Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith

“Be intentional in the social circles you keep; seek out friends who keep you honest and interested in life’s great questions. Surround yourself with people and institutions that recognize how flawed we are as human beings yet still insist that you reach for something higher…The promise of the Church is that you are lost, and the Church will provide you a road map to God.” “This church was filled with the voices and cries of children. Of parents shushing them. Of grandparents during a baptism laying their hands on the heads of the next generation. Of people looking at its beautiful stained glass windows and high steeple and thinking, as I did, that though this building was built by the hands of man, it called us to the divine. This church had consecrated countless marriages, celebrating the start of new families. It had served as a community center, where Christians long since forgotten had helped feed and clothe their neighbors in times of struggle. Its pastors had counseled people in sickness and death, and had buried them outside in its beautiful cemetery…The chains of communion will continue to bind us even after death.” Memory “ensures that the communion we seek in life runs not only among those living today but also across the generations that came before us and those yet to come.” “Communion. It is one of the most powerful means of receiving God’s grace. It also unifies the faithful…Communion means not only to personally encounter Christ but to unite us as a single worshiping body. It turns a congregation into a community, one united across time and space and circumstance…I believe in that communion of saints, and I believe that although God sometimes rewards the wicked and punishes the good for reasons we can’t possibly understand, He also casts upon us little rays of light even in the darkest moments.” Communion is J. D. Vance’s journey back to faith and testimony to “the ferocious love of God.”