The Cup We Share
For every person who has believed in heaven and Resurrection, but cried anyway.
During a December church service right before Communion, I saw an infant dressed for Christmas, all bows and red, and I was hit with a wave of fresh grief over our four babies. While my body held each one of them, I had dreamt of being pregnant at Christmastime, or the first December I’d get to dress them in a tiny, beautiful holiday outfit. Grief consists of millions of small, insignificant, already real-to-me dreams that die along with them.
As I closed my eyes and felt the familiar ache, another Communion came rushing back to me.
I’ve never drunk of the cup the same after partaking of it while losing one of my children; the pain so visceral and biting, it brought me to my knees. The dark liquid never more vital or symbolic. Tears blurred my vision as I drank. The spiritual and natural life intermingling, flowing in and out: the mystery of Communion. Pain and power, loss and renewal, destruction and creation, birth and death — all contained within my frame.
An entire lifetime in one moment.
As we took the bread, I experienced it anew, tears stinging my eyes.
It tasted of a mother’s raw grief.
The shock of knowing your child’s heart stopped before your own. The emptiness of your arms when you long to hold them, but they’re gone from your sight. The helplessness of watching their life slip beyond reach.
As I consumed the elements, I was acutely aware of my own body. A body that had carried life and now carried death. A body now hollow with the ache of what could have been.
Suddenly, I wasn't just remembering Christ's suffering; I was thinking about His mother. I had considered her faithfulness and trust, but not her grief, nor her loss. She, like her Son, was well-acquainted with grief. I felt accompanied in my grief in a new, unexpected way.
For the first time, I wondered whether Mary had ever tasted this same ache at the Communion table after her Son left earth and returned to His Father in glory. How strange that table must have been for the woman whose own body helped form His. What did she feel as she held the bread that symbolized the body she once carried beneath her heart?
Did Mary cry when they gathered in a house, around a table, and commemorated the day that still haunts her mind’s eye, her Son’s very body, broken for them? Did she tremble, taking the bread, remembering how it felt to hold Him? The only mother in history to hold her Child before death, after death, and beyond it?
Each Communion reaches forward to the Marriage Feast of the Lamb and echoes back through the centuries to that first meal in the Upper Room: “Take and eat, drink… do this in remembrance of Me”. A time-lapse sequence, millions of sacred moments. The apostles and disciples. Church fathers and mothers. Martyrs and saints. Mary.
You.
Me.
Jesus.
Did the wine in her cup remind her of standing at the cross, every fiber of her being screaming as she watched her Son slip away? Did her breath catch in her throat as she stared into the sanguine depths in her hand? Did she have to remind herself, “I hugged His resurrected body, the One covered in scars and glory. I know He’s alive and I’ll see Him again”?
The resurrected Christ still carried His wounds.
Perhaps the woman who loved Him did too.
Did her heart race when she remembered the nails, even though she had touched His resurrected hands? Did her body remember the cross even while her soul rejoiced in His Resurrection and Spirit?
Did she ponder in her heart that even the most beautiful story God could write still passed through a mother’s sorrow? Did she understand that redemption itself had come by way of a bitter cup?
Did she hold faith and ache in the same trembling hands? Did she miss Him without shame, knowing that hope does not erase love’s desire to be near?
Did she ever long to have Him back with her in flesh and bone, even when it felt wrong to wish? Did she tenderly recall the days He dwelt beneath her heart, a silent companion so beloved and safe?
Did the One who wept at Lazarus’s tomb count her tears as sacred, even as He comforted her with His Spirit and prepared to make all things new?
Did she dream of their reunion, when she would once again behold the Face that peered up at her from her arms on that holy night? Did her heart swell at the thought of bowing before Him and hearing her Son call her by name?
I think if I could ask her, she would understand.
She would understand my heartbreak,
the way I long for the day
when we all sit at the same table
and, for the first time, I get to
wrap my arms around their necks
and hear four little voices call me:
Mama.