A Wilderness Trek into Communion: Being Church part II
by Robert K. Martin
A decisive moment in my shift to understanding church as a verb, as enacted, as an incarnational reality, occurred as we were tromping through the wilderness. Literally. In the middle of a North Carolina forest near Ashville, I had taken a group of divinity students on a wilderness adventure in which a near-disaster was redeemed.
At the time I was a professor at Yale Divinity School teaching a course entitled, “Encountering God in Creation.” The course was designed around a ten-day camping trip in a wilderness area where there would be no showers, no electricity, no take-out; nothing but raw nature. Somehow we had the crazy idea that we would come to encounter God in a deeper way if we loaded ourselves up like pack mules and left all traces of civilization. By the end of the first day of arduous hiking with seventy pound backpacks, we had become a collective voice crying in the wilderness, hoping for our path to be made straight, wishing we were anywhere but there, praying that around the next bend a Holiday Inn would appear.
As a boy scout, I had done a little camping in my youth, but my most recent experience of sleeping outdoors was in our backyard with my children, neither of whom lasted the night. I was certainly not qualified to lead anyone off the beaten path, much less into a wilderness area where we would be setting up camp, cooking, and avoiding wild beasts. So the camping trip was organized and led by two wilderness guides, both of whom were rather hardcore Outward Bound drill sergeants. Their idea of fun was marching every day from dawn till dusk up and down steep mountainous terrain, finding our “limits”. What even our guides had not anticipated was the capricious temperament of Mother Nature, who blessed us with every form of precipitation possible. We marched through snow, slid on ice, and slogged through torrential rain. It was awful and we were miserable, and our frazzled spirits reflected our harsh conditions. We growled and snapped at each other as we set up tents, cooked our gruel, and collapsed from utter exhaustion in soggy sleeping bags.
By the way, God was nowhere to be found.
On the eighth and gloomy morning of our wilderness ordeal, the day’s agenda was to break camp, pack up, celebrate eucharist, and head home. A few of the young men traipsed off to a nearby river for a swim. While the rest of us were cleaning up from breakfast, we could hear their howls of pleasure and pain in the distance as they played in the frigid water. Their delight lifted our spirits and washed away our melancholy. When they returned from their icy baptism and we began to pack up for our departure, the mood of our entire troop lightened, and in agreement, the clouds parted and the sun shone lovingly on us.
If we had left then, without celebrating communion, I daresay the entire experience would have been considered a failure. There were some among us, including myself, for whom God was distant and inaccessible. I thought that perhaps the ritual of communion would be experienced as an empty gesture, but since I had carried the bread and juice all the way, I did not want it to be for nothing. So, I instructed everyone to go off by themselves for a while, and at the appointed time to return with a symbol of what they had discovered and who they had become during the week. While they were away – probably getting in touch with their inner couch potato – I set up a make-shift altar out of rocks and arranged some logs in a circle for us to sit on.
One by one, the members of our group walked back and took their places around the circle. When we had all gathered, I initiated what I thought would be a rather perfunctory ritual. I was unprepared for the liturgical drama that ensued. Each person placed a symbol on the altar. Referring to a piece of tree bark, or moss, or rocks, or an unexpected flower, they testified about what had happened to them over the week, that their lives were intertwined with the others, that in retrospect the struggles with nature and with each other vividly demonstrated their interdependence upon one another for their very survival. They recognized that the community they had formed over the week was one in which they helped and hurt each other, their interactions were both nourishment and poison, the community they formed was both life-giving and toxic. In all the ambiguity of the journey, they had offered themselves to one another, and time after time, they saw the face of Christ in one another.
When it came time to invoke the Holy Spirit and say the words of institution, I realized several things. First, I did not have to invoke the Spirit, who had been hiding and working among us all the time. Second, as I looked at the altar that was covered with the debris of our journey along with bread and cup, I realized that we had been offering ourselves to one another the entire week. Sometimes we held back, sometimes we rejected each other. But more often than we had realized, we had given of ourselves for the sake of another and for the group as a whole. We had, to greater and lesser extent, placed ourselves on the altar, hoping and praying that the Holy Spirit would transform our meager offering for the sake of the body of Christ. Over the week and at this moment in particular, not only was bread and cup changed, but more importantly we were changed. It was apparent in hindsight that deus absconditus had been at work among us, but surreptitiously. Through our trials, little by little, God was transforming the ambiguity of our lives into living bread for one another such that we came to share a common life.
Our communion in Christ – only now recognized as such – was not a life of leisure and plenty but rather entailed hard work, conflict, and suffering. We came to understand the week as a baptism – of water and snow and ice – into a new life. Viewed mainly in retrospect, we were being raised to new life in the Spirit and shedding sinful preoccupations with ourselves and with things that do not ultimately matter. Our journey together had been a kind of baptismal death to self that prepared us for this moment, for this sharing, for a transformation and resurrection into new life.
After breaking the bread and raising the cup, we shared the common meal by giving and receiving, each to another. The bread and cup were passed from hand to hand around the circle. Through tears and laughter, each gave to the other; each received from another. In so doing, we were following Christ’s admonition to “do this in remembrance of me.” We re-membered Christ. By grace we participated in his life more fully.
After singing a hymn, we were dismissed and sent forth. We gathered our belongings, removed all traces of our presence from the site, and departed for home. We were very different persons and a very different community. That is no romantic, idealistic exaggeration. What I haven’t said yet was that there were two agnostics and one atheist on the trip (in divinity school, you ask??). In the months following the trip, each of these young people professed their faith and (re)dedicated their lives to Christ.
We had been changed but of course not completely and not forever. Shortly after our return, some of the conflicts of the trip surfaced again to cause dissention and pain. Much to my shame and dismay, the most serious of these conflicts occurred between one of the wilderness guides and myself, which to this day has not been reconciled.
Communion in Christ does not make us into saints overnight or over a week. Our community together will still be marked not only by joy, peace, and mutual understanding, but also by tensions, conflicts, and suffering. But this journey through the wilderness into communion taught me more about being church than just about anything else. It helped me to see how during the most ordinary activities of our lives, we give and receive from each other. In our families, in our schools, in friendship and with enemies, we are embedded in a matrix of relationship, an economy of sharing. So much of what we share is colored by sin. But quite a bit of what we give and receive is also beautiful and loving.
Our wilderness experience of communion helped me to understand more clearly what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples, “this is my body given for you.” He had indeed given of himself to his disciples during their three year journey together. He lived with them, taught them, admonished and blessed them; he poured himself into them. Each day, every day, the disciples had taken a little more of Jesus into themselves. Sharing the bread and the wine symbolized that very giving and receiving that the disciples and Jesus had experienced with each other.
And this is what is meant by following Jesus and to gather in his name: To place ourselves on the altar so that the Spirit of Christ can transform the ambiguity of our lives into holy nourishment for one another and for the world. And in giving and receiving from each other – in the Spirit – we become more fully the body of Christ for the sake of the world’s redemption…and our own.