For a Time of Empty Hands

I don’t know your personal circumstances or the details of what’s keeping you up nights right now. But I almost certainly know something that’s true about you, in this season.

Your hands are too empty.

It may not feel that way, because you’ve probably said, more than once in recent weeks, “I’ve got my hands full,” with this decision or that one, or hammering out some strategy that you hope will get you through this time, or trying to homeschool and work and keep yourself sober.

But in a time of

• no answers
• no certainty
• no control
• not enough of some things (toilet paper, PPE, groceries to stock the shelves)
• not enough jobs
• no money
• no touch or hugs with people we love, unless they live with us
• no end in sight

we could be forgiven if we lament that pain of our hands, empty.

Some of you don’t get to hold your grandchildren. I know, you can almost feel their sweet hand in yours, their tiny fingers wrapped around your pinky. Your hands, empty of that touch: that’s agonizing.

I’ve been thinking about empty hands because, in lieu of online communion with all its theological complexity, we’ve been offering an alternative: A communion of empty hands. It’s not Holy Communion in any formal sense. But it connects us; there is a kind of communion in the absence of actual bread and an actual cup.

“We” is, of course, complicated right now, because one of the things that’s out of my hands is my ministry to the women who live in prison. They’re my people! We worship every week, in two different settings there. Except we don’t, since early March, for good, practical Coronavirus reasons imposed by the state.

So we’ve started a livestream, at our regular Thursday evening worship time, with friends and supporters outside. And that’s been great.

And since our worship inside the prison includes Holy Communion, every week, we had to decide what to do about that. But even after our bishop authorized pastors to offer Holy Communion during live-streamed worship, we’re not doing the actual, formal sacrament. Because our people’s hands are empty. Our sisters in prison aren’t able to join over livestream or in any recorded way. They can’t join us in Holy Communion, and in solidarity we won’t partake without them.

My awareness of these women–and men, too, in prisons across Iowa–makes me think of other people whose hands are empty of communion bread and wine even when we consecrate it remotely:

• Persons in detention centers, jails, and other institutional settings.
• Healthcare workers who are pulling long and exhausting shifts.
• Other essential workers who have to keep showing up despite the risks to their and their families’ health.
• People without access to the Internet and livestream services.
• People in families where violence interferes randomly with activities as simple as joining a worship service online.
• People who are hungry, who wouldn’t be able to find bread or juice if we did seek to consecrate it at a distance.

So, during this time, we are practicing some different patterns during what would be our Holy Communion time. I want to share the one that relates most directly to the empty hands I started with. I invite you to join in this ritual, in the worship service you lead or in your private devotions, in solidarity with our sisters at the Iowa women’s prison and the others I’ve named above.

Remembering the emptiness can be an important step.

The Communion of Empty Hands

This ritual is based on words quoted from Thomas Pettepiece, in his 1979 book Visions of a World Hungry.** He writes of spending Easter in prison, at a time when he is among 10,000 political prisoners, under great oppression. On that Easter Sunday, about twenty Christians joined together, with non-Christians covering for them, with casual conversation, so as not to catch the attention of the guards. Here’s a guide for this ritual, based on how Pettepiece describes this holy moment:

You are invited to join together with one or several others, and share these words and actions, with hands empty.

Read: We have no bread, nor water to use instead of wine, but we will act as though we had.

Read: The meal in which we take part reminds us of the prison, the torture, the death and final victory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Read: The bread is the body which he gave for humanity. The fact that we have none represents very well the lack of bread in the hunger of so many millions of human beings.

Hold out your empty hand and place it over another person’s open hand. Say: Take, eat. The body of Christ was given for us. We do this in remembrance of him. When all have been given this imagined bread, all raise hands to their mouths in silence, as if receiving the body of Christ.

Read: The wine, which we don’t have today, is the blood poured out for us. This cup represents our dream of a united humanity, of a just society, without difference of race or class.

Imagine taking a pitcher of juice and pour it into the cup another person acts as if they’re holding. Pour your own cup, too. Say: Take, drink. The blood of Christ was shed to seal the new covenant of God with us. All drink from the absent cups they imagine holding.

Read: Let us give thanks, sure that Christ is here with us, strengthening us.

End this time with a prayer, a song, or a no-touch passing of the peace.

**Thomas G. Pettepiece, Visions of a World Hungry (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1979).Excerpted in Reuben P. Job & Norman Shawchuck, A Guide to Prayer (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983), 143.

Photo by Melchior Damu on Unsplash.