It started at lunch. We were a church-y group at a church-y gathering. I don’t remember how we wound our way to this topic, but we started wondering why our schedule, replete with initial meetings of all of The Episcopal Church’s Councils, Commissions, and Boards (CCABs), didn’t include Eucharist. Being nerdy Church nerds, we understandingly agreed it would’ve been a scheduling headache.
First you need a room and a time, and then you have to arrange for a …. and …. and…. The ecclesial version of giving a mouse a cookie except it ends with someone feeling hurt.
Then we looked around the table. Someone said, “we have a priest.” We looked at the table, “we have bread.” We remembered sitting around a different table in the bar last night, “we can get wine.”
“We could have an underground eucharist. Just take over one of the rooms and make eucharist!”

And lunch was over and we went back to our separate meetings. In mine, focused on Lifelong Christian Formation, eucharist came up again.
We may have been separated into separate meetings, wide spread rooms, but we were connected by twitter. So I tweeted:

norm to include Eucharist at all #SCLCFE in person. Also large support for #undergroundeucharist. #ccab @UbuntuWanderer @dantetavolaro

— Robyn Barnes (@theologybird) November 13, 2012

Planning started. We’d been right at that lunch. Priest, bread, wine, room.

We learned that the hashtag name plus the social media usage to plan it had a few people wondering if we were being exclusive. So we used an older form of social media to communicate: a chair for a raised podium and a lunch time announcement the afternoon of the #undergroundeucharist.

And one of my co-planners was right:

@dantetavolaro @theologybird I am in if we plan the the liturgy they will come. #undergroundeucharist #CCAB

— T.J. Freeman (@UbuntuWanderer) November 13, 2012

One of our committees volunteered their space to be rearranged. So we made a large circle and added more chairs as people arrived.

We had volunteered to serve our Church on a national level; we had arrived for meetings. We came with agendas and hopes and goals. Committed to fixing, improving, changing our Church. More important than any of that, to all of us whether attending that Eucharist or worshipping at home, is the faith that keeps drawing us together.

The people came. Bread-which-is-body and wine-which-is-blood were shared. And together we celebrated the Holy Spirit among us.  The unschedulable, unstoppable Spirit.