Present Over Perfect

us about Sabbath. Even though most of us didn’t understand
a word of Hebrew in the service, we were welcomed into
their community with such warmth that there was no
translation necessary.
Our friend Ian, an Episcopal priest, taught us something
I’d never heard, something that shaped all of us: on a rainy
night, with the raindrops echoing loudly on the roof, he told
us that we never take communion. We receive communion.
Taking, he said, is what happened in the garden. Receiving
is what will put the world back together again. Ian began his
message by reading a long passage from Patti Smith’s Just
Kids, a book I adore, and it’s moving to me that my lifelong
love for literature and language finds a place in that dark
chapel on Sunday nights.
It feels like a coming together of a thousand threads—
the Episcopal church I attended in college; the longing I felt
as a child to be Catholic, because being a non-Catholic in
Chicago is to be an outsider, missing out on Friday fish fries
and first communions; my lit major focusing on modern
Jewish and Israeli writing, with a special emphasis on the
Holocaust.
Poetry and music, silence and imagination, a wide and
holy space for God to demonstrate his nature to us in all
sorts of ways, drawing us nearer, teaching us to see with
new eyes.
As a reader and a lover of history, it’s so meaningful to
me to balance the relative youth of my tradition with the
deep rootedness of the Catholic church, or the liturgy, or the