Last week, I took communion for the first time.

When I was young, my mother had "communion duty". I would stand, fidgeting in the back of the choir loft, running my fingers over the hot polyester of the robes, the cool satin of the sashes. I smelled the decaying sheet music and flicked the silk altar flowers, springing them into one another, at the behest of my fingers on shelves covered in dust. I would beg to use the funnel. It looked like the funnels my father used to oil the cars so that they would continue to carry us from one day to the next. But this funnel was holy. It had a button that, when pressed, dispensed the perfect amount of dark, sweet, dry grape juice into tiny crystal shotglasses. They were arranged in a circular pattern, a bullseye, in garish, brass trays. Heavy, cumbersome trays. All of that crystal tinkling in the brass as it passed through the pews sounded like the kiss-begging toasts at a wedding. But it was never followed with the same laughter. It was grave. And each week, one of the four elders stood at the pulpit to remind us of all we had done and how horribly he had died and how important this juice had to be. And I would remember the funnel my father used to oil the cars so that they would continue to carry us from one day to the next and I think I thought the juice did the same.

It's always been a ritual of appeasement for me. An offering on an altar. A laying down of something. And I've always felt that I didn't do it well enough. I wasn't sacrificial enough. I didn't take the confession seriously enough. I wasn't reflective enough or penitent enough or grave enough. I couldn't make it mean enough. Even if I vowed, with every fiber of my being that after this moment, I would remember, I would understand, I would be better, I knew it wasn't true. Communion always felt like a grasping act. Never enough. I think filling my own communion cups with that little funnel had gotten to me.

Last night, one of the prompts at Stations of the Cross asked me how it felt to vow never to deny Jesus. And the immediacy of it hit me. All of the disciples, Peter & Judas included, vowed never to deny him and he gave them the cup anyway. He knew they wanted it to be true, they desperately wanted to be loyal, to understand and to follow and he knew they couldn't help but fail and he did it anyway. He sat and ate and drank with them. He broke for them. He rose for them. There was this immediacy of him being with his friends, sitting and eating and drinking- this closeness of knowing that Peter chewed with his mouthful and Thomas was a hopeless case and Judas' impatience would get him in the end. He sat with them, and knowing they were bound to fail him, he did it anyway. They weren't enough. He did it anyway. I'm not enough. He did it anyway. I'll never be enough, and still, he wants to sit and eat with me.

So, even though I've filled a thousand tiny shotglasses, torn hunks of bread, broken snips of crackers and drunk more Welch's grapejuice than a Baptist teetotaller, until last night, I had never really sat down, taken a breath and eaten. I acknowledged that even though this is an epiphany, I will probably forget it later. And I realized that Jesus knows this. And he did it anyway.

It was a good meal.

Good Friday to you- today and every day.