Bread & Wine: Millennials & Anglicanism, Pt 2 | S.K. Munday

Bread and wine, body and blood.

We take these symbols into our bodies as a reminder of why His was broken for us. It is a poetry of contradiction: at once elegiac and jubilant, solemn and effervescent with hope. It is a corporeal experience that signifies the immaterial and eternal promise of Christ. Holy communion is a complex, offensive, beautiful, and jarring liturgical practice. 

The centrality of Eucharist in Anglican worship ensures a consistent confrontation with God’s love and how it consumes every reason we do not deserve it. It is a reckoning and a reclaiming, a call to not only consume but to be consumed. It is a reminder that love should bend us into better shapes. 

The significance of Eucharist in Anglican liturgy is a great comfort to me.

It is what assures me time and time again that it was right to return to the Church. Years of wandering alongside other disaffected Millennials had left me certain Christ could be seen everywhere except in a pew. Yet it is Eucharist–one of Christianity’s most overt rituals–that draws me through the doors each Sunday morning. 

Yet I did not always feel this way. My religious upbringing did not emphasize Eucharist, nor did the countless ‘Millennial-friendly’ churches I attended throughout my twenties. Though never explicitly stated, there was a sense that Holy Communion was a superfluous ritual, one that did not require regular attention. 

Millennials tend to believe the best love requires no sacrifice or disruption or discomfort.

As insatiable consumers, we are eager to be entertained and catered to. We want the Church to shape itself around us, to provide bespoke experiences that ask little of us. We often view spiritual experiences as steps toward self-actualization, rather than holiness. We snub tradition as if it is a virtue to be ignorant of the past. 

But Eucharist does not pander to ego or aesthetics.

It does not aid in our relentless quest toward self-optimization, nor does it affirm our perception of love. In short, Eucharist is nothing we want but everything we need. And rightly so. Appealing to our inherent narcissism does not illuminate the relevance of the Church–it destroys it. As Saint Teresa cautions, when we “separate our life from the Eucharist…something shatters.” 

About the Author: Stefanie (S.K.) Munday, is a writer and high school English teacher who currently attends Christ Our Hope Anglican Church in Olympia, WA with her husband, Travis.