40 Days of Compassion

One of my favorite aspects of Christian worship is the sacrement of communion, a time when we gather at the table to take part in the bread and the wine. Some prefer to intinct (partially dip) the host in the wine. You’ll occasionally happen upon a church that distributes tiny, shotglass-like individual cups. My personal preference is to drink from the common cup.

This morning, I happened to be thinking about communion and realized that the reason I am partial to drinking from the chalice is because it reminds me that this thing I do once a week at church is something countless believers are doing around the world and have been doing for thousands of years. It is something I have in common with such a large body of people.

This got me to thinking about the physical act of eating. We all must eat, which can be both wonderful (gathering with family, enjoying a friend’s expert cooking) or terrible (some have no one to eat with, or worse, nothing to even eat) and this one aspect of life runs as a connecting line through all of humanity.

So, now I’m thinking all those people I will encounter today, all the talking heads I see on the 24-hour news network, all the people I work with, all the celebrities I will see on the tabloid mag covers- they all share in this one, undeniable fact of life- they all gotta eat.

As I look at people on this humanistic level, it forces me to wonder what other traits we might happen to share. It helps me to overcome my brain’s categorical lumping of all ‘others’ into a separate bin than the one I put myself in.

We’re all in this together and we’re all gonna get hungry at some point. So, how can I help in the feeding of those I encounter today?