I got up to the kitchen around 7pm tonight and noticed right away the smell of fish cut straight through the muggy atmosphere. I had about five liters of white wine in two sacks and sat it on the counter where Marcus had been laboring for hours over the vongole. David and Serena were at the sink pulling the clams out and separating the shells. Maurizio had bought eight kilos of those little suckers. I threw the wine in the freezer to get it real cold in time for dinner and took a cold bottle out of the fridge, opened it, and started serving it up. I made a workstation at one of the plastic tables and got the other large pot ready to separate. David, Kyle, Barbara, and Maurizio gathered around, rolled up our sleeves, and we all got our hands into the piping hot sandy water, combing our fingers through the shells making a loud clack, and started plucking. I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing, nor how to cook these things. I just followed what everyone else was doing.

Conversation and laughter sprung up as one of us would accidently throw one of the shells into the pot of clams. Serena kept slaving away in the kitchen with Marcus preparing the onions, garlic, oil, and parsely. It was magic in the making. The actual meal wasn’t served up until after 9:30pm.

This pasta dish requires a whole day and a lot of hands to help it come off without being completely overwhelming. In the end, there were about ten of us at the table. We ate a ton, drank most all of the wine, and even made room for coffee and desert. Several times during the eating, we would break out in applause and cheer for the chef, Serena. It was that good!

April started cleaning up the dishes and Maurizio would run in from the other room reporting the soccer score. What, on the surface, seemed like a fun evening together between friends is really church happening. If you knew the stories of those hands that contributed to making the meal, and if you knew how much they’ve grown, if you knew their desires, hurts, and hopes, then I think you’d see church happening. It’s probably not the kind of church you grew up with, but its the kind of church, that in its happening, opens up and embraces God’s grace in our midst. It’s one of those meals that you get the feeling that you are being oriented towards a promised future which roots us all the more firmly in life of the risen Jesus and opens us up to the love of God in the here and now (cf. Kerr, 154).

Does all that happen during a meal, you ask?

When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him (Luke 24).

Maybe so?