Dip and Sip: Irreverent Tales of Holy Communion

By Vance Meyer

Luckily, our Connecticut church service had not yet started when two nicely dressed elderly women sat down behind Teresa and me.  Still, we were starting to worry that neither of the ladies had any awareness of how loudly they were talking to each other.

"Oh rats: It's dip and sip!," the lady directly behind me complained loudly.  Her friend giggled.

It did not take a divine revelation to realize that her irreverent comment was aimed directly at the communion table with its brass pitcher, ceramic chalice and loaf of bread.  

We celebrated communion on the first Sunday of every month.  Sometimes they served tiny square wafers and miniature glasses of grape juice right to the pew.  This week, the white table cloth and elements indicated that we would using the “intinction” method in which everyone comes forward and dips a small piece of bread into a single chalice.  (Dip and sip.)

Any experienced churchgoer might assume that our old friend was A) not happy about having to walk up front for communion, or, B) suffering from a common form of task-specific germaphobia, which is never talked about by Christians.  Either way, it was clear that hearing-loss was an unfortunate disability for two lifelong congregants who had liberated themselves long ago from the pretenses and piety the rest of us were trying our best to maintain.

Throughout the service I found myself trying to control my laughter, not because of what the old lady said, but rather due to the memory of my own first experience with intinction, which played out in my mind throughout the remainder of the service.

It was Saturday night on my first weekend at Indiana State University, 1981, and I received a great call in my dorm room from Mike Batton, a high-school buddy who had also just become an ISU freshman. 

Actually, we had been friends since the eighth grade, when he was the bassist and I the drummer for a garage band named “Flair.”  Our introduction to rock and roll was short-lived, however, due to the fact we concentrated almost all of our attention on perfecting our signature song, “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, in the cramped, drafty living room of Mike's tiny ranch house in Brinker Heights.  Put differently, we lost sight of the need to learn other songs, which severely limited our ability to play concerts or dances lasting longer than four minutes.

Mike is brilliant.  A Renaissance man.  And a true original.  Sometime in the mid-eighties, I think it was, young people started using the word "random" as a colloquialism -- as in, "That was totally random, dude."  But Mike had been using that word since before he started shaving, to describe the kind of experience that he found enjoyable. 

At ISU he had entered the aeronautics program, while I studied music, even though Mike was the better overall musician and a naturally gifted pianist.  

“Hey man, what do you say we start this whole college thing off on the right foot and go to church tomorrow,” he said over our landline.  It was a call that Mike’s mother and mine would have loved, but I knew it wasn't just a random suggestion. After Flair had broken up, the two of us had made regular contributions to the music programs at his and my churches over a period of five years. 

One one Sunday, when we were 17, Mike played piano at my small neighborhood church with his broken leg propped up on a chair, an injury that occurred during a sky-diving incident.  Playing with us was Darrell (D.w.) Briscoe, a 6'5" guitarist who went on to have a very successful career as a musician, composer and producer of music for TV and films.  Darrell was not a cheese-ball like me and rolled his eyes when I joked with the congregation that Jesus had literally dropped Mike out of the sky for our service.

I thumbed through the Terre Haute Yellow Pages that had been left by the prior occupant of my dorm room, and found a Lutheran church that looked like it was situated ideally between my nine-story campus tower and Mikes new apartment on the outskirts of town -- a one-roomer located in a converted cinder-block motor-lodge.  (I still have no idea how he found that place.)

Neither of us was Lutheran, but we met at 9 a.m. anyway. 

When it came time for communion, I realized that we were about to partake in an intinction ceremony.  Mike was an old pro, but they had only served wafers at my church and I had no real dip-and-sip experience.  (Little did I know...)

There was a long line of people in the center aisle and I really couldn’t see what was going on in front of me.  After Mike partook in the elements and moved on, I stood face-to-face with a distinguished-looking Lutheran minister.  He was holding an ornate plate of large, round unleavened pitas stacked up like pancakes.  Mike had taken the last torn piece from the prior pita, but I hadn’t seen him do it.

In a whirl of confusion, I grabbed the whole top pita from the plate and made a quick futile attempt to dip it, unable to interpret the blank look the reverend’s face.  Before the mistake could be rectified – and before I even knew for sure that there had been a mistake -- I was well in motion to the altar where Mike had consumed his morsel and was kneeling and praying.

Before I knelt beside him – and you might have trouble believing this – da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper shot through my brain and I actually considered the possibility that maybe these Terre Haute Lutherans took the whole “meal” thing more literally than we did back home.

Mike opened his eyes and looked over at me in horror at first, as both of us assimilated to what had happened.  Unable to resist my usual temptation to crack him up, I looked around quickly and started fanning my face with the pita.  Fortunately for Mike, his tears could easily be mistaken as a spiritual emotion, even by the most devout protestant.

 

After that 10 seconds of fun, things turned serious again and I realized that I still had to figure out what to do with the “meal.”  I did the only thing I could think of -- fold it up and stick it in my pocket.  With his eyes closed, Mike raised his face toward heaven, and I could see his diaphragm moving up and down under his blue blazer.

A few months later, in what I perceived then as a message from the Lord, I was attending an elective course on religion when a really nice Catholic kid, with his voice quivering, told a heart-wrenching story about how, as a young boy, he had accidentally dropped his sacramental bread on the cathedral floor and went into hysterics believing that Jesus himself was lying between his sneakers.

Part of me felt “convicted” about having clowned around during communion with Mike.  Another part of me felt badly for this classmate who was obviously still harboring a tough memory.  And a different part of me felt a perverse sense of envy over this guy’s deep, emotional connection with the communion experience, which I have always struggled with in spite of my own deep faith.

Over the next several months, Mike and I grew as people and as friends.  Being an aerospace student and licensed pilot, he remained current on flight miles in a rented Cessna at the local Sky King Airport, and a few times he took me along to see sites that I was not aware existed in our home state.

By May, however, we had decided to go in different directions with our lives and both left ISU.

Once in a great while Mike will call me, often to share a brilliant product, service or business idea that he has conceived of or actually implemented.  When time permits, we occasionally hearken back to the day that we changed holy communion forever at that little Lutheran church, and laugh just as hard as we did that afternoon in his motel apartment over chips and bean dip.

For the past several years, I have offered gluten-free elements to my teenager, Samuel, at a small makeshift communion table in the back of our Presbyterian sanctuary.  Somehow, these brief moments in an unlikely setting have enabled me to see God more clearly during the act of taking communion -- partly, I think, because it is just the two of us together, and partly because Sam, and his brother Noah, are my begotten sons.

As the years keep rolling by, and as I too begin to rid myself of pretenses -- religions or otherwise -- I am beginning to view life through the prism of large and small experiences that now seem artfully and beautifully interrelated.  And I have come to realize that laughter, like the bread and the cup, is a sacred gift from our Creator, divinely engineered by Him to be experienced in communion with people that He puts in and on our paths.

Today I think I’ll download some Bachman-Turner Overdrive.  And rather than wait on him to call me, I might just make a random call to my dear friend Mike.

Vance Meyer is a former corporate communication and marketing professional whose blog, myTMI, contains short stories about his life which he hopes that his boys, Samuel and Noah, will enjoy in their later years.