Communion Without Baptism: The Insightful Perspective of Sara Miles

Some time back I cited (here) a series of articles at Episcopal Cafe that opposed opening communion to the unbaptized. Sara Miles, whose book Take This Bread was mentioned in one of Taryn Mattice's comments (both worth reading) to my post yesterday A Beautiful Prayer, wrote an insightful comment to the last of the series (see here) which persuasively argues for an open table: "My first communion (at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco) was an entirely unexpected experience of the risen Christ in bread and wine: it knocked me upside down and drew me inexorably toward baptism. While my own conversion might not represent the way things are supposed to happen, it's the way they did happen.

"I hesitate to draw broad conclusions about what that experience means for others, and I agree that individual experience is not the point here. But as someone who's been baptized now for ten years, and continues to share communion with unbaptized people, I'd like to offer some observations.

"I completely agree that the secular rhetoric of "inclusion" or "welcome" is inadequate to explain what's happening sacramentally during communion. Offering communion in order to be friendly, polite, or socially broadminded toward the unbaptized quickly reduces a mystery of God to being about our niceness.

"The pastoral reason for offering communion to everyone without exception strikes me as being far more about the spiritual health of the baptized partakers––we who say repeatedly that we're not worthy to receive the meal, and yet frequently pretend that we're somehow prepared for it. I think it's good for Christians to eat bread and wine alongside people who incarnate the truth that nobody gets communion because she deserves it––or, for that matter, understands it. It's good for Christians to see that we can't control who is going to hear the good shepherd's voice, or when. It's good for Christian churches to feel themselves hungry and in need of something they cannot manage.

"It's one thing to pride myself that, from a privileged position of correct belief, I'm generously sharing communion with unbaptized outsiders to make them feel "welcome." It's a very different thing to have to witness God's extravagant love for the unprepared, the unworthy, the laborers who show up at the 11th hour...to learn that God might be using foreigners, the unclean, the Gentiles and even the wicked to save me and my tribe, and to show us something about the wideness of his grace.

"Grace is not sequential. It frequently shows up at the wrong time, to the wrong people. It doesn't follow the logic of the world. I'm not sure how we will discern the movement of the Spirit in our present struggles over communion before baptism. But I'm pretty sure it's a mistake to imagine the Spirit tidily walks everyone through a ladder-like curriculum of spiritual development before she decides to blow."

For more on Sara Miles and her writings, see http://saramiles.net/

Comments

[Clark West]

Thanks for posting this, Steve, and thanks to Taryn for highlighting Sara Miles witness, a powerful one that many of us in the Episcopal Church share. Just fyi, on the thread on open communion from Episcopal Cafe to which Steve links, Donald Schell is one of the contributors. Donald was one of the founders of Sara's church, St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, a parish that has done more than almost any other in bringing liturgical renewal to the church. Theirs is a remarkable integration of the ancient and the (post) modern, and well worth a visit if you're out on the West Coast. Their icons, which include Sojourner Truth, Charles Darwin, John Coltrane and Malcolm X, are worth the price of admission! A truly remarkable witness to the priesthood of all believers (and even of some unbelievers!!)

[Jimbino]

Wow! This is a pile of unmitigated BS. I, like 100% of humans, was born an atheist, probably baptized by RC relatives as an infant, rebaptized in a Bible Church, and now, a scientist, again asserting my atheism.

There is no god, there is no "grace." There's just genuflecting, fiddling with rosaries, communion and confession.

Thank Darwin that my RC father was excommunicated for marrying my non-RC mother. Else I would probably have suffered untold years of "Hail Mary, ..." and loads of other nonsense.