A rough climb in an arid space (2022)

Approx. read time: 2:30 min.

One day in prayer, a year or so before the pandemic, I receive an understanding. 

It arrives so clear that I know I need to make note of it: A time will come when I will be deprived of Eucharist. Maybe calamity will visit the land. Maybe churches will be shuttered. Maybe I’ll be in prison. I tuck this premonition away for safekeeping.

Now, some time later, I’m sitting in the paddle-armed chair in the path lab. Something’s not right with my blood. I feel at peace as the vial fills with the precious deep red fluid. Unawares, the memory of my earlier insight threads its way into this moment. Unawares, peace washes over me, and the words silently come: Take my blood! I am unafraid! I know Whose Blood it is!

Now, well past the season of pandemic, my region’s bishop declares that communion from the cup will no longer be available to the common folk. Apparently it’s deemed unnecessary, or too risky. Someone might receive unworthily, or irreverently, or without fully understanding What they are receiving.

Yes? I don’t recall Jesus setting such a high, exclusionary bar for encountering him. He was known—and despised—for dining with sinners. His bad-hearted betrayer supped with him at his last meal.

So, now I find refuge and consolation in a wasteland. I may be deprived, on Sunday mornings, of the Blood of the Beloved, the Blood of innocents, of prophets, witnesses, and frontline martyrs; the Blood of the poor, the uprooted, the banished. I may be deprived of the Blood of those whisked off to the dungeons of torture, the abducted, sold, exploited; the Blood of those deceived, stripped of their humanity, locked out from the circle of life. 

Yet, I know Whose Blood, already and everlastingly, flows in my veins.

This knowing, and remembering, is both consolation and peace in the interior wasteland where I live.

Read “Whose Blood Flows In My Veins” in my collection of stories, Living as Jesus Taught. Or listen to the spoken word version wherever you get your music; and downloadable on my album Free To Be Free, at marysharonmoore.com.

Be well. Live in peace. Love one another. And please, share this post!