Physical world offers endless symbolism for spiritual truths
When I use a metaphor, I use words to describe something you have probably experienced that suggest a comparison to something else. I help you see the unknown by linking it to what you have already experienced.
God uses metaphors, too, that have way more depth and complexity than mere words. When God makes a metaphor he uses events, individuals, stories and material things to suggest a comparison to a spiritual truth for which there is no human language.
Dust can be a God metaphor for humanness. From dust we came; to dust we shall return. He took dust and breathed life into it, and man became a living creature.
Without that breath of life, dust is lifeless, inorganic, dry. Filled with God’s own breath, however, our dusty human form becomes a living being full of the possibility of transcendence.
The God metaphor for Christ is bread and wine. Bread and wine are nourishing, sustaining food and drink for body. Christ is that same nourishing, sustaining food and drink for our souls.
His body is the bread and his blood is the wine – the metaphoric nourishment we need for spiritual growth and health. This spiritual nourishment is deeper, wider, richer, fuller and more sustaining than mere bread and wine.
Communion is one of the great mysteries, an unexplainable cataclysmic union of the spiritual and the physical, the sacred and the mundane, the holy and the ordinary. The bread and wine are incarnational in a way that I experience without understanding.
Just as God incarnated himself as Christ and became flesh and blood, so the bread and wine are “inspirited” into the flesh and blood of Christ.
His broken body becomes the middle ground, the doorway, the rip in the fabric of space and time that allows me – an ordinary, mundane, physical person – to enter into communion with God, who is spirit, who is divine, sacred and holy.
The metaphor of bread and wine link my present experience to a spiritual reality that is beyond human language or experience.
The classic funeral reading says we come from dust and to dust we will return – falling back into the earth and returning to our material origins. In Christ, that is not true.
Christ, the Bread of Life and the Vine, assumed our dusty human form, died a human death and resurrected himself. He stands at the juncture between death and life and hands us from one realm to the other.
We do not return to dust; we are changed into bread and wine – we become like Him. The communion bread may remain just bread, but we do not remain only human.
Even now, we are being transformed into something else, something living. We are filled so full of life that, even though our dusty bodies do die, we – our essential beings – survive death.
There’s a subtle gender equality in communion. Bread is traditionally made by female hands; wine is made by male hands. Sometimes when I knead bread, I think of Mary and the other women washing and shrouding Christ’s body after his crucifixion.
My bread rises because it is full of life – the actively growing and reproducing life of the yeast within it. Wine ferments for the same reason.
In the same way, Christ rose from the grave because He was and is full of life – life that has survived death. Life that inspirits you and me and allows us to survive death, too.
Communion tells us that Christ joined us here in the dust and mud of humanity, but neither he nor we must remain here. Christ incorporated humanity into his spirit. We incorporate his spirit into our humanity.
We share his blood and body as he shared our dust, and we become more. Day by day and bit by bit we become more and more like him until, at our death, he takes our hand and hands us over to life everlasting.