The common cup.

Wake up and smell the miraculous cups of church coffee.

OUR WEEKLY MASS HERE IN OREGON CONCLUDES, as many do in America, with personal remarks from the pastor and then a last blessing and a cheerful final song and procession down the aisle and then a melting of the congregation from the pews into the bright capacious lobby, where we gather anew around another table--this one graced not by the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, but by the dough nuts and coffee from the local supermarket, courtesy of (I kid you not) the parish's Doughnut and Coffee Committee.

To the sugar-encrusted crullers and bear-claws and maple bars my children fly like arrows, and soon they, too, are sugar-encrusted, and reaching for seconds and accidentally eating parts of their napkins and chasing other children through the thicket of their parents' legs.

Meanwhile, their parents have gone to the common well and from it drawn a most interesting elixir, the liquid that more than any other is the common (burned) tongue of American Catholicism: coffee. Ubiquitous but generally unremarkable, absorbed by many but the absorption of very few, church coffee is, I believe, both the ground--or grounds--on which so many congregations stand together and the energizing lifeblood of parish life.

Consider: Coffee is what we drink together after Mass. It is served after Baptisms, First Communions, weddings, Confirmations. It is served at wakes and after funerals. It is served at parish-council meetings, at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the church basement, at parish school board meetings, at bingo games, at the annual dance, the annual raffle, the annual welcoming-new-parishioners potluck.

It is served and spilled so often that there are hundreds if not thousands of church basements and lobbies and rectory and auditorium kitchens, in which the aroma of decades of coffee infuses the very walls. Even sacristies can develop the smell of the boisterous bean; I think of the sacristy in which I spent my altar-boy years, a room that smelled wonderfully of cigars, coffee, incense, candles, red wine, book dust, and starched linen--a particular combination of flavors that no other faith can offer.

I'm not saying that American Catholicism serves good coffee. For the most part it's poor stuff, shoveled from an industrial-size supermarket can and boiled too long in an ancient urn, and it's generally weaker than the plot of a summer novel. Sometimes it's worse than poor; one friend told me of a parish where excess coffee from one week was simply saved to the next and boiled again. But sometimes the coffee is extraordinary: I remember a cup in a Massachusetts parish that nearly melted my teeth and a cup at an Oregon ordination anniversary that was so good I sought out the honoree for an explanation. "I brought the beans myself," he said, grinning.

There are many miraculous liquids in American Catholicism--the wine that becomes the Blood of Christ, the cleansing water that cascades over the squalling newborn, the oils that anoint new priests and the dying faithful, the tears wept over newborns welcomed and newlyweds wedded and the dead blessed, and the milk that mothers make for their holy children in an ancient miracle most reminiscent of the Madonna and her stunning Child.

But, all due respect to the wine that becomes blood in the mysterious miracle of our faith, I believe that those mediocre cups of coffee are our most elevating elixirs as a community of believers. That coffee, searingly bad as it can be, comes from the hand of a friend and is shared by all but children; it is a gift freely given and so priceless; it is a sign of brotherhood in a society so often devoted to celebrating the individual; and it is, however rough, an agent of awakening. So it is eerily like the Eucharist, is it not?

And, I say, affably, steaming Cup in hand, leaning against the lobby wall, maybe this coffee is not unlike Jesus himself, who gave himself and his searing message to us freely, so that we might be awakened both to the vast holiness of the quotidian and to the promise of the savory cup of holy and joyous life to come.

By BRIAN DOYLE, editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of Credo (St. Mary's Press, 1999), a collection of essays about faith.