Jumpin' Jesus!

This one may certainly cement my place in Hell.

I am 100% sure I've already blogged about this but I couldn't find it in my blog pile, so here we go again. Heck, there are a lot of new readers right now and most of you regular readers just skim, anyways and probably don't remember the first time I wrote about this and I might be funnier this time, so I'm going with it. I'm perimenopausal--I can't remember what I had for dinner; how am I supposed to wrote about a year ago?

This edition of Jumpin' Jesus is dedicated to Pot Holder Grrrl. She was on campus during the time the wife and I were there, so she is truly part of our history. And, I went on a few dates with her would-eventually-be husband, so that counts for something, doesn't it?

I'm flashing back to college, 1983. That's when the wife worked in the college chapel for the Catholic Priest. Being the good Catholic that she was, this was like the BEST JOB EVER for a collegiate Catholic. Her family was probably so happy they wept when she got that work-study job. I'm not sure what she was supposed to do during this very holy employment but she it was her work-study placement and thus she was often found hanging around in the chapel, which meant I could be found hanging around in the chapel.

Side note: I asked the wife tonight what she was actually supposed to be doing when on the clock. She said, "Honestly, I don't know." Who works in a chapel for work-study, anyways? Talk about a cake job. The wife added later, "I think I did my homework."

One of the wife's jobs was to "break the bread" when it arrived for Mass. Back in those days, it was way cool to have someone bake a loaf of bread, bring it to church, rip it up and then "serve" it up during Communion. The bread usually arrived a day or two before the Mass, so there was plenty of time for bread ripping....and, bread consumption. I tried to be around whenever the wife was on bread ripping patrol because I loved that stuff and wanted a chance at eating some of that home made bread. Yum!

Some of you devout Catholics have begun hyperventilating--tell yourself: it's not blessed bread yet, so it's just bread, not the body of Christ. The time to freak about about communion bread comes later in the story.

This bread was DELICIOUS. I mean we loved, loved, loved it. It was sweet but not sugary, hard but not too hard, dense and delicious. Because it was so delicious and because we each weighed about seven million pounds and because we were college students who really didn't think twice about things, we would eat as much bread as we could without letting it "show" that so much bread was "missing." We quickly learned that if we filled the "bottom" part of the bowl with regular old hosts and put the bread on top and fluffed the bread, it looked like there was a lot of bread. If we tried to fill the bowl without the hosts, it looked like someone had indeed been snarfing down bread with the communion wine that was missing.....

.....Yes, we drank the unblessed communion wine while stuffing unblessed, homemade communion bread into our traps. I am here to tell you that the wine is AWFUL. Terrible. Poor, desperate college students don't really care--they just make faces and pass the bottle. And, it wasn't the blood of Christ yet, so what's really wrong with drinking cheap, yucky wine in the back of a chapel? (Have I ever mentioned how hard it is to get the cork out of the bottle when you don't have a cork screw? One time, we just shoved a knife into the cork and pushed down. The cork shattered and all the cork-ettes floated around in the bottle. I'm guessing the priest had to few a pieces of cork that weekend. And, since we no longer had a cork to re-cork the bottle with, we covered the bottle with tin foil. Bet that kept if fresh and tasty.)

But, I digress. Back to the bread.

The bread was ripped, consumed, fluffed on top the hosts and covered. It sat in the bowl, waiting for its turn to become the Body of Christ.

This is where I come in. If you think it's entertaining that the wife worked at a church during college, you'll love to learn that I used to serve Communion while in college. You know, as an extraordinaire minister. Blessed or whatever, there I was, seal of approval to serve communion, doling out the Body of Christ to the parishioners. I did this whenever needed, hung over or not, dressed appropriately or not, feeling holy or not. Most often, I was hung over, a wrinkled mess and not very holy--but when the Body of Christ calls, you answer.

It's my weekend, so I belly up to the bar---er, I mean I waddle up to the altar, get my Body of Christ from the priest, grab my bowl of bread/bowl of Jesus and waddle to my place to serve Communion. The wife and I had gotten a little over zealous in the "use the hosts to fluff the bread" department, so bread was just about flowing over the top of my communion host bowl. I'm standing there with my mantra, "Body of Christ, Body of Christ, Body of Christ," handing out bread.....

.....when the unimaginable happens:

The BODY OF CHRIST JUMPS OUT OF MY BOWL AND ONTO THE FLOOR!!!

This is worse than death to a Catholic.

JESUS HAS JUST JUMPED OUT OF THE BOWL AND HE'S ON THE FLOOR!!!!

I do not know what to do. There's the hunk of bread, no longer just a hunk of bread but rather a hunk of Jesus, Body of Christ, on the floor by my left foot. I am filled with sheer terror. They never told me what to do in such emergencies. How was I to know Jesus would ever jump out of the bowl? I can see him, he can see me.

I look at the person I was about to provide Communion, I look at Jesus on the floor, I look at my bowl. Jesus ain't getting off the floor and the priest isn't noticing the Catholic Chaos going on next to him. The line is getting longer, people are waiting for their transubstantiated piece of bread....

There is nothing I can do but bend over, pick up the Body of Christ and shove it into my mouth.

You know, the wife and I always tried to rip the bread into small, manageable pieces, but this piece (of course!) was a HUGE hunk of bread. Usually, this would have been an awesome thing; it's the size you hoped you'd get when getting communion--but, in this case, this huge wad of bread was a bad thing. I've got this dry, dry mouth, I'm already freaked out and now I've got this wad of bread that I can't swallow and I have to continue my job of serving Communion. I shove the wad to the left cheek and mutter out "Bolly of Cliste, Bolly of Cliste."

The rest of the Mass went without a hitch. No one was the wiser. The world didn't end, I wasn't struck down by lightning. Everything seemed in order.

Me? I returned to my seat and tried not to pass out or vomit. It's really hard to be 20 years old and have such trauma come your way.

Twenty five years or so later, I no longer serve Communion....but, I still would sure love that bread recipe.....