Post by
@gallusrostromegalus
gallusrostromegalus -- Read time: 10 minutes
The 1969
Easter Mass Incident
Content
Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention,
Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and
your health always comes first. Its
a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As
always, all the names have been changed to protect people's identities.
This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad
was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small
church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father
Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be...
rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church
was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and
liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil
demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam
war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a
series of incidents lead him to start exploring "nontraditional"
means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring
his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of
you who weren't raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one
with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of
wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.
It's big McFucking deal, and you have the
opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained
to me second-hand because after this and Dad's 51 days in the army, Dad decided
he wouldn't inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
"Hey
dad," Six-year old me asked the first time he
told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine
at church. "Isn't that cannibalism?"
"We're
getting to that." He waved.
*
The First
Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts
Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed
someone if he'd actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of
the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year's. He couldn't NOT
have communion.
"I'll
bake." offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in
the county. "So we have hosts. Jesus will
understand."
Father
Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria's cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is
supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is
why they taste terrible. It's a theological point of some importance
relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological
counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would
neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so
instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a
SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick
for the Much Better Wafers and that they'd be sure to show up next week as long
as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything
that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus
once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of?
So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and
encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on
swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the
same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad
remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring "THE HOLY BODY OF
CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!"
The matter
went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right
to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes
to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he's
come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father
Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
"Is
this where the Cannibalism happens?" Six-year-old me asked, eager to get
to the good parts.
*
At his
remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of
transubstantiation, aka "That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually,
Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow."
Also on the syllabus was understanding the
importance of Christ's suffering and sacrifice.
"So, I
was thinking about Easter Service." Said father Patrick one
afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church
because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where
you went to have sex.
"Well,
we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on
easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it
real for everyone. Trauma's great for bonding a community together."
"Who's
playing Jesus?" asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
"That's
the thing- A Host, it doesn't look much like flesh, right? Doesn't look
like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one's belief.
What if,
instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can't cook to save my life- make a
man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the
boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it's
bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread
to it with, I don't know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the
cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion."
He paused to
take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and
Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
"Then
we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear
a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I
think that'd really be a good bonding experience for the church." he
nodded thoughtfully. "The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding
enough romans."
"I
WANNA BE LONGINUS." bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the
plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually
rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal
Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being
a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to
start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and
human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited
hair, quail's-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack
because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the
important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to
die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy
corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
"Maria,"
asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over
Jesus' toothy grin and abdominals. "Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
"Well,
he's the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails." She said,
pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously
lumpy tea-towel. "And he might have... burnt, slightly."
Everyone
nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The
rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious
Jesus they've ever had.
*
Easter
Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing
up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of
newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a
lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical
jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared
Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the
whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the
sermon, but did hear the "oooh" from the
crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by
horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible "What the FUCK" as
they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering
him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the
terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally
Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down
the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by
everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run,
shrieking latin curses, down the length of the
church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to
spear him in the gut.
Please take
moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to
visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and
you're all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman
has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there's some sort of
underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a
horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking
spear, screaming like a madman. Don't you feel yourself drawing closer to
God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a
crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two
things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad
misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of
a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small
target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an
athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very
solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria's
tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly... attentive angle, as Bread
Jesus's Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this,
however because
2. In
rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus's
navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up
there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come
up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made
of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was
a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely
gooey dribbling effect.
However,
this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so
when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had
collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers
exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first
three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the
church after that.
Then, Father
Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on
with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar.
At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last
Oration:
"Thou,
O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we
give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our
weakness. Amen."
...And
everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at
first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered
prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling
about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
"IS
CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?" six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked.
I'd convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
"No, it's
normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin."
"Well that's boring as hell." I remember muttering and
Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people
filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon,
faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick
turned to Maria and asked "You don't think that was too much, do you?"
"No."
Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from
sincerity.
It was the
exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed
up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the
mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
"No.
That's crazy." She said, staring down the archbishop like he
was an idiot.
"Such
imaginations some people have!" Said Father Patrick, much less
convincingly.
"And
you- you didn't... Spear an effigy of our
lord and savior?" the archbishop demanded of my father.
"Do I
look like I can jump that high?" Dad asked, having in the interim
been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore
no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat
relieved that he'd only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a
doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and
complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please
have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on
to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria
became a Nun.
*For those
of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
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