It’s communion on Sunday morning. Should I take it, despite giving up sliced bread for Lent?

In St Silas we use bread. It’s not slices, obviously, but wee cubes. But what if, as I suspect, the bread is sliced and then cubed after? Does that still make it sliced? Or to put it another way, does the slicing refer to the end product (sliced bread) or a part of the process?

If slicing is the process, then that means I can’t take communion because it was, and therefore is still, sliced bread. If slicing is the product, then I’m fine, because it stops being sliced bread when cubed.

But let’s say it really counted as sliced. Which action should take precedence – my observance of Lent (and thus not taking communion), or my observance of communion (and thus taking it)? Which was the more important act in Jesus’s life – him spending forty days fasting and facing Satan’s temptation, or him dying on the cross for my sins? His death would seem the obvious one… but then… would he have been the saviour he was if he hadn’t spent forty days beating temptation in the desert?

There’s probably a thesis in that, and I’m the last person you’d want to write it.

Of course, there’d be no dilemma if I became a believer in transubstantiation – the idea that the bread and wine literally transforms into the body and blood of Christ. That would mean I wouldn’t be risking sliced bread at all, but munching on 2,000 year old raw human flesh instead. Nice.

Thankfully, however, there’s no need to resort to cannibalism – as posters have pointed out here and here, Lent doesn’t take place on Sundays.

Now that seems a bit weird. Jesus didn’t get a meals on wheels every Friday night when spending forty days in the desert – so why should I take a break when trying to observe his fasting? Is it right to deprive ourselves of something in order to focus on Jesus… for only six days a week?

Well, rules are rules – after all, I am trying to observe and understand Lent fully, so may as well go the whole hog and give Jesus the full six-sevenths of my life. Forward for bread and wine I go…