The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on July 4, 2025 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
As a child, I can recall treating “communion” like a noun, an object, a thing. “Are you going to communion?” “Will you receive communion?” “Have you had your first communion?” These popular references to the Eucharist, and more specifically the host received during the ritual celebration, tended to make us treat the hosts like a treasure, sacred objects to be acquired, or rewarded with, rather than to emphasize the experience of communing together in the Eucharistic celebrations.
This latter lens looks at communion more like a verb than a noun. To commune is to participate, To commune is to belong to something bigger. To commune is to be bound by a particular community. The -ing version of communion, communing, helps to break open the boundaries that we often set for prayer—that it is only done at certain times or by certain people. Prayer as communing can just as easily be done outside sitting in nature as it can be done sitting inside in a pew. Similarly, prayer as communing can remind us that we belong just as much to the folks on this side of the veil as to the communion of saints on the other side of the veil. Communing in prayer helps us to decompartmentalize our prayer and also to open up the participation of our prayer in a longer and wider continuum of communion.
May we be blessed, deep, wide, and inside by our prayers in communing communion with one another and with all of creation!
