The Forgotten Sacrament

Beloved,

Let me begin by saying:

We do not believe in an idea. We believe in a man. A man who wept.

You were not wrong to notice that something in the Church’s language doesn’t always reach the bones.

It speaks often of heaven, rarely of ulcers.

It builds cathedrals while the inner cities grow silent.

It offers songs but stutters when asked about loneliness.

What you have felt is not rebellion. It is fidelity, to the real.

Let me be blunt:

God has never demanded that you deny the ache.

The spiritual life is not an escape from the world.

It is the immersion into it until even your pain becomes the altar.

You were taught, perhaps, that the highest expression of holiness is detachment.

That faith requires becoming immune to doubt, suffering, and flesh.

That was never Christianity.

That was Platonism dressed in piety.

Christianity begins not in escape but in embrace.

The Word became flesh.

Not idea. Not feeling. Not metaphor. Flesh.

And if He came down into it,

then so must we.

That is the scandal of the Incarnation:

not that God is like us, but that God became us.

Utterly. Embarrassingly. Irrevocably.

The same Spirit who brooded over the waters,

who hovered in Mary’s womb,

who groaned in the Garden

that Spirit broods now over your chaos.

Even now.

We must proclaim this in a Church that prefers clean theology over bloodstained truth.

You cannot teach God. You can only reveal Him, like bread broken in the hand of the hungry.

This is why theology divorced from suffering becomes noise.

This is why churches filled with eloquence still feel empty.

Because what we’re starving for is presence.

Not the presence of the triumphant.

But the presence of the broken, the breathing, the weeping—like Him.

I once sat beside a woman who could no longer say the Creed.

Not because she had abandoned Christ,

but because her husband had died coughing blood into her hands.

And the next Sunday, the sanctuary was filled with song,

but none of it spoke of blood on tile floors.

She looked at me and said, “Where is God who bleeds?”

And I thought of my priest and friends' final days—

when he called for a Church that didn't start with catechism,

but with communion.

Not ritual communion. Real communion.

The kind that wraps an arm around the addict.

The kind that sits on the floor with a child.

The kind that tastes water and says, Thank You, Lord, for this small miracle.

That kind of communion doesn’t require belief in doctrine.

It requires participation in life.

You are not faithless because you struggle to find God in the prescribed places.

You are faithful precisely because you refuse to pretend.

You do not need to fake certainty.

You are not required to suppress your realism.

The God who took on flesh does not ask you to abandon yours.

He simply invites you to bring it.

Bring the tremble.

Bring the ache.

Bring the divorce, the needle, the silence, the rage.

Not because those things are holy

but because you are.

And where you are is where He wants to begin.

I once heard that same great man say, “The new Church must begin where the old one refused to kneel, on the ground.”

So, let us begin there.

On the ground.

Where the breath of the Spirit still hovers.

Where the crumbs become the Body.

Where the water is not holy, but clean and enough.

If you find yourself today unable to sing,

then whisper.

If you cannot pray, then breathe.

If you cannot believe, then touch something real and say, This, too, is His.

Peace to your realness.

Light to your questions.

Fire to your conscience.

And bread, always, for your journey.

Until tomorrow,

A witness still listening to the Breath