Church of The Immacuate Conception

2/4/07 I’d been to Catholic Church a couple times before. This was decidedly a different experience. Several Catholic components that I’d thought were crucial were missing. It seemed that no one in the whole place actually knew what was going on. I sensed a kind of bystander effect. People appeared to hope no one would recognize they were clueless if they looked forward without blinking.

The sieves by the door that usually hold the holy water were both empty and saran wrapped. You couldn’t touch them, much less the water which should have been inside. There were no welcoming smiles, which, normally I understand to be requisite. No one said Hello, Good Morning, or asked us how we were doing. The Holy Ghost seemed more ghostly than usual. Like maybe he doesn’t translate well to a neighborhood of pawnshops and drag bakeries.

At the first hymn, and due to almost irreversible conditioning, which is even instilled in me although I was by no means brought up in a church, my mom and I both leapt into song. She is one of those soprano singers who always sings in her top register, and while it's not bad singing, in your head you debate over whether she’s living a solo diva fantasy or confused her connection to God with “trueness” of pitch. As if music by its shear impact communes to holiness. 3/4^th of the way through the song my mom elbowed me in the elbow and mouthed, “Is anyone else singing?” My mouth froze as I looked around because I (apparently along with the rest of the congregation) had the fear that my ignorance would be uncovered. Practically no one else was singing. Those who were singing could more aptly be categorized as minging or sumbeling to his holiness.

To make it stranger still at the end of the hymn the keyboardist started to go off on an organ rant which felt like Beethoven’s fifth meets a high speed chase scene, and perhaps we were advancing into a medieval music video written and directed by a chimpanzee on prozac and coffee. According to the surroundings no one had yet noticed except us.

It was a surreal mixture of things that seemed old school catholic and present comatose at the same time. As the time for communion commenced I found myself pondering where Christ’s body is manufactured. Upon research, I found out several interesting facts.

Communion wafers are largely made in convents by nuns. While this used to be an easy enough process, globalization, it seems, has become a nun-struggle. Less nuns coupled with an increased demand have meant increased work for the nuns. It has become difficult for them to balance the constraints put upon them by prayer and production of the lords body in a thin tastless wafer. An exemplary case from Cape Town, South Africa tells how they used to have enough nuns to provide. Now they have to employ both machinery and outside workers to keep up with demand. However, for nuns, the wafers still have a spiritual power. While speaking to a group of children about the crackers one nun explained. “Eucharist, she told the children, heals and unites. To make her point, Sr Catherine took a freshly baked sheet of altar bread, and crumbled it on the table before her. The pieces, she said, represent "the hurt world"”. (http://www.thesoutherncross.co.za/features/hosts.htm).

I never knew this, I thought the hurt of the world was more vividly described in pictures of things and people in pain, or struggle. I had no idea about the intense import that is bland bread shards.

In Quebec, communion wafers have become a diet food. While most of Quebec is secular and unbothered by having Christ’s body next to Cheese-Its, others do not feel so sure about this. “People are snacking on hosts and host pieces like it’s candy. They’re not distinguishing between the body of Christ and something you nibble on at home,” said François Trudel, a former Catholic missionary familiar with the production of communion wafers in Quebec. (http://seedlings.wordpress.com/2005/12/31/communion-snack-food/).

My favorite part about this is how he calls it host pieces, like a whole wafer is some sort of completeness.

Further controversy has arisen over the necessity of wheat in Jesus’s bod. Apparently, Catholicism states that Jesus must have wheat to be the real deal. This is met with cries of damnation from coeliacs all over the world. Who want a new Christ. A gluten free Christ.

Father Williams said gluten-free communion wafers have been available to coeliac sufferers for a decade, kept in a separate dish. But the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had recently determined that only wheat-based flour was valid matter for celebrating the eucharist.

"The church would not deliberately attempt to poison its communicant members," he said. "The last thing we want is to alarm Catholic coeliac sufferers."”
(http://www.theage.com.au/articles2004/08/19/1092889278988.html

So, it seems that there is more to this communion business than originally meets the eye. Funnily enough, in the face of other rituals such as the promenation of a GIANT GOLD BIBLE, the virgin altar boys-not to mention a virgin mother, the incense which must be swished a certain number of times and ways, a Father with an accent that caused him to say "Praise God's Wort" repeatedly, a chapel clearly not designed for the P.A. system and the reverberations that it causes, and sitting under pictures of a man whiter than a sweed, yet by all logic should be brown nailed to a cross in blood and gore, it didn't seem that weird.