“To be grateful for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness” (Brennan Manning).

I love taking the Eucharist, especially at Kairos. The way Chris Brooks leads us through the liturgy from The Book of Common Prayer has a profound way of centering my thoughts on the elements of the bread and the wine, and the sacrifice they represent.

When you receive the blood shed for you and the body broken for you, whether you believe that’s symbolic or the actual body and blood, you remember. You give thanks not just with your words but with your actions.

Eucharist at times is like singing the doxology in darkness. In the midst of your worst week, Eucharist reminds you that the worst won’t last but that the best is yet to come. It reminds us that nothing that comes at us, whether it be loss or pain or death, can ever truly separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Eucharist reminds us all that none of us are entitled or worthy to receive the broken bread and spilled out wine but that Christ makes us worthy. Communion says that those who were once outsiders, enemies, and strangers to the promises of God have now been brought near through the Cross and are now sons and daughters of God, friends, and partakers and heirs of all the promises of God.