On the Sundays when my husband Blake plays bass for worship service, I arrive an hour early and read while he rehearses. I have read manifestos and short stories in this time, Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer. Before service, my church’s office lounge seems to me a sort of borderland, a transitory place where the things that will become holy have not yet been infused, touched, zapped to life with God’s animating bolt. There are no instruments of worship or baptismal fonts; there are guitars, bowls. There is my pastor, Will, covering a stack of gluten free pita pockets with a creased white napkin, filling small cups with a plastic dispenser. He presses the dispenser’s red button and out flows port; he releases the button and it cuts off. Half an ounce in each cup, not a drop spilled. I’ve lost my place in my book admiring the precision.

“That’s quite the tool,” I finally interject. Will laughs. “They don’t tell you about these in seminary,” he says, “but we all find our way to the church supply store eventually.”

“Is the wine from the church store too?” I ask. He laughs again, but differently this time – more to himself, deeper, knowing. “No, we buy this from Trader Joe’s.” Will pauses, looks at me, then at a closet, and then back at me. The corner of his mouth pushes into a grin. He walks toward the closet and opens the door. I see two dozen dark glass bottles, each with the same label: PORT MORGADO / 10 YEARS OLD / OLD TAWNY.

I lean back in my chair, laughing. “I know,” Will says. “We tried switching to the port from Hy-Vee at one point, but some congregants complained that it didn’t have the same depth. So we switched back.”

I return to my book while Will fills the remaining cups. Then he carries the pita and port away on silver platters. Later, I peer into the waste bin and see torn bits of foil, two glass bottles, and a crumb-filled package stamped with the words “Toast Me!”

Our help is in the name of the Lord, Will proclaims from the pulpit. Who made heaven and earth, we echo back the words in bold.

This feels like a poetry reading, I think. Will’s live performance of Psalm 124. Or maybe a public chant. More corporate, more involved. One moment we’re all trickling in from the street, still thinking about an oil change or the laundry, the next we’re facing the pulpit, reciting words with our lips while our minds catch up.

Abrupt, yes. Like a portal. Our minds arrive where our bodies already are. Or they are delivered. But yes, a portal. Will calls out again – Bless the Lord, O my soul! – and the words grab at us, carry us across some line. Praise the Lord! we respond. Full-throated, feet planted, present in a way that we were not before.

Blake joins Dan, the pianist, on stage. The stage is a simple platform made of concrete and covered in area rugs. No smoke machine, no spotlights, no lyrics projected with soothing nature backdrops. Just some guitars and a piano.

Dan plays the first few notes and people’s eyes lock on to their song sheets. We’re singing a new rendition of an old hymn. Many of us are confused by the changes. We hesitate, limp through the verses. I suspect the arranger has made a career of mangling perfectly good hymns. Blake knows this. Throughout the song, he peeks up from his bass and makes faces at me. His faces say, “We can listen to the real version on the drive home” and, “I’m sorry to inflict this upon you.” I make faces back at him: “You hear that real confident harmony attempt coming from the back row?”

I should confess that I dislike church singing. It makes me uncomfortable. I stare at lyrics I already know because I don’t know where else to look. I do occasionally feel affected, but then suspicion shoots up my spine. I glance at the people who sway with raised hands. There must be something insincere or performative slipping in, I think.

I want to bury these thoughts. I want to let myself be moved. I am staring through the lyrics, absentmindedly singing the invitation I need to hear.

Today, God’s voice comes to me through Fred. Fred is another of our elders, a plasma physicist who grew up in a log cabin in upstate New York. He wears the same pilling tweed sports coat every Sunday. He is small. I see him press against the handrail as he climbs toward the pulpit. It is Fred’s job to announce that God has forgiven us. He takes this job seriously. When he reaches the pulpit he cranes his neck upward so he can look us in the eye when he tells us. Then he opens his mouth. When he speaks, I hear God.

I hear God say that in Him is no darkness at all and that the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin, words God first spoke through his poetic apostle, John, words God now speaks through Fred. You might think these layers of mediation would curdle the message beyond repair, like a game of telephone. Yet if there’s distortion, it’s not absolute. Something true makes it out the other side. Out of Fred. Something absolving such as in Christ we are forgiven. As to how the message survives, I cannot say. But when the physicist opens his mouth, God pours out, God’s words.

Will returns to the pulpit and asks us the question scripted in our bulletin: Christian, what do you believe? We respond with the Nicene Creed.

Creed: from the Latin credo, meaning I believe. So the creed asks: Do you really believe these things? Do you claim them? Are they yours? I consider these questions and watch mothers trace the words with their pointer fingers, helping their children follow along. One boy is about a half second behind the rest of us. He’s still learning how to keep pace with the group. To chase these lines, struggling to conform your voice to their cadence – that’s a feeling I know.

The boy doesn’t have his l’s and w’s sorted out yet, and I hear him say descended into Hewul. I can’t blame him. Hell is a hard word. It stings. Years ago I tried to paraphrase the creed in my own words to see if I could render its vocabulary softer. I don’t know that it was originality I wanted, maybe just something to solidify the words as mine.

Hard as I tried to preserve the creed’s substance, I just couldn’t capture it. My versions were apologetic. They leaned on euphemisms, rehearsed palatable doctrines that take no guts to espouse. Hell became brokenness. Judge became meet. I suppose that kind of hedging is what the creed strengthens me against. I am a coward who needs a poem, a chant, a credo with a backbone. No hiding places. No softening. We hold ourselves to these words. We are bent toward the creed. Bent by it. We do not change it. It changes us.

A welcome reprieve in the service after so much earnestness. Children skip to the front of the sanctuary. Some army-crawl under the pews, bumping ankles and spilling paper cups of coffee on their way. Gracie, age three, climbs up the side of the pulpit.

Will has a question for the kids. What’s your favorite toy?

“Sonic the Hedgehog.” “Big truck.” “My binocular compound microscope.” “Doll.”

Will latches on to answer number four. “That doll,” he begins, “you bought it with your own money, right?”

“No Pastor Will, kids don’t have money,” a child responds. The others nod.

But Will presses in. “What do you mean? How do you get toys if you don’t have money to buy them?”

“We got birthdays and Christmas,” the children’s spokesperson says.

“Ooooh,” Will performs. “So what I’m hearing you say is that you receive toys as gifts. Is that right?”

“Yes, Pastor Will.”

“You know,” he says, finger on his chin, “the Bible has a lot to say about gifts. Everything we have – our families, our homes, even our toys – are gifts that God has given us. And the story we’re going to look at in today’s sermon is about a time when God’s people gave their gifts back to God because –”

“’Cause we should love God, right?”

“Yes, that’s right! And so as you head back to your seats, let’s think about how we could use the gifts God has given us to serve him.”

Children return to the seats the same way they came: skipping, sprinting, diving under the pews. Dan plays an instrumental to smooth the transition. I’m left wondering who the children’s message is really for. I’m sure the kids retain bits from the lessons, but the adults are the ones who get to watch.

And by watch, I’m talking about Gracie climbing the pulpit and Will’s twin daughters biting each other. I think those moments are the point. May we never be above hearing about big trucks. May we learn to laugh at ourselves more. I have to imagine that’s at least part of what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Let the children come to me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Jan approaches the pulpit with a leather-bound Bible. He sets the book down and flips its tissue-paper pages to Exodus. Scritta paper, it’s called. A thin, woodless blend reinforced with cotton fibers. The microphone picks up the sound: airy, sharp. I hear the pews creak and realize we’re standing for the Scripture reading.

Jan is a writer from Puerto Rico. He loves books. He loves details. He writes Spanish love poems that I do not understand but that possess a rhythm and pulse and music I appreciate. Jan’s name is pronounced with a soft a. He is very gracious when people mispronounce it. He helps us find the right vowel, practices with us.

Jan is reading from Exodus 35, where Moses solicits donations for the construction of the tabernacle. This is a strange passage. It’s a list of materials: tanned ram skins, twined linen, scarlet yarn, onyx stones, goat hair, acacia wood. There’s no narrative for the congregation to latch on to in a reading like this. There are only quick images, names of goods that will be cut and cobbled into something holy. But it’s hard to feel that potential now. Perhaps Jan senses this. Perhaps he understands that the yarn and the wood will become something in a way we do not see. So he helps us get there. He draws us in with his cadence, finds the meter underneath the lines. I see Fred lean in when Jan says ram skins. I roll acacia over in my mouth. I never thought a list of building materials could sound poetic. Or charged, the way Jan makes them sound. His attention and eloquence are a kind of prayer.

This is the Word of the Lord, Jan says. Thanks be to God, we respond – for the Word and for its reader, and for the leather-bound scritta pages he carries back to his pew, knowing full well the book in his hand is more than a pile of paper.

Will rubs hand sanitizer around his palms, then pulls back the creased white napkin. He reveals God, resting on the table. A stack of gluten-free pita pockets. Will prays and then tears God into pieces. We are silent – moved, even.

“My body, broken for you,” Jesus summarized, handing bread to his apostles. Will says the same words now.

I sometimes think about the Twelve during the Last Supper. What must’ve been going through their heads when their rabbi, prone to strange sayings, declared the bread his flesh? Did they recall his sermon from Capernaum, where he claimed he was bread from heaven? “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, there is no life in you,” he told the crowds. This teaching was a hard one. Many followers had turned and headed home for good.

And what the rabbi had asked them next – did the Twelve recall that? Did they recall him asking, “Do you also want to leave?” Did they recall their silence, broken only by brave Simon Peter, who managed to blurt out: “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Translation: I haven’t a clue what point you’re trying to make. But you are God, and the psalmist said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” So feed me. Feed us.

Or I suppose that’s what Peter meant. That plea helps me understand the way I suddenly, fiercely, always long for the Meal. It explains why the strangeness doesn’t crowd out the reverence I feel right now.

“Feast with Christ, and feast upon Christ,” I hear Will say, and return from my ponderings. He’s inviting us forward. Row by row, we approach the table and circle back to our seats. I watch my peers and wonder how they’re experiencing the moment.

I watch Marc walk up the center aisle. Marc is a quiet man. He wears button-down long sleeve shirts and glasses. He attended the church for thirteen years before making his vows of church membership on the same spring Sunday that I made mine. But here is what I love most about Marc. When he reaches the front of the communion line, he stops and waits for Will to look up from the platter of torn pitas. Then Marc bows. Slow and deliberate and deep, clear at the waist, his hands clasped together on his chest. And though the two of them have never spoken of this ritual, Will bows back. This time. Every time. With love and delight in his face. Never rushed, never shallow. Then Marc reaches out his hands to receive the bread, and Will offers his blessing: “The body of Christ, broken for you, Marc.”

I believe that this too is a miracle of the Meal. Not just the Spirit of God descending on the scene or the transformation of a loaf, but two men bowing over something as quotidian as pita bread, confessing with sealed lips and bent bodies: “He must increase, but I must decrease,” while the organ resounds behind them. And what should feel ludicrous feels holy, and we look knowingly at the morsels in our palms, and we are reminded that God has always communed with his people in the most ragged of mediums: in a tent, a bush, a box, a cloud, a man.