One Body, with Feeling
One Body, with Feeling
In a small church group at my sponsoring parish, before I discerned God’s call to the priesthood, I and the rest of the group were asked to come up with a metaphor for our spiritual lives. Back then, I chose a boomerang. You know something of how I went from Baptist to Episcopal, from a spirituality based solely on the Bible to one based equally on the Holy Eucharist. That became for me the “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine” that Holy Scripture alone couldn’t give me. Though I doubt the that the Baptist Fanny Crosby intended that when she wrote the hymn. But she’s the one who added, “O, what foretaste of glory divine.” That’s one turn of the boomerang.
The second turn happened while I was worshiping here at what was then St. James, reveling in the new found glories of Anglo-Catholicism. But back then my Jungian personality type was INTP, emphasis on the “Thinking” as opposed to “Feeling.” I wanted truth, I wanted certainty. And not for the first time, an Anglo-Catholic decided that Episcopal ambiguity was too discomfiting and decided to “swim the Tiber.” That’s a boomerang for sure.
So Laura and I, along with our newborn son, navigated between Blessed Sacrament and Grace, both in Alexandria where we had moved in 1990. One Sunday when I slept in, Laura came home with John from Grace, got him lunch, and then asked him to tell me what he’d had in church. After a little rewinding of the tape in his brain, John’s eyes lit up, and he said, “I had Jesus Christ!” That’s what he called it, and that’s as good an understanding coming from a toddler as I’ve heard from any adult. Over a year later, Laura wasn’t able to go to church one Sunday, and so I took John with me to Blessed Sacrament. When it came time for communion, I told John that in this church you had to be “older” to have Jesus Christ. Several weeks later, it was me and John again in the Roman Catholic church. This time, as I picked him up take with me so that he could at least get a blessing, he looked up at me and said, “I’m older now.”
I never took him with me again. And over time, as folks at Grace got used to seeing the Kendricks there together, I found myself roped into a ministry for our Salvadoran neighbors, participating in the book club, the Thursday Potluck, and taking communion. And still, it came as a shock to me when, on the 2nd of January, 1999, when the Chair of the Vestry Nominating Committee called to see if I would be a candidate.
In 1st Corinthians, St. Paul writes, “We all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” I like to paraphrase that as — Opinions puff up, but love builds up — I realized that where Jesus had made me a “living member” — a limb, an organ — of his Eucharistic Body was in The Episcopal Church, with all its glorious ambiguity. When asked when was I “born again.” I say April 3rd, 1999, at the Easter Vigil at Grace, when I was received back into the full communion of The Episcopal Church. For it was then that I recognized that the search for the truth that sets us free was not my solitary quest, but could only be discerned with my fellow living members.
I no longer trouble myself with philosophical questions about how exactly Jesus is fully present on that altar. But I trust his word. “Re-presenting” is a better translation of the Greek anamnesis, normally translated as “remembrance;” because when we share bread and wine, and repeat his words, “This is my body…This is my blood…Do this for the anamnesis of me,” we aren’t just remembering what he said and did. We are re-presenting what he said and did, so that in eating him and drinking him, Jesus feeds us with his own risen life. And no longer are we alone in our hopes, doubts, and fears; we are one in joy, peace, and love.
As the years have passed and I’ve taken the Jungian personality test again, it hasn’t changed much, just from an INTP to INFP, from “Thinking” to “Feeling,” with my fellow members, my fellow humans, my fellow creatures. I believe that the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion of Christ’s Body and Blood, has nourished me with fellow feeling for my siblings in Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. And giving him time, Christ will nourish you with whatever you need most to be a living member of his Body the Church
June 07, 2026
Second Sunday after Pentecost: Corpus Christi
The Rev. David Kendrick