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Francisco X. Alarcón wrote of un dios más dios:
I want a god as my accomplice who spends nights in houses of ill repute and gets up late on Saturdays. a god who whistles through the streets and trembles before the lips of his lover. a god who waits in line at the entrance of movie houses and likes to drink café au lait. a god who spits blood from tuberculosis and doesn't even have enough for bus fare. a god knocked unconscious by the billy club of a policeman at a demonstration. un dios que se orine de miedo ante el resplandor de los electrodos de tortura. a god who hurts to the last bone and bites the air in pain. A jobless god a striking god a hungry god a fugitive god an exiled god an enraged god a god who longs from jail for a change in the order of things. I want a more godlike god.
quiero un dios más dios. I think Alarcón is writing about an extra, ordinary god, a god who is More, ordinary. One perhaps who blurs – or erases – the hierarchies between secular and sacred, between holy and habitual. The gospel passage this week is John 21, and I think it illustrates this beautifully.
It is a remarkable and an ordinary story. Hours of fishing with no catch and then a surprising haul. A charcoal fire at daybreak beside a lake. A miraculous meal and a common meal, like so many others Jesus shared in homes and on hillsides. Friends, family have gathered. They are reunited, Jesus is alive! Bread and fish is on the fire, typical fare, already there is enough for the day, already a blessing; and Jesus says, bring the fresh catch – and there is something new, abundance! un dios más dios. Ordinary miracles in you and with you and through you.
It’s a communion story and so it tells us something of that meal. Bread and cup, ordinary things; routine, useful things, necessary, wholly commonplace. Like the stuff of Jesus’s miracles: words, water, bread and fish, spit. Like the stuff of his lessons: seed, a woman with a broom, a man with debt, wheat, weeds, leaven, flowers and birds, what surrounds us in our homes and our work and play. Bread and cup; bread and fish. The repetition, the daily meal, and Jesus said, this is my life, this my body, my promise. This routine, this practice, becomes the magical rite of community and salvation, solemn representations of a divine, loving reign.
Metropolitan Community Churches everywhere celebrate an open communion. Everyone is welcome at its table, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, whatever name you call your god. Without exception, without exclusion, everyone is invited here because we believe that these gifts, these ordinary miracles of food, friendship, abundance, are for all of us. un dios más dios. The table is set, please come and be fed.
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