“The table of the Lord is a catalyst for reconciliation on the horizontal level as well. This normal, everyday activity of eating will be the occasion for undoing the abnormal but all-too-common reality of human enmity and discord … In a broken and fragmented world, the church is called to be the firstfruits of a new creation by embodying a reconciled community; and the way we begin to learn that is at the communion table. The habits and practices of examination and reconciliation that are part of the Eucharist are like training wheels meant to let us “try out” forgiveness and reconciliation. And in this respect, the Eucharist is just a macrocosm of what the church is called to be as the new humanity: a community that gathers, irrespective of preferences, tastes, class, or ethnicity, in order to pursue a common good. I often tell my children that one of the reasons we go to church is to learn to love people we don’t really like that much – people we find irritating, odd, and who grate on our nerves”  James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom