Say It's More than Symbol

What we want is presence.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Growing up in a Baptist church, it didn’t take me long to form an opinion on transubstantiation—the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist—and on adherence (not to mention adherents) to the idea. It’s amazing how little of a push we need to form judgments of others; amazing how long those can last. This is no comment on the church or tradition I grew up in, but an observation of my own tendencies as a human being.

I don’t write this to convince you (or myself) any which way on this particular dogma. I write instead to recognize the insatiable hunger for presence we bear as flesh-and-blood stamps of a relational God. A text message only goes so far to tell us about a person’s tone (hint: it’s not far). A written letter only gives the idea of the company of another—a beautiful and possibly deep one, but still only the idea. Even rich media like conference calling can deliver no more than the illusion of nearness. What we want is presence, a communion or companionship (literally “with-breading,” from Latin com- “with,” and pane “bread”), a guide through our joys and sorrows and losses and all the little things that make us smile. As Christian Wiman says, “The revelation we want—or at any rate the revelation we need—is not ultimate, but intimate.”¹ The ultimate does not change us until it becomes intimate, until we encounter it in the “fullness of time” which is a moment.

I think that’s why

Lee Kohman

’s poem “Say It’s More than Symbol” strikes such a chord in me. Not because I believe in transubstantiation and want her and others to believe in it too, but markedly because, like her, I don’t. Yet I have that gnawing, human longing for presence. If the Baptist-child-me was convinced there could be no such miracle at play, I sit here now not caring so much whether the child adopted a particular belief of a particular part of the Church, but more that the child was open to seeing Christ in the bread and the wine and not behind it only. I sit here caring that the Baptist-child-me, who is still a part of me, would be more open to seeing Christ in everything.

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Say It’s More than Symbol

A Practicing Protestant Yearns for the Sacraments*

by Lee S. Kohman

Holy Communion—
          blessed boon
                    for the breaking

                              and broken,
                    for the hungering
          for every tongue longing
to touch and

 

          taste

 

to feel
          even for a fleeting moment
                    the physicality of unseen union—

 

          the imperceptible

 

                    plated, then placed
          under fleshy
palate roofs.

 

Christ clothed in crust of skin,
     meet me

 

          in my mouth.

 

Slake me by divine wine;
                    nourish the ache

                    gnawing to know
beyond symbol or creed:

Your body present.
                    Your life poured into me.

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Lee has a deep and amicable friendship with spacing. All kidding aside, she has a knack for using the empty space of a (web)page to help guide a reading, and a sinking into the language at play. If you skimmed her poem just now, I’d encourage you to go back over it again, but slower, allowing those white spaces to lead you to the particular words and breaths—the sights and vistas—the piece has to offer. Pray the poem.

In the first few lines we’re invited into the familiarity of Holy Communion (and no doubt all of us are picturing some different iteration of this: paper-flavored crackers and Welch’s; wine and fresh bread; a plate passed around with the elements; everybody drinking out of the same medieval flagon as though germs were never a thing). Lee brings us together and settles us gently into these images by comfortably recycling sounds in “blessed boon / for the breaking.” Immediately the mind recalls the practice of “breaking bread” with another—or again, with-breading—the sharing of that which sustains. But even so early on Lee turns a meaning on us, and it is not only the bread but we ourselves who are broken. We not only break and share the bread, but having been broken ourselves, receive.

I once mistakenly took Communion at a Lutheran church I was visiting only later to learn how scandalous this was. In my defense, no one stopped me, and the pastor still served the sacrament. In a similarly gracious act, Lee offers us line after unexpected line of prayers and new perspective, the “physicality of unseen union” itself coming to us on the Communion plate, whence we tuck “Christ clothed in crust of skin” himself “under [our] fleshy / palate roofs.” There’s a wonderful play between the exalted and the earthy—between the divine and the mundane—in this poem. A perfect picture of what we practice when we take Communion: dust participating in a divine hope. An incarnationality.

I’ve spent a severely unhealthy amount of my life wanting and working to be unequivocally right. I’m still recovering. As George MacDonald’s Lilith knows, it’s difficult to relax a clenched fist, but I’m learning to let go a little more every day. And a little more. Not to toss my beliefs to the wind willy-nilly, mind you, but to hold them openly and humbly so they and I can grow branches and roots (which is difficult in the stuffy space between palm and fingers) and so they look less and less like violence to others, more like invitations. Thanks for your patience with me even as I do so here.

As Lee’s excellent work here shows, poetry is a new lens: a willingness to consider something from a new angle. Sometimes this leads to seismic shifts in the heart; other times to a refreshment of established beliefs, a kind of stirring the soil to allow new air and light in. And if we’re open to that, we may just find Christ where we least expected him, or chose not to see him before.

I don’t believe in transubstantiation, but I hope those that do will forgive me that. Here is our common ground: Like you, I’m hungry to know, “even for a fleeting moment / the physicality of unseen union,” I have a deep “gnawing to know / beyond symbol or creed / [Christ’s] body present. / [His] life poured into me.”

I believe we can commune over that much and more, together “nourish[ing] the ache” and leaning across whatever table we might share to whisper to one another, “Say it’s more than symbol.”

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Lee Kohman

is one of the many talented poets featured in the recently released Habitations, Vol. II, a collection of the generous work of The Habitation Poetry Collective. I commend the book to you.

Now over to you, dear reader. What does this poem stir in you? What lines stand out and stick with you?

1. Christian Wiman, "Ifs Eternally," in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 226.

*Originally published in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal. Shared with permission of the author.