Waking Michael Griffin.

After the death of his best friend's brother, Patrick McCormick found that family and friends had a place to direct their grief: the buffet table. A conversation over a cup of coffee or a shared sandwich helps mourners connect with each other and with the person they have gathered to mourn--just as the words spoken over the bread and wine connect us with Christ's gift of self for all people.

There are days, as my friend Pat Griffin once said, when we really need to believe in the Resurrection, days when we've got to be able to lean hard and fast on the faith that we're not alone or abandoned. As grace would have it, those are often the very times when we can. At least that was my experience during the three days of Michael Griffin's wake and funeral.

Last Monday afternoon I got one of those calls that those of us who are not yet of an age or inclination to read the obituaries never expect. One of those calls that, nonetheless, can come at any time of the day or night, and that moments later has you booking a flight the next morning to a place you haven't been to in years. Pat's youngest brother, Michael, had died suddenly, unexpectedly, the previous afternoon, and the wake for my best friend's youngest sibling would start tomorrow in Brooklyn. Ordinary time had been interrupted, and whatever else had been planned for the days ahead must now be moved, canceled, or forgotten.

Meals to go

Packing that evening for a 7 a.m. flight to Chicago's O'Hare Airport with connections to LaGuardia in New York City, I made one of those lucky choices that always seems later as if it were planned, or inspired. Searching for something to read on the planes, I passed over a couple of half-started novels and picked up a copy of Eugene LaVerdiere's Dining in the Kingdom of God: The Origins of the Eucharist According to Luke (Liturgy Training Publications, 1994), a book that had been sitting on my shelf, waiting for a read. Five hours in the air ought to take care of that and maybe help salve a guilty conscience about missing classes and appointments.

So the next morning, after an airplane breakfast of egg by-products, I opened LaVerdiere's book someplace over Montana and began to read.

In the opening pages of Dining in the Kingdom of God, LaVerdiere argues that the Eucharist is a "gospel event," meaning that in and through our participation in this shared meal we are not just recalling but proclaiming and celebrating the Good News.

"There is only one gospel," LaVerdiere writes, "the gospel of Jesus Christ, telling the Good News of the Savior's life, death, and Resurrection. And as a memorial of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and as the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist is at the very heart of that gospel."

Uncovering the origins of the Eucharist in the gospel account of Luke, LaVerdiere's book walks us through the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and beyond, a pilgrimage marked, as LaVerdiere points out, by 10 eucharistic meals--meals that reveal and proclaim the identity and message of Jesus the Prophet, Christ, and Lord.

In the first seven meals, which Jesus eats with a mixture of friends, Pharisees, sinners, and strangers, LaVerdiere shows us the "radical table fellowship" and gracious hospitality of the one who himself "had no place to

rest his head." In these meals eaten on the road from Galilee to Jerusalem, in dinners shared with those not invited to other banquets, Jesus the Prophet is revealed as one who calls us to repentance and reconciliation and challenges us to make room for those we ignore, despise, and forget. In these accounts, breaking bread with someone is an act of compassion, companionship, forgiveness, and reconciliation--and we are called to do this in memory of the one who has become food and drink for others.

At the same time Luke is also sketching out for us in these meals just what it means to be "church," to be "the Body of Christ." For, as we see in the Book of Acts, the community of disciples of Christ is a community shaped and nurtured by the table fellowship and hospitality of Jesus, a community where disciples proclaim their faith in Jesus by sharing their tables and lives.

The eighth meal in Luke's account is the Last Supper, the meal shared with the disciples who are now to become apostles proclaiming the gospel. Luke shows us Jesus the Christ, our Savior and Messiah, and invites us to share in his Passion, death, and Resurrection by breaking bread with him and each other. As LaVerdiere notes, this very meal is not just the Last Supper, but also the Lord's Supper, the banquet at which we taste and participate in the kingdom of God--where we are called to proclaim the Good News. For LaVerdiere, the Eucharist is our central sacrament where we celebrate being food and drink to one another.

Do this in memory

Finishing the last few pages of LaVerdiere's book just as the flight attendant was welcoming us to LaGuardia, I slipped Dining in the Kingdom of God back into my carry-on bag and joined the other passengers in the trek to the baggage claim. Three hours later I was standing in the anteroom of Parlor C of Duffey's funeral home, taking off my coat and getting ready to join the 40-odd other mourners attending Michael Griffin's wake.

I found myself thinking about LaVerdiere's book a great deal over the three days of the wake and funeral. For they were days, like the Gospel of Luke, punctuated with a number of meals. Which is not so surprising when you think about it. For if you've ever been on the inside of a family wake--ever been there from the time the calls start to go out until the moment when people begin to scatter back to their daily lives--you know that eating together is one of the ways we take care of each other in such times, one of the ways in which we fend off death and connect ourselves to the ones we are mourning and the ones we are mourning with.

If we can eat at all at such times, we often seem to do so with voracious appetites. And so we find ourselves running around making sure everyone has something more to eat or drink.

The food, like manna, began appearing on the doorstep of the Griffin household Tuesday morning. While Dan and Johnnie and Pat were clearing out closets, washing linens, cleaning countertops, and generally keeping busy making space for the coming guests, a small caravan of homemade cakes and desserts were making their way from the kitchens of neighbors and friends, or being brought over from local bakeries. By mid-morning the delivery truck from the neighborhood deli had dropped off two massive trays of cold cuts, cheeses, and garnishes, two heaping platters of lox, a dozen containers of cream cheese, coleslaw and potato salad, four large baskets of sliced kaiser rolls and bagels, and enough coffee cake to feed a battalion. Meanwhile, Kathleen and Eileen were out buying cases of soda and beer, picking up sacks of ice, and getting stacks of paper plates, napkins, and plastic dinnerware. It was only by lucky happenstance that Dan managed to cancel Tim's order for yet another set of deli trays.

And so we were ordered to eat, to take off our coats, pull up a chair, make ourselves at home, and have a bite. Having been introduced around, offered a dozen smiles, handshakes, and hugs, we were shown the way to a gluttonously over-stuffed refrigerator and a bounteously laden kitchen table and told to have a second helping, to be certain we had something for the ride back over the bridge tonight or for the ride back into Brooklyn tomorrow morning.

We were asked if we had ever seen so much food, if it wasn't a sin, a waste. A pot of tea was put on at some point and never seemed to run out, two garbage cans of iced drinks continuously replenished themselves on the back step, and an army of children playing and eating in the living room made numerous raids on a mountain of pies and cakes without ever seeming to reduce its size. When we departed on Thursday there were still 12 goody baskets left over.

We gathered in clusters, the standers and servers collecting themselves in the kitchen, working the dishwasher, clearing plates, dabbing countertops with wet rags. Overhearing and adding to conversations, we filled in the gaps of our stories and memories with additions and corrections.

Over the bustle of our eating and drinking we told stories, lively and enhanced tales of other meals, of weddings, Baptisms, graduations, an ordination, and two other funerals. Funny stories, laughing-till-you-cried stories, whatever-happened-to-what's-her-name stories, and a couple of do-you-remember-the-time stories. Like the bread and cakes we were eating, we were breaking open our memories over that table and letting them feed each other. We were making a new set of memories that would hold us to Michael, and to each other.

In the front room, the room where Michael had died, were the little ones, the ones without memories of those we were now recalling, the ones for whom this was their first memory feast, the ones who would some day carry memories of us into places we were not going. Shepherded by those teens and parents who traveled back and forth between the big and small tables, the runners and crawlers also moved about us, overhearing and storing impressions, gathering tidbits they would someday repeat in hushed or happy tones, and keeping us connected to the present and the future.

Pat preached at the funeral Mass, an unenviable task for a brother but something expected of the priest in the family. And in his homily he reminded us eloquently of our faith in the "God who is with us," the Emanuel who does not ever abandon us. Gathered there with the others who had come to celebrate and give witness to that faith, I found myself thinking about LaVerdiere's book and about the meals we had shared in the past three days.

And, like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, I caught myself recognizing this Emanuel in the "breaking of the bread" that had been nurturing and supporting us in our grief. And I knew in that Eucharist we had been "Body of Christ" to one another and tasted something of the banquet being prepared for us.

By Patrick McCormick, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.