Communion

When I was seven years old, I spit out the body of Christ.

It wasn’t an act of rebellion, only the reflex of an unselfconscious girl I must have been once. My Sunday school teacher asked for a volunteer to demonstrate how to take communion, and I volunteered for everything then. She told us it was bread, but as soon as I tasted the wafer, I was sure there’d been a mistake—the sliver sticking to my tongue and then, suddenly, to my outstretched palm, had to be cardboard.

I don’t recall that teacher’s name, but I can picture the look on her face at that moment: the tight mouth drawn even more taut while the eyes went wide, an amplified version of the expression that wrenched her face whenever I blurted out “Oh my God,” which was often. She continually corrected me: “Say oh my gosh, or oh my goodness. You hurt God every time you say that.”

Her attempts to keep me from taking the Lord’s name in vain were futile. I didn’t understand the meaning of that phrase, in vain, given that the words were usually uttered in wonder. I think it’s as good evidence for God’s existence as any that even now his name comes to my lips so automatically at any moment of real import.

***

There’s a photograph of me from the first communion that followed my ill-fated practice run. The girl in this picture looks like she is wearing a miniature wedding dress, like she is the tiny plastic figurine at the top of a cake, except she isn’t smiling. A veil hangs from a crown of synthetic white flowers, covering curls that are not her own—her mother must have had her sleep in foam rollers the night before. Her pressed-together palms are encased in lacy gloves; the elastic at the wrists must itch when she moves. But the girl in the picture is not moving. Her eyes are lowered, face set serious, sincere, serene. She looks like she is praying.

I have no memory of this event.

I do remember my cousin’s first communion five years later because it was the first time I heard an antisemitic joke. The priest, standing in front of a dozen seven-year-olds and their families, opened his homily with it. I don’t remember the joke itself, but I remember my mother’s reaction. My mother is half Jewish; her father, whom she adored and who died too young, was Jewish. Before I even looked at her, I felt her tense up, turn as rigid as the wooden pew beneath us.

After the service, when everyone was taking photos in the sunny courtyard, I marched up to the priest. I told him he’d set a terrible example for these kids, that the Christ we worshiped was a Jew. His reply spanned two sentences. The first was something dismissive; the second was “Bless you, child.” He may have patted me on the head.

I wanted to spit at him. What I did was hide and cry hot tears that should have singed the hem of my dress.

***

I haven’t taken communion in twenty years, not since my confirmation, one last sacrament to satisfy my father, who grew up in a time and place where you identified home by the parish you belonged to. The oldest child of Irish immigrants, he was St. William’s longest serving altar boy, carrying the processional cross until his cassock nearly came up to his knees. He attended schools where sisters stalked the aisles with rulers tucked into the sleeves of their habits, sheathing their weapons in dark wool. When he was thinking about applying to college—the first in his family to do so, the first to graduate from high school, even—he told the Sister Superior that he dreamed of going to Brown. She told him attending that bastion of liberalism would imperil his immortal soul. He ended up with the Jesuits at Boston College.

My father takes communion, but he isn’t supposed to, because he’s been divorced—a fact that on some days I must count as a blessing, since I wouldn’t have been born otherwise.

***

A few years ago, I saw an exhibition of the art of Corita Kent, who spent much of her career as Sister Mary Corita, having entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at age eighteen and taught in its college’s art department for more than twenty years, until her increasingly political work—about poverty, racism, and the war in Vietnam—was deemed blasphemous by the archbishop of Los Angeles.

The show featured sixty of her silkscreen prints, joyous jumbles of color and text created in the mid-1960s, when Vatican II was igniting hopes for change in the church. Screen printing is a medium that allows for mass production, but there’s nothing mechanical about Kent’s work, no clean edges or perfectly straight lines. You can always see a human hand in it.

Kent didn’t see a divide between the sacred and the everyday. The words on her prints came from product slogans and pop songs, billboards and road signs, Camus and E.E. Cummings, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, her students’ comments and her own thoughts. She often pulled inspiration from shelves at the supermarket. Several prints play with the branding for Wonder Bread, reimagining the polka dots from the bag as communion wafers. At happenings like the college’s Mary’s Day celebration, a formerly solemn affair that Kent and her students transformed into a parade and block party, she served ordinary bread from nearby bakeries. “Any bread,” she said, “means communion.”

***

Bread was a staple in ancient Israel, accounting for half the day’s calories. It was made primarily by women, who spent hours grinding and baking at home, feeding their families by the sweat of their brow. I wonder: who baked the bread served at the last supper? A woman still can’t give the sacramental rite of communion, but one almost certainly labored over the bread for Christ’s last night on earth.

Bread is the first thing I remember making with my mother. She let me knead the sticky dough with my small hands. It was the most basic of recipes, four elemental ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast. The yeast seemed like a miracle—sealed in a foil packet but somehow alive, waiting to be awakened by warm water from the kitchen sink. The tiny grains worked their magic in secret, doubling the dough under a damp towel while I wasn’t looking, doubling it again in the darkness of the oven. We ate the bread hot with salted butter. I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted anything better.

Most of the communion wafers in this country are mass-produced in an industrial bakery in Greenville, Rhode Island. They contain only two ingredients, flour and water, pressed between iron plates. The results are perfectly uniform, with a carefully sealed edge to prevent crumbs. The company boasts that throughout the entire production process its bread is untouched by human hands.

***

Three of the four gospels provide some variation on “Take, eat; this is my body.” Only one includes any hint that Jesus meant for us to repeat the Lord’s supper as a ritual; only in Luke do we hear him say to his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” But let’s assume he said it. What did he mean? I don’t think he imagined an elaborate rite defined by rules about who cannot partake in it. I think he was extending a simple and profound invitation—to take a moment, during the everyday act of nourishing ourselves, to remember what’s been given to us and what we owe one another.

What does it mean to take the Lord’s name in vain? Claiming to follow a savior who broke bread with sinners, who loved them and died for them, while turning people away from your table would surely seem to qualify.

***

Yeast are single-celled organisms, invisible to the naked eye but existing all around us—in flour, in the air, on the hands of a baker. This is how sourdough starts: if you create the right conditions, if you provide the proper temperature and enough time, flour and water will ferment, no foil packet required. I’m hoping faith is like that—that it will someday find me and change me if I remain open to it.

In the meantime, I am trying to pay attention to everyday miracles, to microbes and mushrooms, to the tides tugged by the moon, to the tree in my backyard whose species predates the dinosaurs. I am giving thanks for the stanza that sticks to me like a burr and the song that makes me weep for no reason and the painting that stops me cold. Distant strangers and long-dead souls are talking to me, singing to me, showing me something important: this is a kind of communion too. And I am trying to believe that if transubstantiation can happen at an altar, it can happen in my mother’s kitchen and during the dinner shift at the youth shelter down the street.

Can an ordinary meal made by human hands be a sacrament? The sun is an utterly ordinary star. The whole world depends on it.

-Jacqueline Houton

Jacqueline Houton is an editor and writer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her musician-turned-techie husband and two Rubenesque cats. She has mostly worked at magazines, but is currently copyediting kids’ and YA books by day. Her writing has appeared in Bitch magazine, Boston Art Review, Boston magazine, Pangyrus, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Find her on Instagram @j.houton