This summer, my wife and I left our children in the care of her parents and headed off to hike Pilot Mountain, which is about a half-hour’s drive from her childhood home in central North Carolina. When my wife was a girl, her family occasionally drove up the mountain after church for lunch.
She and I parked at the base of the mountain and leisurely followed the winding trail underneath the canopy of trees, the dappled light touching upon fallen leaves and seas of emerald ferns. At the top, we found the outcropping of rocks that created a small cave. My wife crouched inside and posed for a picture — just like she did as a child. I texted her photo to my in-laws.
Last Monday I thought about that picture when scrolling through Facebook. A number of friends had posted first-day-of-school pictures of their children standing on the front steps holding either a dry-erase board or chalkboard with their grade level written in a big, block number. This was the same pose as previous years …
But in North Carolina, these students were not heading from their front steps to their school buildings. Everyone turned back inside to login to their laptops for virtual classrooms.
Why snap the photos of the same pose as previous years? Is it merely for the sake of nostalgia? Are we simple creatures of habit? Is this act a product of wishful thinking?
Later that week, I logged into Zoom for our midweek Communion. In breaking the bread before the laptop camera, I say the same Words of Institution as I would at the Lord’s Table in our sanctuary. Since we’ve celebrated the sacrament online, however, I’ve been more aware of Christ’s choice of the word “broken.”
This is my body, broken …
The body of the church feels broken, fragmented, damaged to me, although the two dozen members shown on my laptop wear brave smiles in their little boxes and beat back my despair.
I look at previous years on my own Facebook page and find my firstborn posing on our front steps before heading off to kindergarten, then first grade. He was younger, of course, but the greatest difference is not visible in the pictures — my expectations. My previous self on the other side of the camera had taken for granted that my son would head off to school in the fall, a leaving as reliable as the tree leaves changing color. Things seemed to fit together back then, the pieces falling into place in predictable patterns.
Who knows what the next month will bring, much less the next year? Yet, I continue to receive the bread of life, remembering that Christ continues to give himself for the sake of the world and that, but for the grace of God, go I … hiking along the winding trail through the valleys and peaks.
After my wife and I returned from Pilot Mountain, my father-in-law pulled out a family photo album. (Remember those relics of the pre-smart phone era?) Flipping to the middle, he found a picture of my wife taken when she was about the age of our firstborn now. She posed on top of Pilot Mountain in that same tiny cave. Of course, her appearance has changed over 30 years.
But the shimmer of her smile is still the same.
