Thursday, July 29, 2004
We were Catholic once, and young. |12:48 PM|
When I was in gradeschool, I was very Catholic, as I may have already mentioned. At least once a month we were in church for a special Mass of one kind or another. (This is of course in addition to the times I went to church during the week with family members or for other reasons). This meant that I was taking communion quite a bit.
For those of you not familiar with this little bit of the Catholic faith, I'll try to sum it up. In the Bible, during the Passover meal that Jesus has with His pals before being nailed to a tree (Which is called
The Last Supper), he declares that the bread he is sharing with them is his body, that the wine is his blood, and that they should repeat this ritual in remembrance of Him. In the Catholic church (but not unique to it), Communion is the most important sacrament, and (bunch of boring details) ...what it comes down to is that when the priest guy blesses the bread wafers and wine, it undergoes transubstantiation and is now the BODY and the BLOOD of the big Christ guy.
And then we eat it. Pretty heady stuff for a 4th grader.
The unleavened bread wafers are disc shaped, about the size of one of those Kennedy 50 cent pieces. This size becomes important in a few sentences. Now I was the contemplative type, so it began to bug me how I should eat this wafer thing. I mean, biting into it seemed kind of...disrepectful, perhaps even sinful. Well, what if I just let it dissolve?
The complex starches that were in the wafers are broken down by your saliva into more simple, sweeter sugars. I found that if left in my mouth, the papery bread stopped being so bland and actually became kind of sweet. This whole "not biting Christ" thing looked like a better and better idea.
Unfortunately, at some point, the wafer got stuck to the top of my mouth. It was a near perfect fit to the roof of my mouth, the softened paste of bread becoming a glue affixing it there. While standing, kneeling, or sitting, I was trying desperately to scrape the savior off the roof of my mouth.
Working with my tongue, trying to be as discreet as possible, I was still haunted by the thought "Is
this a sin?"
This ended up happening more than once, but I was less full of the Fear of God. At least the body of Christ stopped tasting so papery.
Now, there were plenty of fellation jokes I could have made, but I showed strength and resisted.
Labels: Religon
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