At work, I mentor young adults interested in health care and social media and I often talk about understanding your audience. Often, the people I work with have fairly narrow views of life and the people around them. So, I find different videos to help them gain a little perspective. One of my favorites is This is Water from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. He starts off with

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

He goes on to talk about the banal tedium of daily life and suggests the following:

I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

It is up to us, what we do with life around us.

I had shown this video to some coworkers one Thursday, before heading out to a dinner at church.

It was a Thursday evening and I stopped in the basement of Grace and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Hamden, CT. The basement is like many church basements. The ceiling is covered with square foot sized tiles with lots of little holes in them; the kind I remember from my childhood, and probably even older. I can’t say that I remember the walls, but it seems like they are cinderblocks painted with some bland industrial color, perhaps from the 50s.

This is the room where Alcoholics Anonymous have meetings many evenings. There are hand written instructions near the giant coffee percolators and trash cans. On Friday nights, there is Dinner for a Dollar. It is an inexpensive home cooked meal where people contribute what they can, typically a dollar; sometimes more, sometimes nothing at all. People of all walks of life gather, chat and have a nourishing meal.

But Thursday night was Maundy Thursday. I had just gotten through rehearsing with a small pickup choir that would be doing Tallis’ Lamentation of Jeremiah on Good Friday. My youngest daughter was with me, talking blithely with those around her.

I sat quietly, considering the walks, the ceiling, the lives of people who have passed through this space. I thought of people who perhaps first started worship at Grace and St. Peter’s after attending an AA meeting in the basement, or having a nice home cooked meal when they were down on their luck and between jobs.

As we shared the supper and listened to the story of Maundy Thursday, it struck me. David Foster Wallace had told students about finding meaning in the tedium of daily modern existence. “This is water”.

The words of consecration, “this is my blood”. I thought of people struggling with addiction, struggling to make ends meet after losing a job. I thought of people that we pray for, week after week, fighting some illness. I thought of those close to me struggling with one calamity or another. I thought of monks I had met at monasteries, who had taken vows of silence, eating their simple meals. I thought of my own failings.

David Foster Wallace’s words mixed with Jesus’: “This is blood.” This is going beyond just “considering that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am”. It is recognizing that when you get right down to it, we are all the same, we are all connected, and that the Blood of Christ helps us transcend the tedium and empowers us to not only consider those around us, but to connect with and help them.

Around the state, I figured that friends of mine would be at similar dinners. They would have different ways of remembering, of celebrating, of talking about being ‘washed in the blood’, and that too, reflected our connection.

David Foster Wallace ends off his commencement speech with

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

To which, I add, and “This is blood”