Soccer, dance, gymnastics and basketball. Band practice, Scouting meetings for both girls and boys, jobs for all in every shift. Any family with a child today knows how many things pull for the family's attention, and those which have more than one active young person can only feel pulled apart. Gone are the days when the average American family sits at the dinner table and spends just a half hour of the day together. And the idea of eating becomes an exercise to satisfy only a physical need for nourishment and never acknowledges the spiritual and emotional need to be nourished by family. Oftentimes the best lessons of life were learned around a meal when issues were worked out and conversation had the glimmer of hope to offer help and support in crisis. The idea of a meal connecting the members of a family together in the midst of separate and often disparate lives, may have fallen by the wayside in our homes, but still searches for acceptance and value in our churches. The gathering of the parish family around the table of the altar, every member to be included, is such a necessary part of who we are as a faith community. For just one hour a week, the young and the old, sick and the healthy, rich and the poor, male and female, gather to lift up each others needs and to be fed. Gifts of bread and wine, representative gifts of our own basic need for sustenance, are offered humbly to a God that we cannot see, so that they might be transform ed into the very Body and Blood of Christ, the God we can see. We call it Eucharist, and as the third sacrament of initiation, and of our series, completes the process of our becoming part of the family. Like the table sharing of homes long past, the Eucharist is the very place where our stories are told, again, and our needs taken care of. Through the sharing of Scripture and homily we hear once more the startling story of our God's presence in the lives of his people, and not just when the going was good, but especially when times were difficult. In the retelling of the story, we can begin to recognize patterns of behavior by both God and his people, and the innumerable interventions brought by God on behalf of all who claim to be his. We listen again and again, and in through the stories repetition, differing details take on a new clarity, for while the stories themselves may not change, we certainly do. We never get tired of hearing the same tales told with varying degrees of excitement, or by a new set of voices. We laugh and cry, ponder and grow. Like family. Once the story takes hold once again, we pray for a change of heart or perspective. We pray for the ability and the courage to slow down to see and hear more clearly the very presence of the one who will feed us. We give thanks for the food present on the table, and for the one who prepared it through his own sacrifice. And we savor every morsel of bread and wine because we believe it will give us strength to face another day and its inherent challenges. We pull back from the table satisfied for we have taken just a little bit of time away from the craziness that has become our lives and have spent some quality time reflecting on what we have become. The Bread and Wine has truly become one within us, and through our sharing in the one meal, we have become one with each other. Christ himself was made known to us upon our table, and now is made known to others through us who have received him . Like family. The Eucharist we celebrate is abundantly rich in what it can and does provide for our family. It is so important for every member of the family to make every effort to be together for this meal, for when even one is missing, the stories cannot be told in their entirety and the sharing is lacking in perspective. Like the missing person at family meals almost haunts us by their silence, so too the member of our faith community who chooses to go hungry. There is not one member of our parish that does not need to be nourished in word and sacrament, but so many that do not even realize this. They sometimes wait for an invitation, again, to be present, not out of obligation perhaps, but out of a mutual need. Both ours and theirs. We are strengthened when we gather around the table to be fed in every way, and it will be always up to us to make the effort to come home and be present. Like family.

© 2005 Peter J. Andrews