The Bloody, Enchanted Host

About seven years ago, I took a job as an assistant minister in Columbus, Ohio. It was my third position in seven years and I could never get comfortable in ministry. Nothing seemed right to me and I felt this constant tugging towards something. If you had asked me what, I couldn’t have told you. I would have insisted everything was fine.

Part of my job was to buy the bread and the wine for every service. This church celebrated the “Lord’s Supper” every Sunday, unusual in the Protestant world. They would tear off a piece bread and then dip it in the wine. They took it seriously, believing that Christ was spiritually and “specially” present in the bread and wine.

Theology Nerd Sidenote: There have been four ideas about the Lord’s Supper and Communion about what happens to the bread and wine during Mass/worship/youth group jamboree

Memorial: “Just a Cracker and juice, so you could probably just use Oreos and milk too. Its all good.”

Consubstantiation: “Cracker and Wine, and Jesus too!”

Transubstantiation: “That cracker and wine? It’s all Jesus, baby.”

Spiritual: “Um, well, that cracker/loaf of bread/pita thingy and wine is Jesus, kinda..I mean, spiritually, I think, but really he is bodily sitting at the right hand of the Father, so really, it’s still just a cracker and wine. Except its not.”

(These theological  oversimplifications are NOT endorsed by the Vatican)

Thing is, I loved “The Lord’s Supper” and it was always secretly my favorite part of the worship service. This was uncomfortable, because as a Presbyterian, you’re supposed to say the sermon is the height of the worship experience. As someone who gave many sermons, I’m pretty sure they were NOT the height of worship for most of my congregations.

And yet, I couldn’t have said why. As a Presbyterian, I believed that the Lord was “spiritually present” in the bread and wine. I would have snickered (even though I’d had my first communion in the Catholic Church as a kid) at the idea that Jesus could be physically present. The idea was grotesque and absurd. Chewing on Jesus’ actual body and guzzling his actual blood? It would have sounded like something out of a cheap horror film to me. Spiritually present was something I could handle, wrap my brain around, mostly because no had the faintest idea of what that meant. If you want to make an idea comforting, make it “spiritual” with no real physical connection. Everyone feels safer that way.

One evening, I took the remaining bread and wine down to the basement to throw it away. As I held the torn apart loaf in my hand, it seemed like meaningless, ordinary bread. Nothing special about it, even thought twenty minutes before, we had observed the pastor, in awed tones, remind us this was Christ’s body, broken for us. I held it in my hand with the cup, full of sludgey wine, and I couldn’t throw it away.

This is silly, I thought to myself. It’s just bread. Christ has already nourished us, He’s not in the bread. 

But, why not? Why can’t He still be here, isn’t He always?

I think I stood there for ten minutes until my oldest son came to find me, took a chunk out of the bread and walked away. The wall between “the spiritual” and the “physical” had broken down for me, if only for a moment. Not really wanting to think through that possibility, I threw the bread and wine away. The whole thing unsettled me and I didn’t sleep that night.

The reason I didn’t sleep is probably the same reason people we’re weirded out by the bleeding host of Poland, even Catholics. In case you missed it, a priest dropped a host by accident and put it in  water, as prescribed by the church. The next day, he checked on it and a blood-like substance had oozed into the water. This happens pretty regularly, and usually it turns out to be red mold. So the priest followed procedure and took it to his bishop and tests were run.  The freaky part? The tests revealed that it contained actual heart tissue from a man. Not only that, it seemed as if the tissue had been under some kind of stress and strain.

Now, how you react to this possible miracle will tell you a lot about yourself. I’ll admit, my first reaction was “no damn way.” Something had to mess up the test, or someone was hoaxing the church. Then, I stopped myself as I remembered that night in the church basement, reluctant to throw away chewed up bread and sludgey wine. It reminded me of one of the reasons I became a Catholic, believing the bread and wine turned into the actual Body and Blood of Christ. So, why did I have such a weird reaction to a possible miracle?

The answer is simple, really. I fell back to a naturalistic assumption of how the world works, rather than a sacramental one, which tells me that physical things are always intertwining with unseen things. Unseen reality is always bleeding into the seen reality. It’s not just a Catholic point of view, but a Christian one. If I embrace my worldview fully, not only is a bleeding host possible, it’s likely. God can break through whenever he wants and the universe becomes enchanted, full of things threatening to break into our little worlds and shatter them. What a terrifying thought.