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"Holy Communion Reflections"

By Bruce Schrott

My wife and I were in our early twenties having just graduated from college when we moved to a new town to begin our careers. We were cradle United Methodists so we joined the local congregation. It wasn’t long before someone asked us to be the youth group leaders for the senior high students at our church. The youth group traditionally attended a weekend mid-winter retreat each January at Camp Lakeview near Palestine in east Texas. When the time came, we loaded up a van full of students and entered into the adventure with the enthusiasm of youth and absolutely no experience. The weekend was filled with learning and recreational activities for the students along with the obligatory Saturday night dance party. Sunday worship, however, resulted in an experience I could never have imagined.

Worship was filled with the popular praise music and hymns of the time to which the students sang and moved with enthusiasm. I remember the students appearing much more at ease with worship than my wife and I were. We were new to all of this and were mainly trying to get through the service so we could load the students up and return home. We worried out loud with each other about trying not to look too much like neophytes. There were butterfly decorations on the walls in the worship space, likely illustrating a theme I vaguely remember about butterflies being released from their cocoons. It probably symbolized our release from ourselves into the freedom of soaring with the Spirit ,but the details are dim after so many years. However, I do remember the Holy Communion service in vivid detail. My wife and I had participated in the liturgy and received the elements. I remember the bread being very dry and the grape juice was served at a tepid temperature where it had little flavor. We had returned to our seats and I looked around to watch the students moving through the communion process. Suddenly, I had this warm feeling come over me that I had never felt before. I became aware of the presence of God and God’s love in a way I had never known. To this day I can’t recall what triggered all the emotions and have since simply handed it all over to the workings of the Holy Spirit. The warm feeling started in my stomach and moved up through my chest into my shoulders and neck. My heart started beating faster and my body was shaky. Tears of joy filled my eyes. I embarrassingly glanced over at my wife and her eyes were watery as well! The worship service eventually ended and we turned to the activity of packing the van and gathering the students for the trip home. We quickly came down from the mountain, so to speak, and reimmersed ourselves into the activities of careers and maintaining a household. But I couldn’t escape the warmth that filled my heart and a new curiosity I had for learning more about the faith I had so casually been proclaiming up to that point.

Someone said we make our plans then God smiles and proceeds to lead us where God wants us to go anyway. My experience from that Holy Communion service with a large room full of high school students began a transformation I could never have planned for myself. Only the grace of God could have led me to be who I am. It motivated me to study the scriptures. I began to learn the history of the church, to explore the ways we experience the Holy Spirit, and to study the theological foundations of our faith. I also studied the spiritual disciplines, which led me to spend time almost every day in silence and prayer. Along the way I read about John Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” experience and immediately related to the feelings he must have had that night at Aldersgate while listening to someone read from Martin Luther’s introduction to the letter to the Romans. Somewhere on this journey I realized my own mission to have a lot of fun leading, learning, and teaching. I have developed spiritual practices that keep me centered on the love of Christ in my heart, and the love I feel is what moves me to share that love with others. Given the opportunity, I share my stories with people to offer them hope for similar transformation.

The Service of Word and Table, since that Sunday in my early twenties, has continued to be special in a way that is sometimes overwhelming. The kind of bread and juice or wine that are used for the elements, the setting I am in, or who is serving on that particular occasion never seem to stand in the way of what happens deep in my heart each time I receive the elements. Sometimes the prayer of confession has me feeling as though I should crawl toward the altar and beg for the gift being offered.

At other times I feel like running or skipping forward to receive the elements with joy! I listen closely to the Thanksgiving that recalls our history. I anticipate with great hope the taking, blessing, breaking, and offering of the bread of life. The invocation of the Holy Spirit over the elements and the participants always leaves me awestruck. The taste from the cup of forgiveness is always warm and filling. Each and every time I receive the elements, I feel the deep and abiding presence of the living Christ in me.

A long time ago I heard a pastor say that we “remember” Christ into our presence each time we participate in the Holy Communion Liturgy. “Re-membering” for me also gathers a cloud of witnesses around us; my departed brother, parents, and in-laws, and the saints both recent and past. Whenever I can, I kneel at the altar and when I can’t, I return to my seat. Either way, I offer a prayer of thanks to God for my own life and each member of my immediate family. I pray their names and offer them to God thanking God for the honor of loving and being loved by them. These prayers then sustain me until the next time I can participate in the liturgy.

My story continues and I constantly wonder how God could want to love someone like me. I move back and forth between periods of lightness and darkness. Sometimes my prayers feel hollow and empty. I spent days in isolation during the COVID pandemic wondering where God was. Our pastoral leadership allowed space for us to participate in Holy Communion through video feeds, yet the trust I have in God’s constant presence sustained me even when I wasn’t feeling God’s presence directly. I have never let go of that deep trust that God is always present, always creating, always working in all people since that Sunday at Camp Lakeview so many years ago. The love I feel is very real for me and it comes from somewhere deep inside me where I know that Christ must surely reside. And I know, if it is in me, then it has to be in everyone else as well.

Bruce Schrott was born in central Kansas and grew up on the Kansas prairies where the Milky Way was awe inspiring on clear nights, the horizons felt infinite, and you could watch thunderstorms roll in from miles away. He and his wife, Peggy, attended high school and Kansas State University together and were married while in college. They moved to Lake Jackson, Texas, after college to start their careers and raised their two children there. They moved to Sanford, Michigan in 2006 then to Georgetown, Texas after Bruce retired from The Dow Chemical Company to be closer to their two “Grandma magnets.” Bruce’s idea of paradise is the tall grass prairies of the Kansas Flint Hills.

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