a lot of time to talk, to perfect our peeling motion, and I had time to agree with C.S. Lewis when he said, “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he used material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: he invented eating. God likes matter. He invented it.”
What was peeling potatoes with love in our hearts if not a sacrament, an outward sign of our love for each other because of our love for Christ?
On our last night in Zambia, we sat around the coffee table with our hosts and said goodbye. The matriarch, Juliet, laid out fruit in front of us. She gave us knives and told us to start cutting and peeling, and so we did, her daughters Irene and Prudence and our team of mzungu missionaries cutting pineapples and mangoes and oranges by candlelight.
In the dim glow, Juliet started to sing.
She taught us a song in Bemba, and then we taught her a song in English. And for a few golden moments, we were all singing, worshipping the Lord with our voices and with our hands as we sliced fruit for a last meal together.
I took the pineapple the baby Mapolo handed me as I would take communion, with sacred meaning, with an expectance of grace.
Feeding the body of Christ can be one and the same as eating the body of Christ. The sacrament of communion is meant to be a visceral tradition, one that connects us to the thousands of years of motion, the millions of Christians gathering around candle-lit altars and kitchen tables and basements, and also connects us to the Christian right next to us, holding pieces of the same loaf in their hands. A tradition of abundance in a body deep and strong enough to carry my faith when I cannot.
Now, I understand new ways to carry my faith. I can carry it on my hips like water jugs and in my hands like paring knives and on my knuckles like a makeshift washboard. In Zambia, the rhythms of daily life became sacramental.
In other words, the unforced rhythms of grace Paul wrote about became, for a month, the unforced rhythms of life.
