Welcome back to Gabbin’ About God, in which Mallory uses her religious background to explain Christian-y things to Nicole. Most recently: Predestination.
Mallory, can we talk about the false doctrine of transubstantiation, and the evolution of the concept? I’ve always thought it was weird that Jesus used metaphors CON-STANT-LY and this is the thing people decided was NOT a metaphor but a Real Exact Thing. And is consubstantiation just “yeah, you know, we’re doing this in memory, like he SAID” or is it something else? And why do some denominations not drink wine even though Jesus literally made wine that one time? What denominations have Communion or Communion-esque things in their services? Thank you for your time.
PAPISM. (N.B. I love Catholics and feel comfortable that we are far enough removed from the religious wars of the 17th century that I can rib them gently about their WRONGHEADED ADHERENCE TO FALSE DOCTRINES.)
Oh man, the various doctrines around the Eucharist are…something and a half, aren’t they? It’s an incredibly basic concept, in theory: The church should periodically eat a meal of bread and wine together to commemorate the fellowship of the disciples and Jesus’ sacrifice. And it’s pretty universal, across party lines, to celebrate the Eucharist, whether you’re Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant. All the Synoptic Gospels mention the Last Supper, and Corinthians records members of the early church taking communion:
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’
And yet the theology that’s developed around the nature of the sacrament has become INCREDIBLY complex. And to modern eyes, it can seem…incredibly silly, sometimes? But people used to take this debate incredibly seriously, whether the bread and wine of the Eucharist were actually bread and wine or whether they were transformed into body and blood during the service.
Right, yes, it’s very “follow the shoe/follow the gourd,” given that Jesus was generally given to using simple, earthy metaphors and yet fifteen hundred years later half of Europe was stabbing out the rest of Europe’s eyeballs because no one could agree on the Aristotelian distinctions of the elements of the table. And it can be a little confusing, because the Eucharist is also referred to as the Lord’s Supper and communion interchangeably, the bread is often referred to as the host (and it might be a wafer instead of bread) and different churches might celebrate it weekly or monthly or just a handful of times a year. Your Eucharist may vary!
There’s also a difference between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ communions – you can’t take communion at a Catholic service unless you’re a baptized Catholic; most Protestants don’t care if you’re a member of their church as long as you’ve been baptized and profess the faith, although there are some churches that only offer communion to their registered members. (If you’re ever at a High Church communion service, by the way, and you’re going up to receive the elements but you don’t want to take any, you can just cross your arms over your chest like a mummy and that’s a sign for the priest of whomever to just offer you a blessing instead of the cup and the bread. If you’re at, say, a Baptist service, they’re just going to pass the trays around and you can send it on down the line without taking anything.)
Broadly, here’s the major distinctions:
Catholics: That transubstantiation of which you have heard so much! Broadly, the idea is that the real presence of Jesus comes to inhabit the materials of the Eucharist without changing their outward appearance. The substance changes, but the appearance doesn’t, which is why a Catholic wouldn’t expect to literally taste blood during the service. Very Aristotelian! (SOMEDAY WE WILL TALK ABOUT THE CREEPING ARISTOTELIANISM OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.)
First Communion is a big deal, although most churches won’t offer communion to little kids (sometimes no one younger than seven, sometimes the cutoff age is twelve, it’s dependent upon what that particular church considers the age of accountability to be.)
They’ve heard, by the way, your very-clever follow-up question a thousand times before, and they are ready for you: “When, after Holy Communion, our digestive processes have destroyed the appearance of bread within us, Jesus no longer is bodily present; only His grace remains.”
Orthodox Christians: Basically the same thing!
Coptic/Ethiopian Christians: “I believe, I believe, I believe and profess to the last breath that this is the body and the blood of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he took from our Lady, the holy and immaculate Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.”
Lutherans: That CONSUBSTANTIATION doctrine you’ve heard so much about (Actually, it’s more accurately called the “sacramental union,” by which the presence of Christ was to be found “with, in, and under” the sacramental elements). These sort of nice distinctions can all, by the way, feel a bit WACKY to modern readers, so instead of dismissing everyone in the past as a bunch of loons, it can sometimes be helpful to think of it in these terms: People were trying to explain in concrete terms to each other how they could interact with the divine presence on a regular basis. And, again, that damn Aristotelian worldview meant that the nature or substance of an object dictated its value, its meaning, its effect on other things. So it wasn’t just a matter of “you see the Body of Christ, I see a spiritually meaningful loaf of ordinary bread” but a matter of “how has God organized the world, and how do we interact with the divine, and where do we fit into the order of things.”
Episcopalians: Of course – of COURSE – there is a plethora of opinions held within the Anglican church. They’re just happy they have an excuse to drink wine at church every week, honestly. There’s a general divide between trans- and consubstantiation in the High and Low/Broad churches, respectively, but Episcopalians love covering all their bases whenever possible. See if you can find a definitive, exclusionary claim somewhere in this CofE catechism (I can’t!)
Question – What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?
Answer – I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.
Question – How many parts are there in a Sacrament?
Answer – Two: the outward visible sign, and the inward spiritual grace.
Question – Why was the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper ordained?
Answer – For the continual remembrance of the sacrifice of the death of Christ, and of the benefits which we receive thereby.
Question – What is the outward part or sign of the Lord’s Supper?
Answer – Bread and Wine, which the Lord hath commanded to be received.
Question – What is the inward part, or thing signified?
Answer – The Body and Blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper.
Most other mainline Protestants: Metaphor! Spiritual significance! Holy Spirit! A lot of Methodists and Baptists, by the way, will offer communion to any willing believer, but recommend that communicants reflect on their “spiritual fitness” before approaching the Lord’s Table. Generally, it’s understood that if you’ve got a major ongoing conflict you haven’t resolved – say, you’re estranged from someone that you owe an apology or some form of amends to – you should make it right before accepting the elements. But it’s very individually based; you don’t have to go to confession or check with any spiritual authority figure to determine your readiness.
Quakers and the Salvation Army: Generally don’t celebrate communion at all! Quakers don’t do ANYTHING that other Christians do, bless them, and the Salvation Army considers it a showy ritual that makes no difference in regards to one’s spiritual condition.
Right ho! That’s a layman’s view of things, anyhow. It’s certainly not the dividing issue it was four or five hundred years ago, anyhow.
*extremely Party Down voice* ARE WE HAVING FUN YET? (I am.)
Okay, so then, why do so many Protestant denominations serve communion in the form of grape juice in those little plastic cups? It’s certainly a far cry from lining up down the aisle to intinct your wafer in a majestic communal chalice of wine. And, as you pointed out, Jesus himself drank wine on several occasions. The Bible has several injunctions against drunkenness, but there are certainly no universal bans on drinking (Nazirites like Samson were pretty clearly exceptions). In fact, for most of the Church’s history, drinking alcohol was a huge part of common life. Teetotalism was for Muslims, not Christians.
So what changed? Two things: the column still and a series of legislative acts in England restricting the importation of brandy. (I’M SERIOUS.) Distillation had been possible for centuries, but it was a fairly difficult and labor-intensive process. Most people in Europe drank beer and wine, and plenty of it, but the alcohol content was low enough that they could still, you know, function. Fortified wines and brandies were for the rich. But by the 1820s, a number of inventors had perfected the column still, which allowed operators to distill alcohol continuously. Which led to a real explosion in the mass-production of spirits! A century earlier, England had passed a number of laws restricting the importation of brandy, because to hell with the French, and encouraged the distillation of gin to buck up grain prices, which led to the DEADLY GIN CRAZE.
This is basically what sparked off the temperance and prohibition movements of the 19th century. Methodists were at the forefront of the movement, as were other socially-minded groups and also William Hogarth. The mass-production of high-alcohol-content spirits led to a huge shift in how people drank, you know; there had always been debauchery and drunkenness, sure, but never had it been so easy for so many people to get incredibly drunk incredibly quickly, for relatively cheap. So the temperance movement wasn’t just a bunch of killjoys who sprung up for no reason! They were responding to a very real social ill. The first temperance societies sprung up in America and England within the first few years of the development of the column still. After a few decades, the idea of temperate daily drinking sort of got lost in the shuffle; wine and beer were lumped in with all fortified spirits as part of the great Demon Alcohol, and that’s why so many Protestant denominations refuse to serve wine as a part of communion.
It probably has a lot to do with how you were raised; for me, the smell of grape juice or the taste of a certain type of white bread takes me back to childhood instantly. I used to feel a little guilty for how delicious I thought the communion grape juice tasted, like it was bad to enjoy something so serious.
On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our
Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks
to you, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take,
eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the
remembrance of me.”After supper he took the cup of wine; and when he had given
thanks, he gave it to them, and said, “Drink this, all of you:
This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you
and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink
it, do this for the remembrance of me.”Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
Now that I’m grown up I can buy all the grape juice that I want, but I never do.
Tags: gabbin about god, religion
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When I went to Catholic church as a kid, my sisters and I would comment on the type of communion served, with the unleavened bread being our favorite. “Jesus is kind of salty today, but delicious. His blood complemented the body very nicely.”
You had different types of communion?! I was also brought up Catholic (sort of, parents were both fairly lapsed at the time because divorce, but I experienced Mass at a bunch of different churches) and I thought ALL Catholics always had just those weird wafers. Nothing with any flavour. Huh.
Lutheran here – sometimes we had the wafers and sometimes it was small pieces of real (but still tasteless) bread. I think it maybe correlated to different phases of the church calendar, but it seemed pretty random to me.
The Catholic teaching is that the bread has to be unleavened to validly be used in communion (based on the fact that the Last Supper was a Passover meal) — I’ve only ever seen the flat wafers in Catholic churches.
Well, were they the wafers the texture of styrofoam that just melt away, or the wafers the texture (and flavour, imo) of cardboard that melt away slightly differently, but don’t stick to the roof of your mouth so much you can’t focus for the rest of Mass?
Not a huge difference, but when I was little it baffled me to find ANY differences after the big deal that was made over the special way they had to be made.
When I went to Mass at my grade school we had those weird styrofoam wafers, but at my high school the cooking club made unleavened bread cut into little squares for our Masses and it was DELICIOUS! I seriously want to find their eucharist recipe. (Catholic)
The regular communion-taker can absolutely taste the difference in age – if it’s getting stale it gets stuck in your teeth.
We had the wafers for regular church but on church retreats they would bake REAL BREAD with was obviously a thrill. I think the wafer are already so stale that they can’t get worse so they saved the edible stuff for when they were sure of how many servings they needed.
Around 60+ years ago my dad was in Catholic school and learning these things for communion. He says the nuns were at the front explaining everything, and passed around wafers (that hadn’t been ‘transformed’ yet so they were still just wafers) so they’d know what to expect. Right after they said about it being his actual body one of his classmates yelled out ‘I got a leg!’. The nuns were…. not kind to his knuckles.
This is hilarious.
My Lutheran church (ELCA) growing up used the wafers at certain occasions, but most of the time they used plain old pita bread (and Manischevitz).
One time somebody on the altar guild wasn’t paying attention and bought onion-and-garlic pitas. That was some savory Body of Christ.
Okay, that is making me laugh far harder than is really appropriate. Mmm, onion-and-garlic Christ!
The particular hippy-dippy UCC of my childhood doesn’t even require that you be Christian, if you happen to be there and feel like participating.
Of course, they also once sent us as a class of nine-year-olds to have “secret” communion in the catacombs (a little closet behind the basement storage, iirc) so we may have just been weird in general.
The NH UCC (or Congregationalist or “Unitarians Considering Christ” as one Catholic friend of mine once put it) church of my childhood served tiny cubes of Pepperidge Farm Thin White and Welch’s grape juice once a month. These were passed around the pews by the Ushers. The grape juice was especially exciting (if you’re 8) because it came in teeny glass shotglasses that nestled in a special silver tray that had wee holes for each glass.
It wasn’t exactly hippy-dippy (excuse me, we are from the Granite State: we neither hip nor dip), but it also didn’t have the layered grandiosity of a Communion served at the altar.
haha, once they forgot to buy the bread that actually goes on the pastor’s table upfront to be broken (as opposed to the little cubes all ready to go) and they sent one of the ushers to the nearby Corner Bakery, where all he could get was some kind of jalapeno cheese sandwich roll.
My Episcopal church does universal communion, as well. The bishop doesn’t particularly agree with the practice, but doesn’t mind it enough to make us stop.
This is one of the most Episcopalian things I have ever read, thank you.
This is what we officially call a “generous pastoral response.”
I have a genuine question: as someone who had (and has) no religion, and almost no experience of churches outside one or two First Communions of cousins whose mother is a lapsed Catholic, how does the Church know if you’re Christian, to take the communion?
Is it just a self-declaration, so it relies on honesty? Or is there, like, code? Like if I went up and wanted to take communion, would they ask me some questions and I’d have to answer in the right way or they’d know and kick me out?
It’s definitely self-declaration. You don’t get quizzed because they’d have to quiz everyone and that would take forever (Catholics love nothing more than getting out of mass in 57 minutes), but the idea is that by saying “Amen” in response, you’re saying you believe in the transubstantiation. I had Protestant friends that found this INFURIATING and INSULTING, but them’s the rules.
Ha! I suspected it would be something like that.
I mean I can’t see a reason for taking communion if you didn’t want to, unless you were the kind of person who vandalises Wikipedia pages for fun.
Thanks for answering!
I think it’s a self-declaration, because really, how would that be enforced? Although I suspect that the stricter churches might notice newcomers and strike up a conversation about their home parish as a way of finding out if somebody’s baptized into that particular tradition. My church has a bit in the bulletin saying “The Church believes that our Holy Communion has its fullest expression through Holy Baptism. If you are interested in Baptism, talk to a member of the clergy,” which sort of sidesteps the enforcement thing.
My hot take: if God cares that much about non-believers receiving the consecrated elements, then God can de-substantiate upon sensing the lack of belief in somebody’s heart. Also, I don’t think that there’s an epidemic of people fraudulently taking communion, so it’s not really worth getting all twisted up about.
Hmm, that’s the kind of thing I was imagining. Like, subtle questioning that would tell them I wasn’t genuine.
Though I have this image of Church Police just leaping out from behind the priest and leading me outside in shame.
I accidentally took Communion at a Catholic wedding when I was nine-ish (my teacher, so I wasn’t with my parents) and felt horrible about it for YEARS.
Kind of like how I feel about that one time I shoplifted. One gumball and a set of plastic Power Rangers.
The guilt haunts me still.
My grandmother was excommunicated waaaay back in the day (pre Vatican II) for marrying a non-Catholic. She kept right on taking communion and going to church; raised the kids Catholic.
That’s just what I mean. If no one KNOWS you’re not Catholic (or not anymore) then it’s completely up to you and your conscience.
If a tree falls in a wood, etc.
I went to a UCC church for several years (they are just awesome) and did communion once a month. And every time, our pastor would say that “everyone is welcome at this table,” which I just loved.
We had home-baked bread cut into little pieces, which we dipped into grape juice. (The UCC isn’t anti-alcohol. It was meant to be supportive of people in recovery.)
(If I started believing in the whole god and Jesus thing again I would go back to the UCC in a heartbeat. I’m forever recommending them to queer Christians who are looking for a church.)
Love this. Having grown up Four Square, Episcopalian and Assembly of God I feel like I grew up with little bits of all of this. I forgot the call-and-return-sing-song element of the Episcopal call, reading the catechism reminded me of it.
OH MY GOODNESS I FEEL LIKE GOING FROM FOUR SQUARE TO EPISCOPALIAN IS A BIGGER SHIFT THAN CONVERTING TO BUDDHISM, PLEASE GIVE ME EVERY DETAIL
It’s a Very Strange Thing That Happened in my Dad’s Family who are all dickwads and yet Staunchly Religious??? Thank GOD it happened after I was in college and could therefore assert my own Religious Preferences (ie: forgetting to actually go to church every Sunday after they left) Dad always tries to puppydog eye me into going to Midnight Mass on Christmas (only on Christmas, he’s AoG the rest of the year!) and so far I have been able to escape it since I lived at home.
Wow. Were you Episcopalian first and then the switch was made to the pentecostal traditions?
My spouse grew up AoG and his mom still looks at our switch to Episcopalian with the side eye.Too cal. My parents (nondenominational, very conservative), OTOH, flat out think our kids are going to hell because there is no baptism by submersion, but that’s another story.
Grew up AoG (Dad’s Fam was 4sq) and then Dad’s fam (sans Dad, minus Christmas ???) switched to Episcopalian in my teens. So it was more of a “when going to church with grandma” situation than being dragged to services on the regular… so it wasn’t too bad. Mom and Dad are pissed that I’m not a) going to church where I live, b) living in sin, and c) thinking about not taking my kids to church at all, so uh, I guess count your blessings?
I had a similarly denomination hopping family that gives me a comfortably with most forms of Christianity. I grew up evangelical non-denominational, then my parents became Lutheran while I went to the First Baptist Church with a friend. Then, I joined the Catholic church my grandparents attended because I auditioned for their choir, but my parents said I could sing if I did not convert (Dad’s youthful rebellion was becoming Protestant). Suffice to say, watching my Catholic friend attend a Baptist service for the first time was my first great lesson in religious insularity. She shuddered at the praise band! I just assumed everyone knew about other people’s interpretations of the Gospel as well as all the various ways you can sing Rock of Ages.
I also love that I’m not the only formerly devout / person who is spiritual when she remembers individual who enjoys being an Expert and Explaining Religious Things to people. It’s fun and also fascinating to put these traditions into words for people who didn’t grow up indoctrinated.
I’m not devout or formerly devout, but I did grow up in a very, very devout area with lots of devout family. Now that I live in a Big East Coast Liberal City (pretty much Sexcriminalboat), I have a wonderful time explaining to people here that yes, there is a place where prayer in public school is A Thing.
i love scandalizing people by telling them about Mormons! Especially when they grew up in an area where there weren’t Mormons. (For the record, I like Mormons a LOT, but some of the traditions are strange if you’re not used to them)
For work, I once had to read the daily diaries of a Quaker woman – teenage to elderly – and as far as I can tell, Quakerism is based on chats. Quakers LOVE a good kaffeeklatsch. Maybe some hot cocoa, maybe a slice of cake, and a good ol’ gabfest about spirituality. I can dig it.
I always thought of it as based in being very, very quiet.
It was her journals I was working with, but I got the impression she was a fairly quiet person. Also, she and her mother (I had one of the mother’s diaries, too) would copy over poems a lot and kept, like, spiritual scrapbooks? I have this contact at a Quaker archive and he basically explained it to me as a sort of optional Quaker homework. The woman in question’s diaries were from the 1920s-1980.
Ooh, which Quaker archive? I interned at the Quaker archive of Guildford College, a Quaker college in NC.
The American Friends Service Committee in Philly! The guy that works there and I have never met in person, but he’s super nice and lets me pester him with questions.
Currently a practicing Quaker, and I can attest that at my meeting we spend an hour being very quiet and then an hour having coffee and chats.
I could dig that kind of service. Especially if the hour of being very quiet meant I could curl up under a blankie with my cat and be pensive.
Quakers are very, very chill. I think you could probably bring a cat and a blanket to worship meetings without anyone minding
There’s a joke that most Quakers are only silent for one hour a week.
UUs as well.
Pretty much. Except replace the cocoa with tea.
I gave you a thumbs up just for the word “kaffeeklatsch”. Love me some German infiltration of the English language.
These posts are my favorite. #teampapist
I have been a committed Catholic all my life. When I was taking classes before Confirmation (age 13), our confirmation teacher was asking us questions about the Eucharist. One was, “So if aliens totally unfamiliar with Catholicism came down to earth and said, ‘you’re cannibals! You’re eating his flesh and drinking his blood!’ what would you say?”
I (being a goody goody as well as devout) raised my hand to answer: “Well, it’s a metaphor–”
NOBODY in years of Sunday School and mass had thought to inform me that one of the central beliefs that sets Catholicism apart is that we believe the wine and bread are actually Jesus, and that we’re not being metaphorical about this one. NOBODY.
oh NOOOOOOOOOO
WHAT DID SHE SAYYY
She cut me off there, which was very considerate of her, and said something like “No, that’s what Protestants believe.” I don’t remember her exact words so much as my SHOCK.
She’s one of my mom’s best friends, and her daughter was one of my closest friends from infancy into high school, so this might have been why she was kind to me even when I committed outright blasphemy in her class. She was probably amused that her daughter’s goody-goody friend had accidentally committed outright blasphemy.
(Apparently IntenseDebate ate my first answer.) Mercifully, she cut me off right there with something like, “No, that’s what Protestants believe” and moved on. I mostly remember my TOTAL SHOCK.
She was my one of my mom’s best friends, and her daughter was one of my closest friends from infancy into high school. So this might have been why she was rather kind to me for committing outright blasphemy. She was probably also amused that her daughter’s goody-goody friend had just committed outright blasphemy.
Nobody ever told me, either! I was in COLLEGE when a friend of mine casually mentioned it, and I was like, “WTF? That’s nuts. That’s not a Catholic thing. That’s definitely something else.”
Wrong!
I was well into my twenties when I realized they meant this literally. It really is the hardest hump for me as a regular Catholic churchgoer to get over, believing in transubstantiation. I figure Jesus doesn’t mind if I read it as a metaphor.
Also, what should you have said? Very lapsed Catholic here, I remember having to answer that question but have no idea what I would have said because it makes even less sense to me now.
If I’m remembering my apologetics correctly, the basic counter-claim is tied into the claims about exactly what changes are being effected; you are receiving the body and blood in the form of bread and wine; their true substance is the body and blood, but the form they are received in is not, and so it is not cannibalism. It’s splitting very, very fine hairs at that point, of course, but if you’ve got Europeans in your family tree, you’ve probably got (potentially very distant) relatives that killed and/or died over those distinctions.
What I remember from 16 years of grudging Sunday School is that Catholics are all about the both-and: the Big Bang and God creating the universe, eternal hell and constant opportunities to repent, etc. The bread is the body of Christ sort of the same way Jesus is God. Was he a man? Well, yes, he ate and grew up and bled, but he did all of that as God too- Jesus isn’t Jesus without the divinity or the humanity. So the bread and wine have essential food attributes, but they have God’s grace too, and the presence of that grace means they are, essentially, a manifestation of God’s presence.
Or you could recycle the head-of-a-pin argument: God is everywhere and everything at once, He is the stardust (Catholics these days love star dust for some reason) that created every atom in the universe, and so by saying the bread and wine are God we are simply acknowledging the presence of Christ more than we normally do.
I think this was also one of the things I went a long time not really realizing, and I might have snort-laughed at the idea at one point in Catholic school, and then quickly pretended like I hadn’t when everyone else seemed to be taking it seriously. See also: God being Jesus’s dad but also Jesus being god at the same time.
I probably would have said that too…
OMG SAME. This was heavily compounded by the fact that my parents were super-lax don’t-even-really-believe-in-God Catholics who nonetheless thought it was VERY IMPORTANT to continue being Catholics because of heritage, and Grandma, and the necessity making sure that at least we aren’t Protestants. So I grew up with a sort of proto-postmodern idea that religion is something that you perform, and that actual belief is some sort of philosophical conundrum of believing and not-believing at the same time. Like what does it reaaallly mean to say that something is “literally true” anyway?
And then I learned that for some people “literally true” means like ACTUALLY literally, and that’s about when I realized that I didn’t have all too much in common with the Catholic church.
Yeah… My grandmother was raised Catholic, by nuns. She later became wiccan and a lesbian, but god help anyone who tried to become a protestant. We’re Irish american, though, so I thought that was why.
I did something similar during the kids’ service (when they herd all the kids into the church basement to learn about Jesus while the adults suffer through a long homily punctuated by unexpected musical bursts from the narcoleptic organists) when I, at the age of about 6, repeated something I had seen the week before on 60 Minutes: that Jesus couldn’t have been born in December because shepherds weather wrong time of year what have you. I don’t remember anymore what the leaders said but I do remember a long, long, loooong awkward silence.
My boyfriend was raised Methodist, and he always says that it is the Lord’s Table, not the churches, and it’s not up to anyone else to decide who does/doesn’t get to take communion.
I used to go to Mass regularly with my Catholic friends and sit on the end of the pew so that I could easily get up and let them all out to go to communion and then get back in my seat (they would come back in the other side). And I remember it as being “this is my blood, […] which is shed for you and for all.” Which appeals to my inner Universalist (though predestination appeals to my inner heathen, because then if I am going to Hell, it isn’t my fault).
I was raised Methodist, and we also would occasionally have communion with Oreos and milk at church camp!
I was raised Methodist as well and different people would be in charge of baking the (leavened) bread each month. Some were much tastier than others.
U.S Catholic churches used the “for all” translation until a couple of years ago, when the English language mass was updated to better reflect the Latin from which it was supposed to be translated (which in, in the case of “for many,” comes from Jesus’s own language in Mark, I think). So “for all” became “for many,” along with several other minor changes.
Which are just the worst when you’re a long-lapsed Catholic attending mass slightly hungover for Mother’s Day and MOM I KNOW IT’S DIFFERENT I JUST DON’T KNOW EXACTLY HOW PLEASE QUIT GIVING ME THAT DISAPPROVING LOOK WHEN I SAY THE WRONG THING PLUS “AND ALSO WITH YOUR SPIRIT” IS DUMB
“Consubstantial with the father” shut up shut up shut upppppp it’s so dumb. That’s not even a real word!
It’s not only the US, though. Pope Benedict released a text in 2012, ordering the German bishops to change the words from “for all” to “for many” because – as you said – it is a better translation: Latin “pro multis” shouldn’t be translated as “for all” because that would be interpreting “pro multis” as derived from the Hebrew text of Jesaja. But it comes directly from the New Testament, meaning it was originally written in Greek, and then translated to Latin.
Nevertheless, a lot of priests around here still say “for all” – I think it’s one of those cases where you can do what you want as long as nobody tells the bishop.
At my church, whether it’s “for many” or “for all” depends on who the celebrant is, and which prayer book (all from the Anglican Communion, but we like to switch it up sometimes) we’re using. I’m sure there are various members of the congregation who are all in a tizzy about the changes, but they just kvetch about it to other people at coffee hour, rather than formally objecting.
Most of the Lutheran churches I’ve been to have been very chill about taking communion – v. ~you know within yourself whether or not you believe & should receive the host~ etc., which is exactly what I’m looking for as someone with faith but whose heathen parents never baptized her bc apparently they don’t care about their only daughter’s immortal soul
BUT that being said, I recently moved and was trying out new churches & the one I went to was SO STRICT and MEAN about the checklist of qualifications necessary to take communion and the pastor was so into shaming everyone that i thought i might’ve accidentally gone to catholic mass tbqh
I’m Episcopalian and my husband is Catholic. When he came to church with me one time, the priest (very good-naturedly, to be clear) asked why he didn’t come up for communion: “Tell him Jesus wants him to have dinner. You can’t come to Jesus’s house and not eat!” She was a delight.
Yeah, you are looking for ELCA churches, I believe (but even then, individual churches differ on conservatism). Missouri Synod and the denomination from Wisconsin (I think?) are way more strict/conservative.
thank you! I was just surprised because my home church is in the reddest of red counties / very traditional in most aspects (only formal services, no ~modern worship bands~ or digital hymnals) and this new church is in Southern California, which I assumed would be highly loosey goosey
also, to be fair, i think 90% of my home church’s vibe is due to the fact that our pastor is a holdover hippy who invariably pulls out a guitar at some point during his sermon lololol
If you are looking for a lutheran church still, may I suggest looking at the ELCA’s Reconciling in Christ congregations?
They are churches that have specifically put in their mission statements that they are welcoming to all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Of course, that doesn’t say everything about them, but I find that if they are committed to these welcoming values, they are usually pretty in line with other values I want in a church. There are a bunch in California, you might have one near you!
Wisconsin Synod is definitely more strict than Missouri Synod. I have Missouri Synod relatives and there were always kerfuffles about who could have communion or not depending on who was visiting whom, but Wisconsin Synod people won’t even pray with other people*
*to the best of my recollection from some pan-Lutheran stuff
Yeah, I grew up ELCA, but my grandma goes to Missouri Synod and the differences are stark enough between those. I can’t imagine doing Wisconsin Synod.
I’m not allowed to take communion at my grandpa’s Missouri Synod church, despite having been raised ELCA, because they’re weird and believe in actual Transubstantiation.
Same. Raised ELCA, can’t take communion in my grandparents’ Missouri Synod church. I think even my dad couldn’t, because he joined an ELCA church after being raised Missouri Synod. Fortunately this usually gave us an excuse to slip out before communion when we visited them, because their church is huge and it took for-freaking-ever.
True story: my grandfather spent most of his career as a pastor in the Missouri Synod until retiring for the first time. He then started volunteering at a local ELCA church, which then offered him an associate pastor position when one opened up. He had to get ordained AGAIN, over fifty years after his first ordination.
I also have distinct memories of grape juice.
I remember noticing the different trays/methods of passing out the communion a lot as a kid. For example: most of the time, my parents & I went to a Southern Baptist church. Really great silver trays, and the trays for the grape juice shots (heh) had little circles in them for the cups to nestle into. On holidays, or just occasionally, we’d go with my grandparents to their Assembly of God church. Everything about that church was much more….low-budget? They still used an overhead projector for hymn lyrics (I always loved it when the elderly lady who switched the transparencies forgot to change songs. Hilarity and much mumbled singing ensued), and their trays were wooden (but still had the special cupholders!). So many different methods of eating/drinking.
Do you remember the AoG communion being hella casual in terms of like, who gets to do communion? I grew up AoG and usually the conversion prayer was a part of the communion part of the service but I don’t… ever remember ~being chill with the JC~ being a stipulation of taking communion.
Oh definitely. I don’t even remember it being mentioned. There was definitely a prayer, but the plates were just passed around casually. It was my grandmother who explained to me that you should only take it if you felt like you should. If you felt uncomfortable, or weren’t a Christian, you shouldn’t take it. But it was never stated explicitly that I recall.
AOG. oh lawd. My childhood denomination. Yes, I believe “hella casual” applies to everything EXCEPT spiritual warfare. Which is hella serious. I look back now, and envy teens whose nighttime ponderings didn’t involve things like, “does Satan have a stronghold in my soul?” and “gosh, I hope that Jesus has forgiven my rebellion, or the demons have probably gotten me, because you know it’s the same thing as witchcraft, and I’m going to die.”
I guess my pastor always emphasized the importance of “taking the cup worthily”, but then AOG churches are notoriously individual and fluctuate wildly from congregation to congregation.
OH SHIT. Did you guys do like, TEEN INTERVENTION nights where someone dressed up as satan to scare you straight?
As fond as I am about a lot of the teachings of growing up in church (the quaint songs! the felt sheep! the having friends!) I’m pretty sure I’m going to go out of my way to keep my kids from the insane amounts of guilt and terror the SPIRITUAL WARFARE brought me.
I’m actually pretty sure that’s why I like, gave up on “trying so hard” because no matter what I did it wasn’t good enough for God? Also everyone who spoke in tongues in my age group faked and I genuinely believed it was A Thing That Could Happen To Me If I Was Good Enough And I Never Was.
GRAPE JUICE TASTES HOLY. The church I attend as an adult uses wine, but I still strongly associate communion with grape juice, and cannot bring myself to buy grape juice for other purposes. (I mean, it’s not that I think one shouldn’t drink grape juice, I just can’t disassociate it from communion on a visceral level.)
Catholics are literal about a LOT of things… when Jesus called Peter the “rock on which” he would “build his church,” later Popes took this seriously enough to literally build the Vatican on top of Peter’s burial site, despite the original intent clearly being a humorous pun.
he was also the first pope, so that is a major part of it
Hippitus hoppitus deus domine…
I like to take the Colbert approach and believe that he was actually transfigured into a rock, that they then built a church on.
Over here in Ireland, they do not serve wine (that looks weird, but I’ll go with it) at Catholic mass with communion unless you are one of the Eucharistic ministers. I know not why, but I used to find it most exotic to attend church in another country as a kid and get to have some wine as well.
I’m also trying to remember whether the Pioneer movement (huge tee-total thing over here that they try to foist on you in school, or did in my day) considered communion wine exempt – my grand-uncle was a lifelong pioneer and I *think* he spent time as a minister of the eucharist so it probably was.
The pioneers (and their pin) are sort of like the chastity movement in the US (and their silver ring), make you make a promise at an age where you don’t understand it and are too cowed to say no, give you dodgy jewelry and set you up for extra guilt dollops when you reject it later. It’s like confirming your faith at 13 when you’re still not old enough to refuse it. Maybe 13-year-olds today are ballsier than in my day, but I always though that was unfair. I have issues (not least because I spent my teen years in the Ferns diocese in the mid 80’s to early 90’s) – and had heard enough by 15 to lose any trust in the church.
When we had the type of communion with the little squares of bread and lil cups of grape juice passed around, we had to wait a while before we got to eat it. So lil me would squish the bread flat (to represent Jesus dying) then squish it back into a square (because he lived again!)
I got bored a lot in church.
I ALSO SQUISHED THE BREAD
I went through a period of drawing stick-figure depictions of the Titanic sinking every single Sunday during the service. The same exact photo, but I tried to improve some parts (like a chain of stick figures going down to the ocean floor, and Carpathia in the distance, and a handful of lifeboats). I think I had a hundred versions of it at some point, collected inside my Bible. You might have been forgiven for thinking I was a morbid and unwell child. If I’d been in a movie, you’d know something terrible had either happened to me or was going to happen to me.
I was raised more or less Methodist, and yes that bit about how good the communion grape juice tasted, that is very true. That, and the fact that my very small church often used a loaf of rather nice bread, and you were allowed to break a chunk off yourself. Even at a very young age, I knew I shouldn’t grab a handful, but sometimes I wanted to and then felt bad. (And sometimes we used wafers, and sometimes chunks of wonderbread…)
I did not know you weren’t supposed to take communion at a Catholic church if you weren’t Catholic, though. I had to run through my head all the times I’ve been to mass as a guest and make sure I hadn’t committed a major spiritual faux pas. I haven’t, I went straight from “wine is icky and I’m underage” to “I don’t believe in god and therefore do not take part in religious rituals.” Phew.
Definitely some good crusty sourdough for tearing off; definitely tasted great dunked in grape juice; definitely looked forward to after service, when some of us would just go about polishing off the leftovers.
The Hindu/Buddhist version of this is prasad or bhog. Prasad can get pretty elaborate on special occasions (could be veg curry, lentils and rice, soup, carrot halva) but is usually just a small sugar pill or a small sweet snack that’s given out at the end of the service or puja and considered to have within it (or with it) the blessing of God. I loved those sugar pills as a kid.
The one time I visited a Hindu temple in the US (on a tour organized by a temple member who was also a member of our UU church), the priest gave me a banana – it was lovely. And I know it’s not Hindu or Buddhist, but my husband visited a Sikh Gurudhwara in India and still talks about the “hand-pudding” (prasad).
Sick gurdwaras serve an astonishing amount of food. I’m not clear on the theology behind it, but you can basically go in and have a full meal (usually roti and dal), for free, at most Sikh religious centers. You don’t have to be Sikh or anything, anyone can partake.
Here’s a nice article about how the Sikhs are helping feed the homeless in the UK:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-…
I feel like there are a lot of Christians who could benefit from a field trip to a gurudhwara — “See? THIS is how you love your neighbor.”
In the words of Tom Lehrer, “2-4-6-8 time to transubstantiate!”
Ave Maria, gee it’s good to see ya!
YESSSSSSSSS
TOM LEHRER 5EVER
It’s not against any religion/To want to dispose of a pigeon.
Thank you all for a bright spot in the day.
Grew up Catholic, six years of Catholic school (the latter six, which was the worst, in my opinion, thanks Mom and Dad), but no longer practicing (I prefer the term “Recovering Catholic”). I had never heard this until today. So thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart. It is amazing 🙂
I am one of the Unbaptized and I feel like I’ve been to both Protestant and Catholic services (maybe weddings, in the Catholic case?) where the priest has been like, “This is an open communion, just come on up if you feel like it.” Is that something normal, communion even for the non-baptized, non-believers? Or is that more of a “We assume everyone here is at least kind of Christian” kind of thing?
(I’ve never gone, as it feels disrespectful to participate in a religious ritual while not believing in it.)
Might be either, in my experience. In the church I grew up in, it was more of a “even if you’re not baptized, you can still receive the love of Christ”, and at a couple of friends’ churches, it was more “you’re here so therefore you’re probably Christian but we’re not gonna get finicky about denomination”.
In my experience (as a loony toons Protestant married to a mega-lapsed Catholic), open communion means that you can participate even if you aren’t a member of that church and/or denomination. So if you’re a Proddy visiting a Catholic wedding, you can still take communion even though they think you’re a bit crazy the rest of the time. 🙂
In the Episcopal churches that I’ve frequented, open communion has meant that it’s genuinely open to anyone who feels like participating, regardless of their beliefs. (There are many Episcopal churches that do not offer open communion, but that’s what it’s meant when I’ve gone to ones that do.) I think the idea is that it’s a way to share God’s love and be in community even with those who don’t believe in him? The Presbyterian church I grew up in was usually a little more explicit in offering the invitation to all who sought God, which could still be people who weren’t quite sure what they were believed, but were trying this whole Christianity thing on for size.
There’s just as much of a High and Low schism in Catholicism as Episcopalianism, only nobody’s named it. High churches would be offended by a non-Catholic crossing the stoop, and low churches wouldn’t really care. There are three main tells: Are you in an actual cathedral? Is there either a) incense or b) more than one priest on a non-holiday? And most importantly, do the pews have built-in fold-out knee rests for prayerful reflection after Communion? If any of the above, you shouldn’t even look in the same direction as the Eucharist.
(Cathedrals aren’t unique to Catholics though. I remember being dragged out of one Mass on a family trip because, in a haze of jetlag, my mom had just assumed that the nearest cathedral named Saint Peter’s must be Catholic. Turns out it was Episcopalian and we could not under any circumstances have Protestant Communion.)
this is perfect! I’m pretty sure most kids seriously raised Catholic have had that experience, although in our case we just sat quietly through the rest of the service and then went to a catholic mass later that day.
My only additional suggestion is to see if the musicians look to be hippies. The more they look like they could start singing Godspel the more likely they are to not check id at communion. Figuratively, of course.
Protestant Communion: It’s Not Even Jesus!
Although I had a formerly-Catholic priest, with whom I had an affectionate denominational rivalry, explain to me that the joy of transubstantiation is that it happens whether or not I believe in it, so it’s Jesus anyway.
I’m a non-Catholic who has attended more Catholic masses than I’m comfortable with and I abandoned joining the communion line but crossing my arms a long, long time ago. Yes, technically all eucharistic ministers should know that when someone crosses their arms in front of them it doesn’t mean they want wafers shoved in their mouth, but they don’t.
Also the Methodist church I grew up in only did communion a couple times a year so I still smile at the oddity of weekly choreographed-for-max-efficiency Catholic communions.
Who still shoves at mouths?!! I’ve actually only ever seen the to-the-tongue delivery at an Episcopal Mass.
“It’s certainly a far cry from lining up down the aisle to intinct your wafer in a majestic communal chalice of wine.”
This is now, apparently, a no-no. A fact I learned when my Catholic (now ex-Catholic) husband tried to intinct his wafer and got the KING OF ALL STINKEYES from the priest.
Seems like a better idea than everybody slobbering all up on God’s wineglass, but whatever. ATHEIST. Not my problem to solve.
I recall reading once, though I can’t find where at the moment so I might be making this up, that it’s counterintuitively cleaner to drink from the chalice than it is to intinct. At least it is if you’re using actual wine and a silver chalice – the alcohol and the silver are both antimicrobial and the chalice is wiped and rotated slightly between each person. Whereas with intinction you run the risk of people sticking their nasty grubby fingers all up in the wine instead of just getting their lips on the silver where it can be readily cleaned off.
I’ve heard that too but I don’t know if it’s true; given the church people I hang out with it could be a joke.
My favorite gross thing about intinction is the people who aren’t ready for it, and then try to take the wafer back out of their mouths, already partially chewed, and dip it in the wine. Get a new wafer! Or make eyes at the server and try to sip like common cup! Or skip the wine! Do not regurgitate.
LOVE THIS.
“I used to feel a little guilty for how delicious I thought the communion grape juice tasted, like it was bad to enjoy something so serious.”
ok but let me tell you about the bread at [church name redacted], I swear it was basically small cubes of a dense white CAKE. Absolutely delicious.
When I was a wee cookie I went to my cousin’s church every Easter. And every Easter the Sunday school classes baked little rolls that were used for communion that day. So they would still be warm at communion. They were delicious and I’m not ashamed to have eaten a few before they made it out of the church kitchen.
When do we get the article explaining why people don’t turn into angels when they die because I’ve got like 87 Facebook friends who need to read it.
Its interesting that they think that – in Catholic theological tradition anyway Angels and people are completely different kinds of beings. They even have a different kind of being in that they are not capable becoming in the same way that we are. They were not and now they are but they are not connected to bodies and therefore don’t change (except in the aforementioned not-being to being way). I think. ALSO why we get new bodies after we Jesus comes back or whatever -because we can’t become immaterial things. Srry my stupid Catholic theology classes are burning a hole in my pocket – I was agnostic even then but I still found it fun.
Ways to convince your friends of this:
1. Give them Thomas Aquinas
2. I feel like A Wrinkle in Time also describes this…
The book of Revelation is also fairly clear on it. There are angels, then there are the patriarchs and prophets, then there’s the vast cloud of witnesses, the vast cloud of witnesses quite obviously not being angels.
F’REAL.
I was raised Methodist and always assumed my church didn’t agree with drinking, but in fact it was something to do with them not having a liquor license at the church premises – when we went for our church away weekends and someone passed me the cup my eight year old self was rather surprised by the nasty red wine and not the delicious grape juice.
Also shout out to my Irish Catholic ex who at a family wedding turned to me and stage-whispered YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED when everyone else got up for communion.
Was this only my Methodist church, or did you also believe for a long time that the grape juice was because John Wesley and Thomas Welch of Welch’s Grape Juice were friends and contemporaries? I swear that was the reasoning my pastor gave.
I’m looking up dates now and it does not check out. At all. By decades.
I know a story about Thomas Welch inventing his grape juice to be a substitute for wine in the temperence era Mallory was talking about. This blog post seems similar to what I heard in the methodist church I used to belong to. http://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/changing…
There is a kernel of truth to this, though! Thomas Welch was a Methodist minister, and did invent a method of pasteurizing grape juice to keep it from fermenting, specifically to produce non-alcoholic grape juice for communion. He just wasn’t alive as the same time as John Wesley.
Ah, thank you for this Mallory! As a raised-and-current Christian, I’ve always felt that communion is the one element of worship and fellowship that has resonated with me most strongly and reaffirmed my faith. And I see how it appears really strange to non-believers but also it pisses me off that it’s such low-hanging fruit for people to joke about OMG those crazy Christian cannibals, eating flesh and drinking blood. And although I have a soft spot for the white bread and tiny cups of grape juice of my youth, it’s really illuminated my faith to practice communion in other churches with a common cup, standing in a circle, singing the invocation in call-and-response manner, etc.
I also think the different approaches to who can serve the elements is really interesting. In my home church (Reformed Calvinist), only the elders could assist with serving. But in the United Methodist church I attended for a few years recently, anyone who was willing could and would be tapped to help out. The first time I was asked in frantic whispers right before the service started to help serve, I was really freaked out. But it ended up being extremely moving to help serve the elements to people I had known and worshiped with for years, and i got a bit verklempt.
Cannibal Communion and Zombie Jesus, two of my least favorite church memes.
I feel you on that. In part because it’s a METAPHOR OMG, NO I don’t believe I’m eating Christ’s actual body (Christ came to be the final Passover sacrifice? That’s why he says what he does during that Passover supper? Have y’all not read Isaiah?).
(No slight to our Catholic Toasties, though! It just gets annoying to be made fun of, per Unreadaethel’s comment about “Cannibal Communion”)
The practice of breaking bread together in my church is a gorgeous, quiet celebration of our community and togetherness as a group of individuals who love and care for each other–it is a remembrance, and a ceremony of gratitude, and I love Communion for that.
Cannibal Communion would, however, be an excellent band name.
Non-theological thoughts on communion:
The church I grew up in just started doing intinction during the summers instead of the full, heavy brass passed plates and there was an Uproar. (I am not a fan of soggy bread or grape juice with bits floating in it so I am not down for that. But they use Glutinos crackers for the gluten free option and those are delicious). Normal passed plate communion wafers are these shortbread things that the staff makes and they are soooo good. Is it okay for a metaphor-of-Jesus to be tasty?
(For those of you following along home, yes I’m agnostic. But it’s south Texas and I am pretty far in the closet)
Could we also examine why Church wine tastes so bad? I mean, I assume because it was/is cheap, but really. My sister and I always took the grape juice well after the age were you were expected to be more adult about it and drink the (awful) wine.
It is less bad when the campus chaplain brings it to parties but I have no idea about that, why do you ask
As a former altar server I can tell you that the literal blood of Christ is literally Franzia (or at least it was in our parish).
Former Eucharistic minister here (is that still a thing? I haven’t been Catholic in a looong time) and I second the literal Franzia. Also, when there was leftover Blood of Christ in the communion chalices we had to chug that business after communion was over because you can’t go pouring Jesus down the drain in the rectory.
Consecrated bread keeps but consecrated box wine does not.
Wine served for kiddush in Jewish services also always terrible, so this is a pan-religious problem.
It’s so the church ladies (or deacons or whoever are your congregation’s mischief-makers) don’t drink it all in the vestry after services.
I would guess it’s because it’s cheap, and whatever isn’t finished sits open in the fridge in the sacristy until next week. At least based on my experience.
Ours was always port mixed with blessed water – delicious
My Episcopal church uses real bread, baked by various members of the congregation. We also use a local port, because we are ridiculous. We’re at least relatively aware that we’re ridiculous.
And my Lutheran pastor grandfather was clearly an Episcopalian in disguise, because his answer to the question of the nature of the Eucharist was “something definitely happens, but I’m not going to commit myself to saying what that something is.” Episcopalians: our theological debates are the equivalent of “and then something quantum happens.”
Also, I wasn’t permitted to take communion at my Lutheran church growing up until I’d gone through communion class, which we all did at the age of 10. We had to learn about the Eucharist, and then there was a final project where we had to make something that represented Communion.
The Episcopal church I went to as a kid uses multi-grain bread from an independent bakery in town, and that stuff is DELICIOUS. Communion is always a good time over there.
HOLD UP PEDANTRY AHOY the Orthodox offer Communion to all children who have been baptized in the Church, as usually happens at 40 days or so. At seven, the general “age of reason,” it is common to make your first Confession, and after that it’s generally taught that you don’t accept Communion unless you have cleansed your soul through the mystery of Confession. The bread and the wine are mixed and offered from the chalice in a spoon, and there’s none of this wafer biz. Also afterward you are given a cup of wine and a piece of bread to make sure that no remnant of the Body and Blood are left in your mouth. Frankly the Orthodox give a bit of side-eye to the Catholics for being a leetle casual about most things liturgical.
Orthodoxy: When in doubt, add Flair.
Also Eastern Rite Catholics. We do this too. *sits back down in the ‘my rite is too obscure to be noticed’ section*
I grew up Presbyterian, and communion was the first Sunday of the month (third Sunday was baptisms). Going up to dip the wafer in the cup of grape juice was sort of blerg, because it tasted like eating a packing peanut, and half the time there was a half-wafer floating in the juice from someone who got too excited.
When they passed the trays around, though, it was great. The teeny grape juice cups were my FAVORITE THING EVER, for some reason. Depending on the week, we would either get a teeny piece of actual bread, or something that was sort of like if chewing gum were made out of flour.
I like your name! (it’s my mom’s name)
I also loved the little grape juice cups. One of the churches I went to had little glass cups and a silver tray that they fit in that got passed around. I bet it would make a great tray for shots at parties.
“and half the time there was a half-wafer floating in the juice from someone who got too excited.”
OMG. *unconcontrollable giggles*
Question from a Jew – I didn’t know that some churches use actual bread. I thought that a wafer was used because the Last Supper was a Passover seder, so the bread would have been unleavened, i.e. matza, i.e. something you could literally break? I mean isn’t it kind of anticlimactic to think “This is the broken body of Christ” about a flaccid slice of Wonderbread?
Try thinking that way about pretzel sticks and fruit pop. I think different churches vary; I think some are really deliberate about the materials used, whereas others are “well, we have a carb and a liquid, we’re good to go!”
I grew up Methodist and we often used a big round loaf of bread, which the pastor held over his/her head and broke in two during the liturgy (in retrospect, it was probably sliced most of the way in half already). Then he/she would tear off a piece for each person coming down the line. So there was a respectable amount of drama, and you got the experience of “breaking bread together.” Other times we’d have pre-sliced cubes of bread, which were always already stale, though it was a cleaner process I suppose.
In many churches I’ve attended the pastor has a crusty loaf and it rips dramatically. sometimes they have to be partly cut so the pastor doesn’t run into trouble with the ripping. I think everyone agrees the original was probably matza, but anything that qualifies as bread is fine. Sometimes on World Communion Sunday the church of my youth had a whole variety of global bread types. It was neat.
Yeah, I was also expecting something more matzah-like. This sounds like it’s essentially the same as a Friday night kiddush (which is wine/grape juice and challah), except less communal and instead of blessing God for giving us food, you…bless God by eating him?
Is it communal, or do people eat/drink on their own as they receive it, without waiting as a group for the blessing?
It depends on the church! (of course it does). At some Protestant churches (including the Southern Baptist church I went to most often as a kid), you would take the little cup and the wafer and then you had to WAIT until everyone else in the whole blessed church got theirs. Then the pastor would say a prayer for the wafer part, and then you ate the wafer. Then there was a prayer for the grape juice, and then you drank the grape juice. Baptists love impulse control. Other denominations just do a general blessing/prayer and let you eat and drink as you get the cup and wafer.
Heck, it depends on the church, and the officiant, and the day! I can remember in the Methodist church I grew up in there were at least 3 different communion methods- 1. bread cubes and test tubes were passed through the church and everyone took communion together in their pews 2. bread cubes and test tubes were placed at the communion alters which could fit about 30 people so communion was given in groups 3. the pastor had a loaf and a cup and everyone filed past and took communion individually.
For the Cat’lics, the blessing happens individually when you go up to the priest or celebrant to get your wine and wafer. Or at least that’s always how it was done at the churches I went to.
It varies from denomination to denomination, and even from parish to parish within denominations.
I grew up High-ish Church Episcopalian. We had communion every Sunday (except for a period in my youth when we’d do morning prayer on fifth Sundays mainly just for a chance to use that liturgy).
The blessing/consecration is done before any of the sacrament is handed out during the Eucharistic Prayer Mallory quoted above. If you’re especially High Church, one of the acolytes/altar boys/altar girls/altar children(?) will jingle a little rack of bells to make a magic chime noise at the moment of consecration (after the priest says “Do this in remembrance of me”)
The communicants line up at the altar rail to receive the bread and wine individually and consume it it immediately as they receive it. In all of the Episcopal churches I’ve attended, the bread is these little round flavorless wafers that kind of look like packing peanuts, served by priest, who will then say “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven” when you receive it. The wine is served in a communal chalice, usually by a lay (not ordained) Eucharistic minister, who will say “The Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation” when you drink it. Optionally, you can intinct the bread in the wine (mostly I see children doing this, probably to avoid spills) and the Eucharistic minister is supposed to say “The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, keep you in everlasting life” if you do that but they don’t always catch it.
The rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer state that it’s permissible to take the Eucharist in part – for example, a recovering alcoholic or a young child may take only the bread, and a person with gluten intolerance may only take the wine if there is no gluten-free option available, and it still “counts”.
Boy don’t quote me on this one, but I believe the Last Supper happened in advance of Passover, Christ’s crucifixion occurring just before the holiday (hence the whole thing about not wanting the bodies to hang on the hill, because it would involve pollution during the observances, and the standard imagery of Christ as the Passover sacrifice).
Yeah, there are a couple of schools of thought on that–and based on what we know of pre-Diaspora Jewish tradition, it likely took place *during* the seven day feast of Passover. …In my opinion? The metaphor and connection between people who share faith matters more than whether or not Christ literally broke (unleavened) bread at a formal Seder meal with his disciples. 🙂
The Church of Christ (vvvvv fundamentalist! VVVVV LITERAL BIBLE READERS!! except no transubstantiation) uses unleavened bread and grape juice. One reason they use grape juice is that wine can leaven bread, I guess? That is always what I was told anyway. Now I am Methodist and muss the delicious unleavened bread discs all the ladies took turns baking for church (if no one could bake we used matza). I was a little scandalized to learn Methodists think King’s Hawiian bread is A-OK.
I think any liquid can “leaven” bread. I had this whole discussion with a Jewish friend a while ago about kosher-for-passover food. The idea seems to be that just mixing flour and water together can result in leavening if given time, so the dough has to be mixed and baked really quickly (<18 minutes?) which means there’s a chance there’re some chunks of flour which didn’t get mixed with water. If you’re really strict, you worry that these chunks will mix with liquid later on and result in accidentally eating leavened bread. If you’re not as strict, you don’t worry about it.
Hey former CoC pal! The church I went to growing up used matzoh and grape juice. Now when I go back to visit my parents they’ve changed the bread and I find it strangely upsetting.
I think that’s the experience of visiting The Church Of Your Youth in a nutshell- “they’ve changed X and it’s strangely upsetting.” Except for how the choir is now mostly in-tune, I am 100% A-Okay with that change at my old church.
Every Catholic church I had Communion at had two types of wafer, neither of which resembled bread in any way. There was the tan cardboard circle that the priest broke into chunks for the blessing itself, and there were the little white slips of gluten-flavored styrofoam handed out by the aisle helpers. I think it comes down to perishability.
The Lutheran church I went to for most of my childhood used a loaf of challah for the bread, and Manischewitz for the wine, and there was never an explanation for this but as a kid I thought the wine tasted like candy. Our church was pretty chill, and after the service they’d usually let my brother and me eat whatever bread was leftover, because otherwise they would’ve thrown it out. When I asked questions about whether the bread and wine *really* became body and blood, the answer I got was “well, technically, [something about consubstantiation], but we all know it’s just metaphor.” I think our church cared more about tastiness and affordability than being correct.
We use matza at my church!
Thanks for this rad post. I will now go plumb the depths of the series. I am a cradle Episcopalian, PK, and former school Chaplain. I can’t decide what part I like best about this but it is probably how what you summed up what I tried to teach my students in all my religion classes (Hinduism, Judaism, Religion and Social Justice, etc.) in one fell swoop: “These sort of nice distinctions can all, by the way, feel a bit WACKY to modern readers, so instead of dismissing everyone in the past [or the present!] as a bunch of loons, it can sometimes be helpful to think of it in these terms: People were trying to explain in concrete terms to each other how they could interact with the divine presence on a regular basis.” Boom: religion.
The smell of grape juice and stale communion wafers brings back some lovely CRIPPLING FEAR. One time when I was like 7 and old enough communion the pastor gave this hell and brimstone rant about what happened to people who took communion while still holding onto sins. His conclusion: god would strike them dead and they deserved it ( if they weren’t dead it was because of god’s occasionally unfathomable mercy). As a result I was always terrified that I would be struck dead right after communion because I wasn’t really sorry enough.
It went a little like this:
Pastor: Let’s all pray to the lord and ask him to forgive us for our sins before we partake in the Lord’s supper.
Me to god: I am really sorry that I pushed Teddy and that I hate Katy -but she’s so mean!! I mean no I really am sorry I don’t hate her please help me. Also I lied about doing my math homework and did it with a calculator and I’m sorry about that too. Did I forget something? I probably forgot something. Will I die if I just forget something I mean is that really my fault?…oh god the ushers are coming closer and I still don’t remember all my sins and I think I still hate Katy – no no I’m really sorry no I don’t …the’re right here at the pew and I’m not sorry enough and I’m gonna dieeeeee.*
*Takes communion anyway to look Christian enough. I don’t die on the spot but I’m also not convinced that I’ve gotten away with it either so I spend the rest of the day in mortal dread thinking that maybe god just hasn’t gotten around to me yet.
I’m pretty sure I had pretty hardcore anxiety as a kid and religion DID NOT HELP.
Gosh, I’m now absurdly grateful that I went to a church with a pastor who gave really boring sermons. I tuned out for the most part, but perked up during communion because SNACKS.
I never got a speech like this at church as a kid (I only occasionally attended our local United Church and there was no brimstone there) but I remember being completely freaked out by the fire and brimstone sermon in Pollyanna (with Hayley Mills). I know it was a satire, but as a religiously confused 8 year old, being screamed at that “DEATH COMES. UNEXPECTEDLY!!!” was terrifying – so much sympathy here.
I was similarly freaked out by the last movement of Disney’s Fantasia which, I was certain was how the world would end, in the year 2000 no less.
As an adult onset Anglican, I think Mallory pretty much nailed the Episcopal/Anglican approach to communion. I’ve been known to tell people that many Anglicans are so laid back because you can only get so high and mighty about your religion when you belong to a church that was started by a lecher who wanted a divorce.
I’ve always appreciated that about the Anglican/Episcopal Church it seems like Catholicism’s way chiller brother. It has liturgy but less people making jokes about horribly guilt ridden childhoods. I don’t know how true that is I just feel like it’s the case. We were raised Southern Baptist and I guess I do have some rather brimstone-y stories from it. I remember another sermon (at a camp for kids) that was about what hell would be like. I think I also heard people read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” it’s brimstone for the ages.
Ah yes. I only heard this message exactly once, but given that the words “to receive Communion with an unclean heart is to drink damnation unto yourself” are still quite clear in my head some fifteen years later, I’d say it had a bit of an effect on my young psyche.
K good now I feel like I’m not the only one. Sorry about your psyche though.
One of my good friends is from a Catholic family and an Agatha Christie fan. She says that if she were to murder someone, she would do it in church, then hide the remains with the communion wafers. Everyone would think it was a miracle that the bread had taken on the appearance of flesh.
Another reason I’ve heard for the grape juice instead of wine thing is that it’s a way to remove barriers for anyone who wants to partake communion. SO children, recovering alcoholics, people with wine allergies, etc. can still participate.
Yeah, this is the explanation I know, and also some churches have church wine, de-alcoholized (which is even grosser than normal church wine).
in the RC Church, the Eucharist under either species (bread or wine) is fully partaking in the sacrament; lots of times you skip the chalice and it doesn’t mean you’re not partaking.
I’m not religious now, but I loved communion as a kid. I guess I’ve always liked rituals, even if now I tend to shuck off the ones handed down and come up with my own. Plus, I’ve always been down for snacks.
I love these articles! Can the next one be about the Trinity??
Yesterday was Trinity Sunday, and my Anglican minister spent his sermon talking about how all the metaphors he used to use to teach about Trinity was some kind of ancient heresy.
As an Anglican, I was soooo disappointed that I didn’t get a fancy First Communion like my Catholic friends.
A friend of mine had to preach yesterday (as the closest thing we have to a seminarian, this duty naturally falls to him), and so he avoided the heresy route by simply talking about the Trinity as one being having a relationship with itself (which is actually the doctrine of the Interpenetration of the Trinity, but it sounds less off-putting this way). I’m pretty sure that isn’t a heresy of any kind, although I’m probably wrong.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/05/…
The Episcopalian description is spot-on. I realized recently while talking to a non-religious friend who’d been hired to sing with our choir during Holy Week that I could not come up with a definitive answer on the Episcopalian position on transubstantiation despite having been through confirmation class and thoroughly studying the catechism. Actually it’s kind of hard now for me to come up with a definitive statement of MOST of our beliefs beyond the Nicene Creed.
We DO have a special sink in the sacristy that drains directly into the ground that is SOLELY for washing the communion vessels though. Something about how any unused portion of the sacrament must be either consumed or interred in consecrated ground. That was fun to explain to my friend.
Our priest usually downs the last of the wine and crackers, since we don’t have a special sink. Except for that time one of the altar boys grabbed the chalice while she wasn’t looking and chugged it.
I grew up Catholic-ish, and went to a Catholic college even though by then I was effectively atheist. Oddly enough, I went to church WAY more in college than I ever did at any other point (hey, I could sing in the choir and it was cool) and we had the BEST Communion bread. One of the professor nuns baked it fresh every Sunday morning and it was just gorgeously wheaty and flavorful. Every so often she’d miss a week and we’d have lame crispy wafers and it was so, so terribly disappointing.
eta: Lest you think we were uptight, the brand of Catholicism that my college entertained often involved our campus chaplain bringing cases of High Life 22s and boxes of cigars and occasionally some wine that may or may not have been intended for Mass to on-campus parties sooooooo
Hey, if the wine hasn’t been sanctified yet, it’s all good.
And then there’s the whole gluten free issue. I was genuinely shocked when I discovered the Catholic Church doesn’t allow gluten free wafers because Jesus used bread made from wheat and water. (Although apparently there is a gf option now that is acceptable for Catholics).
I have celiac and I’m Episcopalian and its never been an issue. My current church always has a few rice crackers on hand for communion. When my mom was diagnosed in the late 80s, she’d bring in her own rice cracker, give it to the minister or deacon before the service, and then they’d give it to at communion. I guess it’s progress that now she doesn’t have to bring her own rice cracker / wafer.
When I go to Catholic services, I’ll usually get a blessing instead of bread and take the wine (unless they put a wafer at the bottom of the chalis – lots of discussions in celiac circles about how safe/unsafe it is to take communion wine that’s been cross contaminated with wafers).
What is the GF alternative? Last I heard, The Catholics refused to deviate from “Original Recipe” wafers…
There’s a low gluten wafer made by Benedictine sisters that has a tiny amount of wheat – apparently enough to satisfy the church but low enough that it can be tolerated by many people with celiac. I’m not sure how widely used / accepted they are.
http://news.health.com/2014/10/22/why-the-catholi…
I think, for some teetotaling sects, there’s also the argument that the word “wine” used in the Bible is often mistranslated? Or, at any rate, the stuff in the Bible is unfermented (=good), and not fermented (=evil).
Before my first holy communion (complete with Big Fancy White Dress, over which all the girls got very competitive re: size) I was told that if you got the host stuck of the roof of your mouth, you weren’t allowed to scrape it off with your tongue and swallow it, you had to go to the priest, who would scrape it off for you. D:
I 100% believed this at the time, and LIVED IN FEAR.
At my first high mass I was an adult and wanted to avoid offending anyone. My Episcopal friend encouraged me (raised generic Protestant) to take communion. Childhood was among Catholics, so I knew not to chew. But the wafer was stuck to the top of my mouth. May the gods bless my friend. She guessed correctly and leaned over to whisper, “Bite your tongue. It makes for more saliva to unstick the wafer and help you swallow it.”
We’re allowed to chew now! Something about the words “take and eat” also translating to “take and chew.”
In our church, we use a gorgeous sherry for the wine. My daughter calls it “snack at the cross” and sticks her whole friggin’ tongue into the communal cup when it is offered to her (we partake last because of this lovely habit.) Your assessment that Episcopalians just want an excuse to drink in the morning on a weekend is dead on.
This is great, Mallory. As a pagan/agnostic, though, all I can say is now I really want grape juice.
i took Catholic communion (i think?) at my boyfriend’s grandmother’s Catholic funeral, and even though i’m not religious myself, i could feel my Mennonite ancestors looking down on me like, “how could you”
I grew up Episcopalian and their main interest as a sect is pretty much “brunch,” as far as I can remember.
Also my only experience of teetotalers is that my ex-stepmother’s brother is a baptist minister who also enjoys brewing moonshine, but he has to keep his bathtub-brewin’ on the DL so as not to be defrocked.
I have an agnostic friend who goes fishing with various friends. But he is careful to invite the churgoers only one at a time. That way he can serve beer. They do drink. Just not in front of each other.
I just went and gleefully read all of the gabbin’ about god posts and was surprised that i was familiar with a large number of the concepts and theorists mentioned therein.
And then I remembered i minored in Religion in undergrad.
How does one forget one’s own minor. What.
We had communion prep classes in 5th grade for Lutheran communion. My biggest memory is not about learning to spell transubstantiation, but of the practice wafers and wine and this roomful of kids trying to soak up as much wine as possible. Personally, I always preferred the post service tea cookies. Which is why I’m now a Quaker.
ETA- Quakers in general skip such things because of a rejection of ‘outward signs’, Which is also why we don’t call our meeting houses churches or have religious objects about. Via PYM ” Quakers consider outward rites and symbols unnecessary and even a hindrance to direct spiritual experience, and therefore do not celebrate many traditional outward sacraments. Every day, and our relationships with one another and the world, are holy and sacramental.”
I love your religious knowledge, Mallory, and how you pull it out for events like Ferguson to talk to the other side. And also the “If you have not Tim” posts.
As an Episcopalian who’s gone through the training to distribute the wine and bread during the eucharist, I can tell you that we’re told to be on the lookout for people sneaking the consecrated bread away for nefarious purposes. (Who knew?) But before we think about leaping over the altar rail and tackling said sneaky and nefarious persons, we’re reminded, “Jesus got himself into that bread, he can get himself out…”
I think you might be Secret Papists.
Reminds me of the time the editor of my Catholic school newspaper got in trouble for captioning a picture of a priest blessing the wafer with “Get Your Transubstantiation On!”
Mallory, I grew up Lutheran, and had catechism class from 6-8th grade, which mostly involved the Pastor yelling at us for being rambunctious middle schoolers, and memorizing large swathes out of
http://www.amazon.com/Luthers-Catechism-Explanati…
this book.
Other things: my church had those flat little round wafers with some sort of imprint on them, as well as white grape juice or red wine, so you could easily tell which of the beverages you were taking.
Oh man, I just remembered that my previous Episcopal church uses white wine for communion, since it doesn’t stain the napkins. One Palm Sunday, the priest knocked over the entire chalice on the altar, and it was amazing. I also referred to our wine as the Plasma of Christ.
I love various communion things, if only because my family has a tradition of committing a wide range of communion faux pas whenever we visit other churches. It’s just our thing. ‘Welcome to the horde. You’ve just walked up and received the body and blood of Christ when you shouldn’t have. We’ll judge you now and laugh about it at length over xmas eve dinner. You are one of us now.’
I was raised Episcopalian, but went to Catholic School from 5th grade on. In my area, Episcopal churches had Confirmation at about 13ish, and Catholic churches had Confirmation at about 16ish, so I found great joy in middle school telling my Very Catholic schoolmates that I didn’t take communion with them during mandatory mass because I wasn’t Catholic, and we Episcopalians thought it was the METAPHORICAL body&blood, which made me ineligible for Catholic Communion. They got really confused, insisting that they too believed it was metaphorical, that it wasn’t in any sort of way literal, and I gleefully corrected them.
Senior year of high school, we had to use a class message board thing for our World Religions class, and for some reason, I made an on-topic post about feeling “othered” by being regularly required to go to mass but specifically reminded I was not invited to communion. One of the girls in the class took this as an opportunity to explain to me that I couldn’t POSSIBLY understand the deep meaning behind Catholic Communion, so excluding me was exceedingly appropriate. …. I think i preserved the whole exchange on livejournal…. hrmm……
nevermind, what i posted on LJ was her response to to this: “In the quest for unity among Christian denominations, how much can each compromise their beliefs?”
Which was: “I doubt that anyone will agree with me, but I feel that it is the Protestants and people of Greek Orthodox church should rejoin the Catholic Church. Many of the reasons for the split have been resolved, and I don’t see why these offshoots of Catholicism keep dividing themselves into smaller and smaller factions. So, I think that Roman Catholics cannot ever compromise their true beliefs, but the others can come back and should.”
12-year veteran of Catholic education here, including 4 years at a bona fide European-style choir school (complete with adorable cassocks and surplusses) and 4 years with the Jesuits (who are basically the Spooky Jedi of The Catholic Church); so I had the Doctrine of Transubstantiation well beaten into me by approximately age 9. I remember it very fondly as one of the first and greatest WTF moments of my life…
Fast forward 16 years: Adult Me feels that he misses #SavoringTheSavior and decides to order nostalgic unconsecrated communion wafers to the apartment…
Things I learned from this experience:
1. The nutrition facts for communion wafers are problematic. They’re basically copy-pasted from a bottle of water. Yes– the manufacturers of communion wafers claim that they are completely devoid of nutritional content.
2. There are no post-transubstantiation nutrition facts posted on the box… Is nourishment of the soul outside of the purview of the FDA?
3. They do not, in fact, taste better with milk. They make terrible cereal.
4. They look very good in a little candy dish on my coffee table.
5. “No, it’s not even remotely Jesus, you guys, it hasn’t been consecrated!”, though theologically sound, is not an argument that will remove the horror from the eyes of your roommates as they watch you playing around with communion wafers for a lark.
Oh geez I went into a religious supply store once because I thought it would be hilarious to just have them around but then the person working there cast a lot of stink-eye in my direction so I just put them back on the shelf.
A girlfriend familiar with English/Canadian Anglicanism around about 1990 tells this story. A large Anglican convention took place in the Toronto Skydome somewhere between the late 1980s and 1991. There was communion – and fewer people attended than expected. At least for this lot of Anglicans, wine which has been consecrated for communion cannot be de-consecrated again, cannot be disposed of in any profane manner (NO pouring it down the drain!), and the excess could not be stored or distributed to participating churches.
Clergy, servers, assistants, and anyone they could round up had to consume it all after the congregation had gone home. History does not relate precisely how much wine was involved, but my friend’s theology student friend who attended was white and shaky the next day. The event is remembered in certain circles as the ‘The Doom at the Dome’.
I remember this, growing up Episcopalian – sometimes our minister would consecrate too much bread or wine and have to consume it. Once it was consecrated, it was consecrated and had to be consumed. Do some denominations not believe this? I don’t think of myself as having a lot of knee jerk religious beliefs (although I’m sure I do), but I would have a really hard time with someone dumping consecrated wine down the sink.
This series is my new favorite thing.
First and most importantly, I have the recipe for the amazing shortbread version of communion bread, which is the best thing ever (I was the communion bread baking queen for a couple years at a Presbyterian church, and by far the best thing is eating the leftover weird pieces & edges):
6 cups flour
1 ½ cups sugar (you can reduce this or leave it out if you prefer a less sweet version)
2 sticks butter
1 ¾-2 cups milk (if you want to go crazy, this can be, part or all, half and half or even heavy cream – yeah…)
Cut cold butter into flour and sugar mixture with fork or pastry blender. Add milk gradually, stirring with fork until a ball of dough begins to form. Turn out dough and roll out into rectangle. Press into jelly roll pan.
Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes, until slightly brown around edges.
The method from here was to cut off the edges and cut into small blocks/squares (1/2 inch), separate into quart freezer baggies, double bag those suckers in gallon freezer bags (I was obsessed with preventing freezer burn).
But if all you want is a tasty secular feast, cover it in Nutella and slivered almonds. Serve it with coffee. Call it chocolate hazelnut almond shortbread or some fancy-ass name. NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW.
I grew up in a (reformed) baptist church. We had a version of the shortbread above and trays with wine and juice (wine in the middle, juice on the outside, hope people don’t forget). The wine was manischevitz (!)… It was once a month and when I was little, the trays were filled with real glasses (I never thought of them as teeny-tiny shot glasses, but of course they are!) and when it was our (my family’s) turn to help, I distinctly remember washing and drying all those little glasses by hand. I hated it so much. (Most churches use the plastic disposable glasses now, or go the intinction route)
The Presbyterian church also did juice and wine, but we had the good fortune of having someone in the congregation who’d just opened a wine shop. He’d give us a decent cab sav at a discount by the case.
Since I’ve been to episcopal services, had real loaves of bread & gluten free bread and the tasteless wafers… I love it though. Communion is absolutely my favorite thing, and I love it 100% open to everyone who wants it, every week, in offbeat groups and settings with statements like “this is a reminder that you are loved” that don’t even reference the body and blood. (Yes, pretty heretical to most!)
I LOVE Presbyterian communion weird shortbread bread and am totally gonna make some of this!!!
Kid you not, my pastor’s sermon from yesterday was about creeping Aristotelianism in the Church. We had a wonderful, eye-roll filled discussion afterwards about how *LITERAL* most theology in most evangelical churches has become.
Creeping Aristotelianism? TY Saint Thomas Aquinas!
And of course, let us not forget Tom Lehrer’s immortal lyric:
Two! Four! Six! Eight!
Time to Transubstantiate!
So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria,
Gee it’s good to see ya,
Doin’ the Vatican Rag!
generally religious talk makes me eyerollingly uncomfortable particularly when it gets into the absurd theological particulars because seriously c’mon are we not grown-ups but the part about the change in alcohol culture was fascinating and not something I new at all so REDEEMED but only in a strictly secular sense okay
When I was in my early 20’s and playing piano for church services to supplement my meager retail income, communion was my favorite part of the service. It was early morning, and I never got up early enough to have breakfast before getting on the bus, so that wad of torn bread and shot glass full of grape juice were my breakfast. I would spend the rest of the service shooting longing looks from behind the piano to the half-eaten loaf of bread sitting on the podium; there was nothing I would have loved more than to have been able to take it and devour it while I waited for the bus home, but I had no idea how to ask without offending someone.
One question- are there Catholic churches where kids make their first Communion at age twelve? I’ve only heard of it being done in second grade. It was a huge thing that year in school- I went to a public school, but it was a heavily Catholic Massachusetts suburb.
Lutherans and various other Protestants do first communion at age 12/13. Could it have been that? It was a big thing at my public school in eighth grade (including me), but we weren’t in a particularly Catholic area.
I know I am late to this thread, but point of order: Methodist and Baptist understanding of Eucharist is NOT THE SAME AT ALL. Baptists see it as a symbol and call it an ordinance rather than a sacrament. Methodists are closer to Lutherans and Episcopalians in believing in the presence, because we come from Anglican heritage, and we call it a sacrament.
This has been a UMC public service announcement. That is all. Carry on.
So I’m a Mormon, and our sacrament consists of torn up wonderbread and little plastic cups full of water. (Wine was used for quite some time after Joseph Smith was all ‘hey no drinking or smoking you guys.’ It was generally understood until the early 20th century that he didn’t actually MEAN it.) Water instead of grape juice is presumably to cut down on staining issues. Because this is the other thing we do that’s weird – we don’t get up for the sacrament, we stay in our pews. A small, well-trained army of young teen boys in white shirts carry the trays around to the entire congregation. Interestingly enough, one must posess a penis in order to ‘pass’ the sacrament by handing it from one pew to the next, but not to pass it down the length of a pew, which sometimes requires shimmying in a dress and heels if you’re down on one end and somebody else is down on the other end and there’s no one in between to hand off the trays, bucket-brigade-style.
Not getting up for communion isn’t particularly weird. My Baptist church doesn’t. We have little cups of something purple, I think it might be blackcurrant cordial (I don’t know why) and chunks of bread and they’re passed around by members of the church (those possessing and those without penises).
I know a little boy whose mother is from a Catholic background and his father a Protestant one. The boy and his brother are in a Protestant school and the only church services he attends are Protestant (of the non-communion variety). One time his Catholic grandmother brought him to Mass with her and he was very intrigued by all the bells and whistles, and proceeded to loudly ask questions about everything despite shushing. At one point he asked his grandmother ‘What’s the gold cup?’
Grandmother: ‘It’s wine-‘
Boy: [at the top of his voice] ‘Mummy likes wine!’
From the mouths of babes…
My grandmother was a Presbyterian, and because of some alcoholism in her family she asked if she could take something other than wine – like grape juice – and the church said no, and so she left, and never attended a church again, and practiced her own quiet brand of Christian-ish quasi-Buddhism in private the rest of her life.
After Zoroastrian services, you literally get sent home with a plate of flatbread and fruit and sometimes a pudding-ish thing. It’s very unclear to me what those things are supposed to be // represent, which just about sums up the mediocre state of my religious education. Anyhow, everyone’s supposed to hang out and eat some fruit that is now special and blessed.
I’m Anglican, so the liturgy at our church sounds basically like some hybrid between transubstantiation and consubstantiation (we’re low church, mostly, but that still means vestments and candles and the occasional incense). Unlike every other church I’ve part of, including the one I grew up in, in the Anglican church, children can receive communion if they’ve been baptized, even if that baptism was as an infant. So my toddler is allowed to have the bread bit (no wine until she’s older). She basically thinks it’s cracker time and gets put out if I get a bigger piece than she does. But I love that she gets to participate in the sacrament. She doesn’t fully understand it yet, but she definitely understood that she was being excluded when we were visiting a different denomination that makes kids wait until they’ve been confirmed.
I really do get why pure symbolism, rather than transubstantiation or some variation thereof, is a logical interpretation for the Eucharist, but that’s never been the way I’ve experienced it. I think it often comes down to what you believe. It’s meaningful in some churches in a different way than it is in others, and that reflects the diversity of the human experience. I’ve found some variations of communion in more evangelical churches a bit off-putting, because the meaning I associate with it isn’t the same as one they do, but that doesn’t mean either of us is wrong.
I had never known communion could be a mix and match element. I mainly knew of communion from the Catholic "our way or no wafer" version.
It's very interesting to me (from a family where everyone gave up on religion) to hear how people personalize their practices so thank you for the detailed reply.
Thanks! That's what the couple I mentioned did.
I didn't grow up around practicing Christians so I don't have any idea what's normal for different denominations without reading pieces like Mallory's and all the user comments.
1. Orthodox Christians commune infants.
2. Neo-Platonism had a much larger influence on our theology – not so much with Aristotle because Aristotle came to Roman Catholic thought through Aquinas who is a post-schism theologian.
3. There are so many “Eastern” Churches besides the Eastern Orthodox, the Copts and the Ethiopians.
4. What about the Melkites, the Oriental Orthodox, the Byzantine Catholics (aka Uniates)?
5. What about the Armenian Church?
6. So, what, there are pretty much only three “Eastern” Christian churches and we’re all just basically the same thing as Roman Catholics?!
This is not an accurate representation of Christendom. Usually this blog makes me laugh really hard and I read all of these articles quite closely. I’m a huge fan of your work usually, but I feel pretty disappointed by The Toast right now. I consider myself an ecumenist and I prefer to look at the similarities rather than the differences across all religions. However, when there is a lot of religiously-fueled sectarian violence that has come out of these kinds of “subtle” distinctions in theological thought and religious identity, to conflate all of these religious identities into one and give them one sentence in a blog entry that purports to represent all theological views on a shared ritual, is deeply problematic and could be potentially offensive to people who rarely get visibility in these kinds of theological discussions. Something to keep in mind next time The Toast gabs about God: is the point to give visibility and explore these differences/similarities or to continue perpetuating stereotypes and ignorance about the development and diversity of belief within Christian thought?
Definitely a Polish thing! (source: I was born in Poland and lived there for the first 18 years of my life). I still do it, even as a longtime atheist.
Done in Lithuania, too. One of my bigger kicks of Christmas Eve, too. It's so rad.
The regular communion-taker can absolutely taste the difference in age – if it's getting stale it gets stuck in your teeth.