Nielsen’s Nook

Every now and then things just come together in such a way that one has the sense that God is writing his poetry across one’s life. Today has been a moment like that for me.

My daughter, Ashley, has been patiently waiting for admission to the Lord’s Table for months now. Recently she would address the priests directly while Cynthia and I were receiving the elements, saying (sometimes a bit loudly), “I want the Body of Christ too!”

We went to a class on the Eucharist yesterday where a pair of very gifted people taught her a bit about the Good Shepherd and the Table. Today when we went forward for Communion, Ashley was in my arms. We knelt down as a family at the sanctuary rail and I helped her put her hands together extending towards our dear Father Houk. I watched him put the wafer in her hand and the tears just flooded me as they do now while I write this.

There is something most moving about a God who would commune with us, not by merit in ourselves, not on the basis of our performance, not by our ability to articulate fine points of theology, but on the basis of His love to us. It is Christ who chided and perhaps continues to chide his disciples for impeding children from coming to him. He is a God who wants us to grow up into him and that is precisely what happens in the Eucharist as we receive Christ in worship throughout our lives. Indeed, the mystery of the Eucharist is that all of scholarship and all the mysticism from all the ages cannot circumscribe the mystery of God communing with his people through mere bread and wine.

It seemed then, so perfect, that after Ashley’s first Eucharist, we went to the Dallas Arboretum and celebrated the beauty of these botanical gardens, which embody the participation of humanity with God. For nature is gorgeous and yet the Lord has created such that humans can order nature into gardens. The beauty of a garden is that it is an organic sermon that proclaims God’s participation with humanity even now. To watch Ashley run through the grass, wanting to smell every flower along every path, lifted the wonder of the Arboretum to the level of the magical.

Thank you Lord, for the most wonder-filled Father’s Day ever.