I do this weird thing with wine and bread every once in a while. My wife Tracy busts me almost every time I do it, but still, I do it anyway. Often, gathered around our dinner table, I’ll take a little corner of my bread and tilt my glass in such a way as to enable a quick dip of the bread into the wine. And then I’ll gobble it up. It’s just a quick act of irreverent reverence; a quirky little pause which, to my mind, recognizes this moment, this meal, and this gathered time together, as sacred.

The last time I had formal communion was at a small church in northern Wisconsin. And it was one of my favorite kinds of communion; cubed Wonder bread, and a tiny shot of grape juice. It’s funny, as soon as I took that little piece of bread in my hands, they instinctively began squeezing it in opposite motions; compacting it into a dense little dough block; just like I used to do when I was a kid at the church of my youth.

Funny, sometimes, how the little rituals we enact can transport us through time and space; bringing back memories of places and people that might have seemed mundane at the moment, but end up taking on meaning much beyond what was initially intended.

That’s why I like dipping the bread, even today. I like to make even the mundane moments special; and remember in them the grace and beauty of this special little thing called life.

In the gift of this new day, in the gift of this present moment, let me be attentive, let me be alive, and let me be irreverently reverent to the grace in all things.