A society that turns exercise into a sixty-minute communion with the sacred, or the choice of food into the highest expression of personal virtue, has probably lost faith in real change — the kind of change, for example, that might allow the staggering number of ex-felons to rejoin it with a degree of dignity.
It worries through a scatterbrained three minutes before the chords change – a heart-stopping moment of communion and reconciliation, even if it's steeped in a sudden sadness.
This year I watch Saturday shoppers who have successfully made their last minute gift selections stand like communion takers in queues that snake up to twenty people deep into the aisles.
As Minnelli describes the shoot in his autobiography, he found the dialogue fatuous, inadequate to the delicate, intimate grandeur of the moment — and instead of calling Nathan and Schrank for a rewrite or tweaking it himself, he threw the dialogue out altogether, resulting in an amazingly delicate, breath-holding sequence of more than two minutes of wordless yet profound communion.
At the St . Simeons Episcopal Home in Tulsa, Okla., the priest goes to the Alzheimer's unit twicEpiscopal Home up a small altar and does an adapted versinn of Holy Communion Tulsalasts rOkla.y 15 minuthe.
The staff members in the sacristy were fretting over last-minute preparations: had they scooped out too many Communion wafers, were the readers here on time?
Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?
The moment recalls the two German soldiers in gentle communion in "All Quiet on the Western Front": "We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death".
The couple had left "discreetly out a side door" about 45 minutes into the service, after the eulogies but before communion, according to L.A. Times reporter Meredith Blake, who was in attendance and noted it was extremely hot in the non-air-conditioned church.
The schedule was soon abandoned, as Murray's walkabout through Dunblane lengthened from the 75 minutes planned into a slow four-and-a-half-hour communion with the people – almost as long as his US Open final against Novak Djokovic.
"I and You" begins with a teen-ager quoting Whitman: "I and this mystery here we stand"; over the next ninety minutes, the play manages to unfold the mystery without diminishing it, forging communion through the language of poetry.
