Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy 2020

This Is the World I Want to Live in: Toward a Theology of Practical Sacramentality Christopher Grundy Rev. Christopher Grundy, PhD is the author of Recovering Communion in a Violent World: Resistance, Resilience, and Risk and a co-author of The Work of the People: What We Do in Worship and Why. He is ordained in the United Church of Christ and serves as Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship and Dean of the Chapel at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. Learn more about his work at www.belovedcommunion.org.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Gate A-4” describes the author’s encounter with a distraught, elderly Palestinian woman in the Albuquerque airport.1 A loudspeaker has asked for someone who speaks Arabic. Nye goes to the gate and finds the older woman in tears. The woman speaks only Arabic and believes her flight has been canceled. Haltingly, Nye uses her rusty Arabic to convey that the flight isn’t canceled, just delayed. Then, the two women wait together. During the two-hour span, they make phone calls to friends and family, discover people they know in common, and laugh together. The older woman pulls a bag of homemade mamool cookies out of her bag and begins sharing them with other women at the gate. “To my amazement,” Nye says, “not a single woman at the gate refused one. It was like a sacrament.” Toward the end of the poem, she writes, “And I looked around at that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, ‘This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.’” She concludes by saying, “This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.”

For Nye, this was not just a wonderful or amazing event; it evoked something holy. What was it that made that moment in a busy airport sacrament-like? More pointedly, what was the source of its sacramentality? Certainly, it wasn’t the use of ritual space, or trained, clerical leadership (although these elements probably shaped Nye’s experience). As she says, “It can still happen anywhere.” It may have been partly the act of sharing a symbolic amount of food—the cookies mattered, but they weren’t at the heart of it. No, what seemed to matter the most in this vignette, what seemed to be the crucial element that awoke the poet’s spiritual sensibilities, was a very practical shift of the situation: an elderly woman alone