Even though I’m a second generation Armenian whose grandparents emigrated here from Turkey, in many ways my childhood could not have been more WASP. I grew up in a Chicago suburb surrounded by white Protestants like myself. I had one—count them—Jewish friend; in those days, even my Catholic friend across the street seemed just a little exotic. There wasn’t much diversity in America those days, it felt to me. Mainline Protestantism and being American were pretty much equivalent. It was the “wallpaper” of the culture.
 
I officially joined the Presbyterian Church in eighth grade after a year or two of confirmation classes. The night I joined was Maundy Thursday, the night in Holy Week when Jesus shared the last supper with his disciples before he was betrayed. I received communion for the first time that night.

After the sermon, the minister said a prayer over the elements of communion, then the elders took plates of little cubed bread and passed it along each pew. After we’d eaten the bread, the elders passed trays with these tiny glasses of grape juice. It was very special. It was dignified, sacred, reverent, and I still remember it with a sense of awe.
 
But it wasn’t until college, when our Presbyterian group shared a Shabbat meal with the students at Hillel, that I began to feel what it might have been like for Jesus to have shared supper with his friends: the candle lighting and songs, the prayers for the Sabbath, the thoughtful conversation and warm fellowship. They were even joking! It felt more like sitting down to supper with my family than a formal religious ritual. It made me wonder: was this along the lines of what Jesus meant when he said, “Do this in remembrance of me?” 
 
Then, in divinity school, I shared in a Passover Seder for the first time. The first of many times. I may as well have been experiencing communion again for the first time. As we read the exodus story, spilled wine in memory of the ten plagues, and broke the matzo bread, it finally dawned on me what it meant that Jesus’ last supper was a Passover meal. Even though I’d learned all this in class, that link between the exodus—our liberation from slavery celebrated in Passover—and Christ’s resurrection—our liberation from sin and death celebrated at Easter—that connection came alive for me that night.

And when we read from Exodus, chapter 13: “Moses said to the people, ‘Remember this day when the Lord brought you out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery,’” and instituted Passover with the observance of unleavened bread, I finally understood what Jesus was pointing to when he instituted the Lord’s supper and said, “Do this in remembrance, in remembrance of me.” 
 
Well, two years ago, another experience opened my eyes again, this time at table with new Muslim colleagues. I had just started to serve on the board of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Though the school was founded by Presbyterians over a century ago, the board also includes many Muslims. This was my first board meeting in Lebanon, and frankly, my first trip to the Middle East, so I went early to get the lay of the land. Though I keep up with the news and I had done my homework, there were two things I was completely unprepared for.

First, I was deeply moved by the matter-of-fact way in which Muslims and Christians in Lebanon live side by side, and have so for countless generations. In America still all we hear about are clashes over differences in the Middle East, as if one single image could somehow describe the entire region.

Moreover, all my life I had heard from my Armenian grandmother about how the Muslims had slaughtered her family in the 1915 genocide in Turkey. It had honestly never occurred to me that Christians and Muslims could really live together in peace. In Lebanon, though things are never static, at that time I saw what was possible.
 
The second thing I was unprepared for was the extravagant hospitality offered by Muslims and Christians alike. Never could any of the meals have been called ordinary. One mezze, appetizer, followed another. Grape leaves and hummus, baba ganouzh and cheese pastries, then the soup and the main courses, pilaf and vegetables and the most succulent grilled meats, and paklava and cookies and Turkish coffee.

For me, it was more than delicious. It was a powerful, visceral welcome because it felt like I had finally come home. Every single one of these were dishes were those I had loved at my Armenian grandmother’s table. But that was only half of it: the conversation was a feast of its own. We shared stories of family and travel, books and politics, religion and values.

Time after time, meal after meal, I came as a stranger and emerged as a long-lost friend. And finally, it dawned on me. The act of breaking bread was never really about food. It was about hospitality, about welcoming the stranger. It was about overcoming tensions, a place in which religious or political differences were subsumed for the sake of the community.

The act of breaking bread was at heart transformative and I began to see in a new way the urgency of Jesus’ commandment. He told us not just to remember him but to do something: “Do this—break bread, share the cup—do this in remembrance of me.”
 
Well, most of us have traditions, practices of our faith that we’ve grown accustomed to. Often they’re comforting to us, in part because they are simply so familiar and we’ve participated in them so many times it feels like home. But sometimes are practices can become rote and stale and somewhat flat. Yet as I discovered they do not have to be.

I have come a long way from that dignified and awe-filled but slightly antiseptic first communion I experienced in the eighth grade. It is still a mystery, but I have begun to understand what the late poet laureate Conrad Aiken meant when he wrote: "Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread."

Bread we break with each other is much more than bread: it is a joyful feast of the people of God, a feast of singing and laughter. It is an act of willful memory, a rehearsal of God’s saving acts of exodus and resurrection, acts which God does still. And breaking bread is an act of hospitality that welcomes the "other," that overcomes differences, and transforms strangers into friends.
 
I still love communion served on trays with little, tiny pieces of cut-up bread, and grape juice in tiny glasses passed along rows. And I enjoy communion shared by intinction as we tear a piece of bread off the loaf and dip it in the cup. But because of bread broken at table with Muslims and Jews, I experience communion in a fuller, richer way than I could have ever known without them.

Back in eighth grade it would never have dawned on me that I could grow closer to Jesus Christ by sitting at table with people of other faiths. Who knew? It makes me wonder what more I can learn from them. My guess is, plenty.

Conversation with Christine Chakoian

Sherre Hirsch: Christine, thank you for such a powerful and important message, both about memory and about hospitality. So let me say first, how does the regular man invoke hospitality because you just don’t walk in the street and say, “Oh, you’re a Muslim. Come to my house for dinner?” What do you do and how do you go about that? What would you advise?

Christine Chakoian: Well, hospitality, of course, starts with being at table with one another and I think that’s very important. Our faith traditions could do a lot more at discovering ways. I know at a Presbyterian church I served in the city we had a very close relationship with a synagogue and we broke bread together many times. Intentionality is a part of it, but hospitality comes in other forms. I think about the hospitality of treating the other as a friend, of assuming the best in someone rather than assuming the worst. Welcoming differences is a way not only to get to know this surprise, but also somehow to get to know ones’ self simply by knowing the other. The other trick of hospitality, as anyone who has hosted anything knows, is that the whole goal is to be very prepared so that it’s seems effortless when you get there. So preparing ourselves with the knowledge of other faiths and people right around us.

Hirsch: We have a tradition in Passover where you purify yourself. Literally, you clean out the hummous, the matzah, the unleavened bread to prepare yourself to take out that which is evil, take it out of your internal self in order to prepare for others to come in.

Chakoian: Exactly. You make room. You make space.

Eboo Patel: Christine, you told these two beautiful rite of passage stories, one in communion and one in college. Both of them had to do with a meal and both of them had to do with your growing passion and commitment for your faith as a young person.

Chakoian: That’s right.

Patel: As a major leader in the Presbyterian Church USA, how do you make young people, young Presbyterians, passionate about their faith today?

Chakoian: It’s very exciting. Right now what amazes me is that there’s this resurgence—I could call it a revival—of interest in faith, of digging deeper into one’s roots. I serve on a seminary board and for a long time we were welcoming older people, second career people. We have this resurgence of young people coming into seminary right now. So I think part of it is that sense of looking for identity in this multi-cultural, global, fast-paced, changing world and to help young people discover in their own traditions that there is so much richness there. It may start in the home, it may start in one’s place of faith, it may start in conversations that we have, but looking deeper at what’s already there. You don’t have to look outside of yourself to begin to find it and I think you’re in better communication when know yourself a little bit, too.

Hirsch: Absolutely.  But sometimes I think we look back at memory, like you spoke, and we don’t always find beautiful nuggets in our tradition. We have moments in every tradition where we wish that maybe that had slipped by! What do you tell people when they have elements in their own tradition that they may feel ashamed of or embarrassed by or that they’d like to ignore?

Chakoian: Yes. Absolutely. I do think it’s a lot like growing up in a family. You grow up in a family and every single family—I don’t care how saintly—has some dark moments. So there’s a resolution that happens and that’s a part of growing up. You don’t pretend it didn’t happen but you begin as a young adult and then as an adult to reflect on those things with a new perspective. And, I think, sometimes it is only in retrospect that we find the deeper meaning of what’s gone on when we reflect back. When I was in 8th grade I had no clue. I mean it was a lovely ceremony and it was a rite of passage, but it’s only much later when I looked back on it that I fully grasped. So even simply providing the experiences for young people and then helping people reconnect and reflect on even the dark times.

Eboo Patel: Your parents probably asked you at breakfast the next morning, “What did you do yesterday?” and you’re like, “Oh, nothing.”

Chakoian: Exactly!

Hirsch: Wait until you have older kids and you’ll see it’s like nothing happened.

Patel: I’m getting fluent in that.

Chakoian: You know, I have to say my father and mother were both very active in the church. Dad was a leader in the church and I think we sometimes underestimate the power of parental example, even when it looks like we’re not paying any attention to what our parents are doing.

Patel: Yes, definitely.

Hirsch: That’s very interesting.

Patel: I have a two-and-a-half year old. That line is on the tip of my tongue: you are underestimating, kiddo, the power of your parents’ example!

Chakoian: Yes, that’s right.

Hirsch: You’ve got a lot to learn. That’s not going to work!

Christine Chakoian: That’s really true. My daughter is now a sophomore in college and you wonder how much of it connects. But, in fact, it’s not through just my teaching but also through the congregation that I served that she has seen all of these other examples of people who’ve embraced their faith and learned.

Hirsch: And we don’t know when they’re actually watching.

Chakoian: We have no idea!

Patel: Let’s continue on the parenthood theme for a second. It might be the most challenging spiritual thing a lot of us do.

Chakoian: That is true.

Patel: So, I told my mother that Zayed, my son, will get a glass of water, he will look at me and he will spill it on the floor. And I’ll say, “Zayed!” Right? My mom says, “Three hundred days in a row I poured your orange juice and you spilled it on the floor!” You’d think I would learn, right?

Chakoian: That’s remarkable!

Patel: But I want to connect it to something, the theme of this show, which is how do we see the awe that you spoke of at communion, at table with Muslims and Jews, and the challenges of everyday life, like when our kid is spilling orange juice on the floor three hundred days in a row?

Chakoian: That’s exactly right. I think all of our traditions have a sense of the sacredness of time and that you do not squander the gift that God has given you, that life itself is a precious entity. So, you know, our children grow so fast, they really do. Savoring the time, being present in the moment. It’s trite but it’s so true. There are a thousand things that could distract us from what is going on right in front of us and asking where God is in the midst of this can be enormously helpful. Sometimes it’s simply by learning the gift of patience and abiding love, as we read in the New Testament as a gift of the Spirit. And sometimes it’s simply to reflect back and see where you are in God’s own belovedness.

Hirsch: You’ve really given us some precious time here and some very important things to think about. I look forward to breaking bread with you and with Ebbo. That will be a wonderful day in itself.

Chakoian: Thank you.