Eucharist Sunday Year A Alternative Second Reading

Last evening’s catered meal
delivered on rented china plates
was lovely but lacking
the mysterious ingredient of old church basement suppers
in slightly musty parish halls
with their unhealthy menus
of ham loaf or baked steak,
scalloped potatoes (always),
boiled canned green beans—
not metal cans, but bottled beans put up by the women
and grown by their men—
creamy cole slaw (always),
green Jello with grated carrot
or crushed pineapple,
all eaten on folding tables
set up by the husbands
or teenaged boys hoping to impress girls waiting
to serve these hefty meals on indestructible crockery,
coffee in thick rimmed cups.
All this is only the memory
of gastronomically un-PC
elders raised in fellowship halls
that did not lack the flavor
or labor of personalized love,
meals echoing what we heard
upstairs in the sanctuary,
where we, the family,
His Body, gathered
to do this in remembrance.

The words of Bonnie Thurston.