The Mysterious Fruit of the Vine

There is something about distance from familiar spaces or things that makes one think of other paths to becoming. One of my first experiences with distance occurred in the Weiser Christian Church in Weiser, Idaho. I was probably six or seven years old at the time, and I was visiting “Grandma’s church.” Grandma was devoted to Christ, a truth I saw manifest in the Bibles that sat perched around the house. Grandma frequently prayed, and she was sure to teach us to follow God’s commands, including taking care in the use of God’s name.

As a young Latter-day Saint sitting in a small Christian church in rural Idaho, I’m sure there were many things that struck me as distinctly odd, different, and unexpected. None, however, was more shocking than the moment when the familiar sacramental water turned to wine in this new church—the symbolic drink looked unsettlingly like spilt blood. Unsure of how to proceed, I looked to Grandma for guidance as I was offered the familiar little plastic cup with the unfamiliar liquid, but she sat contemplatively pondering, blissfully unaware of my searching question: “Is this okay?” I’ve now come to think of this moment as my encounter with “the mysterious fruit of the vine”—which had always been water to me—forcing me to reconcile where my own tradition utilized an object quite different from other Christian communities.

It was in this moment that my questions about how to proceed in the religious spaces of others first emerged. That day, I found myself among people who unexpectedly declared “peace be with you” as I stood bewildered—uncertain, yet somehow encouraged that they were interested in my soul. I knew this was church, but it wasn’t mine. Over time, Grandma’s worship service created an open-ended invitation to me to explore how others experienced God. The service was clearly about Jesus, as marked by the large crucifix staring down at me, but everything from the hymns to the priest to the sermon felt unfamiliar. I could see that Jesus was present—so present I couldn’t look away. But where were the staid, familiar hymns that I knew by heart, even at that young age? Where was the customary cheap, white, sandwich bread, broken in its ragged form that I had learned represented Christ’s body, the clear water somehow reminiscent of his blood?

Since then, my life has been littered, blessed, and enmeshed with what I later learned were called “interfaith experiences.” One might suspect that on that summer day, the question of drinking the wine (or perhaps grape juice—I may never know) that represented the blood and sacrifice of Christ was more a question of faith than of interfaith. But that early experience still made its mark, and it continues to guide me in my approach to the rituals and practices of others.

On another Sunday morning in the summer of 2022, I found myself entering the Founders Metropolitan Community Church Los Angeles along with a colleague and a few of my students. We were just visitors who wanted to experience different religious services together. As I walked into the remarkable old building that housed the MCC community, I was struck by a statement posted on the wall near the front entrance:

Founders MCC (Metropolitan Community Church) Los Angeles is a prophetic, liberating, and progressive Christian community of faith that honors, values, and welcomes all people. We are rooted in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex communities, and are as welcoming to our heterosexual brothers and sisters as well! You will hear a relevant and scripture-informed message that embodies and celebrates everyone’s spirituality and sexuality. We challenge each other to make our lives count, as we invite everyone to be transformed in mind, body, and spirit. From a place of trust, wholeness, and holiness, we reach out as the hands, feet, and heart of Christ through acts of justice and compassion to make a difference in our world.

This was very different from the “visitors welcome” signs on our Latter-day Saint chapels. The MCC placard exposed my own hesitancy at times to extend a truly Christian welcome. Theirs was a far more specific and expansive welcome that insisted on embracing everyone regardless of where they came from or how they got there. I felt both trepidation and a bit of envy at the ability of this church to cast the net so wide.

At Founders MCC, the usher at the door offered “communion wine” on the left side and “communion grape juice” on the right side. My experience at Grandma’s church came flooding back. As I walked through the right-side doors, I collected my hermetically sealed communion wafer and juice to be used later in the service. It was Father’s Day, marked by many in this community as, one by one, they received a daisy and a small card from one of the officiants. Each one placed the name of their father on the card and attached it to the beautiful gerbera daisy before they placed each one in the large vase on the table. When my turn arrived, I added a yellow flower to the red, white, orange, and purple ones that others had placed in the vase, along with a small paper with my father’s name written upon it. This small act served as a bridge to the unfamiliar congregation. It was a welcome gift.

When the service ended, the five members of our group stood on the front steps with the MCC community. Spontaneously, they invited us to be part of a brief video that would be broadcast to other MCC churches at their global church conference the following Sunday. Once again, I stood mystified by a moment of peace passed to me by strangers. It wasn’t that the MCC community didn’t know about BYU or its sponsoring institution—it was that they didn’t seem to care. They extended the invitation to us in large part, I like to think, because we had sincerely worshipped alongside them just minutes earlier, celebrating Christ, his kingdom, and the fellowship of saints. In that moment, their collective will for fellowship transcended any difference between us and them. As we shouted our greetings into the camera, the palpable sense of community was as present as Christ had seemed in Grandma’s church years before.

Discipleship is measured in lifetimes, not moments, yet distinct experiences of transformation are most often the markers by which we understand the path toward this new, holier state. The experience promised in Ezekiel 36:25–27 makes Christian discipleship seem entirely possible.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Scripture makes the purity of faith and constancy of discipleship seem within our grasp. Yet, in daily life it feels elusive—knowing one’s own heart is frightening at times. Within Christian communities everywhere, faithful believers plead for such cleansing, a transplanted heart, and a new spirit. Religious rites end these soul-wrenching searches. Rituals take a distinctive form that helps to steady wavering hearts and minds as our understanding leads to spiritual growth. Such markers of transformation are assuredly indicators of and results of such searching.

The meanings of my own ordinances and symbols are heightened as I observe other traditions’ approach to worshipping God. Unfamiliarity with certain practices seems to help me find a path toward greater appreciation for the holy life. Very often, the act of prayer signals how much there is still to learn along this path. When my students join me in wider Christian worship services, the familiar recitation of “The Lord’s Prayer” is a moment for such reflection. Not used liturgically in our tradition, yet occupying a central place in the liturgies of many other denominations, the Lord’s Prayer calls us to see Christ in the moment of prayer. For most other Christians, reciting those holy words has become routine; for me, they always evoke a moment of deep concern—why didn’t I have them committed to heart? Yet, I recognize that something of beauty occurs when prayer employed by another tradition awakens something in me. The humility of prayer is often sharpened when I hear a prayer that follows unfamiliar patterns, employs language that seems overly informal, or is highly liturgical. These moments force me to notice how others see the nature of genuine prayer.

At a recent dinner my wife and I shared with people from several different Christian denominations, she commented after the blessing on the meal, “Wow, they just seem so real in prayer.” What prompted this statement? It wasn’t the content of the prayer, which was an evocation of the Holy Spirit upon the events of the evening, cast in the familiar Christian terms of gratitude and hopeful anticipation of Christ’s return. It was more the tone. The prayer was offered in what I can only call more friendly and more energetic tones. It was as if God was worshiped as one proximate and near to the heart of the one who served as voice for the gathering. In a reflective moment later that week, I tried this approach, using such language in my own private prayer—and it felt strange, distant, and unworthy of God’s attention. I could not evoke the same spirit of prayer that our dinner companion had so publicly demonstrated just days earlier. I returned to my familiar language of Thee and Thou and realized that—though they are often clunky and poorly employed—these pronouns were the language most familiar to me in my own prayer life. Yet, the prayer offered by the enthusiastic preacher at the dinner continues to echo in my mind, and increasingly, in my heart.

As a first-timer in a synagogue, I remember how struck I was by the events surrounding Kaddish, or the mourner’s prayer. Just before entering solemn prayer, members of the congregation were brought to recall the yahrzeit, or anniversary, of a loved one’s death. One by one, they called out in simple, yet deeply reverential ways, the given or Hebrew names of loved ones now gone. Through this communal mourning, the named person’s absence was felt in the present moment, and each name reminded me that the way we remember our dead can help shrink the distance of time and generations.

While there are very real tensions between Jewish and Latter-day Saint communities around the issue of posthumous baptism, I don’t think I grasped those concerns fully until the day I sat with my Jewish friends as they recalled the names of deceased loved ones. Somehow my own theology of life and death was clarified in that moment, even as it became infinitely more complicated. What had always felt like a genuine desire for the extension of salvation sat awkwardly alongside my realization that these were people who reverently remembered עם ישראל (Am Yisrael) collectively and individually.¹ Many who sat next to me that day named people who had died because of their faith, killed as a result of anti-Semitic hatred. I wondered, could their untimely death be enough for them in God’s eyes? Did they really need my meager efforts to do what they could not, would not do?

That moment in synagogue helped me realize just how important my own religious actions are in the working out of my relations with other people and how my prayers might have an impact on my relationship with them and with God. This became an invitation for me to dive more deeply into a study of scripture and prophetic words and to search the depths of collected wisdom in my own tradition. Approaching the divine economy now meant that I might have to allow God to sort out the pathways of salvation that were more encompassing and mysterious than I had thought prior to that day.

Religion, it seems, and Christianity in particular, depends upon a deepened respect for the mysterious, unsearchable ways of God and his mercy. I have found that interfaith experience is an invitation to discipleship. One might think of this as the invitation to obtain the “light and truth” spoken of in latter-day scripture. Within the interreligious encounter, there is a compensatory otherness that allows us to sit in contemplation of what is unknown—yet strangely familiar too. Learning about someone else’s faith, religious practice, and worldview, always opens up questions for me that call me back into my own religious life. Can I hear resonances within my own community as I observe a Pesach Seder that speaks through millennia of Jewish communal identities, or the Hesychast chants of Mt. Athos’s Orthodox monks, or in reverberations of the adhan so familiar in Muslim communities? Are they completely other, or are they familiar enough that I sense their beauty, their longing, their soulful cry? And are they just mysterious enough that I cannot appropriate them as my own, but am instead forced to sit in stillness, in awe, at their effective work on my soul?

Learning about other faiths is extraordinarily fascinating, and privately studying the texts that systematize their practice and devotions is intellectually a marvelous thing. Yet, I have learned that in sitting with someone while they practice their faith in forms familiar to them, I am compelled to try and understand not only what they tell me but also what they show me through their rituals. Through this process, I am drawn constantly toward a position of humility.

When they approach God, will I be left behind? Will I be unsure of how to join in that effort? Will constant, active observation break down the distance between them and me, or are there simply things that I cannot overcome as an outsider? My faith demands much of me, both in terms of time, effort, and resources. I’ve learned that this is true of others as well. I’ve learned, by observing others, to cherish those practices that belong uniquely to me and my community, and I’ve slowly began to appreciate practices that I’ve encountered in other traditions. I wonder how theirs might cross into mine, and mine into theirs.

When this happens, it is not syncretism, but rather a sharpening of how precious our traditions are, composed of meaning-making practices and boundary-shaping doctrines. It is not that we cannot practice as others do, it is that it won’t mean the same thing. However, this is precisely why interfaith experiences help us adopt stances of respect and admiration, rather than covetousness. Occasionally hearing the Anglican communion antiphon “Dominus Regit Me” (“The Lord Leads Me”) which recalls the opening lines of Psalm 23, I recognize a paucity of psalmic musical emphasis or beauty within my own tradition, even as I am reminded of the words of James Montgomery’s hymn, which remains the familiar setting of this text within my community. Because of this experience, I cannot hear again the familiar hymn “The Lord is My Shepherd” without reliving the collection of experiences I have had in other traditions. My religious experience within my own tradition is more finely honed because of time in other spaces—the practices that seem uniquely my own are thrown into new light as I realize the common sources from which they emerge.

A growing personal library of interfaith experience, built through hundreds of such encounters with people outside my faith, is now part of my story. I have been changed by these sacred moments, not because my faith has somehow been eroded, shaken, or altered but because my faith has become more present within my mind and heart. Those moments feel reminiscent of the poet Rainer Rilke’s invitation:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Following Rilke’s invitation to “love the questions now” has led me each week to return to the sacrament table, with its familiar white linens, bread and water, and to feel more connected to centuries of saints and sinners seeking to find peace, resolution, hope, and faith through their pursuit of divine presence. The mysterious fruit of the vine, encountered first in Grandma’s church as a young child, was noticeably not my own. And yet, the resonance of unfamiliar objects with a shared symbolism introduced me to the need for distance from things familiar in order to more deeply appreciate common longings. The image of the purple wine from nearly four decades ago seems less pungent now, more “balm of Gilead” than it may have felt then. The voices of congregants who first offered the Lord’s peace to me when I could hardly understand what they were doing—still ring in my ears and prick my heart. I pray that my own tradition offers me the mechanisms, the wells of wisdom, and the fostering of God’s invitation to serve others in return. Thankfully, each tradition, including my own, remains mysterious enough to keep believers dependent upon a shared faith in a God who loved first and invites us to utilize agency to embrace his children in fellowship, truth, and deep human care.

Andrew C. Reed is the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University and Associate Professor of Church History where he teaches courses in World Religions and Interfaith Relations.

Art by Alexandre-Marie Guillemin (1817-1880).

1. “The People of Israel.” This term is usually used to refer to the Jewish people as a whole community.