Accidental Sacrilege

When it comes to religion, as a vaguely Christian person, I try. Oh, do I try.

I genuinely attempt to do what I understand to be the right thing, yet somehow I always seem to fall a little short of spiritual glory. At some point, I have had to acknowledge two important facts about myself: I am a flawed human being, and I am frequently ignorant of what I am doing.

These qualities have seriously hindered my prospects of ever becoming a holy roller.

Still, I try to be as respectful toward all faiths as possible. The problem is that good intentions can only compensate so much for being a blundering fool. With that framing established, I would like to offer a specific example of why I suspect I have the ability to make priests cringe, and pastors quietly rub their temples.

This is the story of how an attempt to satisfy an innocent religious curiosity ended with me sitting alone in my kitchen, wondering whether I had offended God with condiments.

Please understand that I mean no disrespect toward Christianity or any other religion in telling this story. Any offense caused by my actions, although understandable, was entirely unintended.

My weakness in understanding the finer points of Christianity became particularly apparent when I discovered that legitimate communion wafers could be purchased online.

This fascinated me.

I had never received Communion before, and I had always felt somewhat left out of the mystery surrounding it. Suddenly, I realized that this lifelong question could be answered with nothing more than a credit card and the audacity to place an online order.

Naturally, I began rationalizing.

I discovered that the proceeds from the wafers I was looking at supported the religious organization producing them. Wonderful, I thought. This wasn't frivolous curiosity anymore.

This was practically philanthropy.

So I ordered a box.

For the next several days, I waited with embarrassing excitement for my mysterious religious wafers to arrive.

Then the package showed up.

That was when I discovered my first mistake.

Apparently, communion wafers are not ordinarily packaged with one spiritually curious idiot in mind. The minimum quantity was intended to provide individual servings to an entire congregation, not afternoon snacks for some random loafer standing in her kitchen.

I now possessed a disturbing quantity of wafers.

Still, I had come this far.

I tried one.

In my imagination, communion wafers had always been soft and perhaps slightly sweet. Surely there would be something vaguely magical about them.

There was not.

The wafer was astonishingly dry and almost completely devoid of flavor. My immediate comparison was Styrofoam, followed closely by housing insulation.

This was not the transcendent culinary experience I had anticipated.

Had these been ordinary crackers, I would have thrown them away and left an unnecessarily detailed review online.

But these weren't ordinary crackers.

Or at least, at the time, I didn't understand enough about the distinction between an unconsecrated communion wafer and the consecrated Eucharist to feel comfortable treating them like ordinary crackers.

I looked at the trash can.

Then I looked at the wafers.

Then I looked back at the trash can.

There was rotten food in there.

Absolutely not.

Some primitive alarm in my vaguely Christian brain was screaming, DO NOT THROW JESUS IN WITH THE OLD LETTUCE.

I considered donating the remaining wafers to a church, but that would have required approaching an actual religious authority and admitting what I had done.

“Hello, Father. I bought a congregation-sized box of communion wafers on the internet because I wanted to know what they tasted like. Would you like the leftovers?”

No.

I wasn't emotionally prepared for that conversation.

So I sat at my kitchen table for at least five minutes, staring at the box and feeling as though God was judging my stupidity slightly more intensely than usual.

I considered letting them expire and throwing them away later.

Then another thought arrived.

Would deliberately allowing them to expire be even more disrespectful?

Things were deteriorating rapidly.

Eventually, I decided that if I couldn't throw them away and couldn't give them away, there was only one honorable option remaining:

I would eat them.

Unfortunately, they still tasted like drywall.

So I did what I have always done when confronted with food I must politely finish.

I reached for the condiments.

This was the moment the situation crossed from theological confusion into outright farce.

Hot sauce.

Cheese Whiz.

Ranch.

Cream cheese.

Ketchup.

One by one, I dressed those tiny wafers like the world's most inappropriate hors d'oeuvres and ate them.

With every bite, I became increasingly convinced that I had somehow transformed a minor misunderstanding into a major spiritual incident.

I chewed each wafer as though it were my ticket to Hell, occasionally decorated with a little dab of ketchup.

By the time the deed was done, I did not feel spiritually enlightened.

I felt dirty.

And guilty.

And slightly nauseated.

So there I was, alone in my kitchen, crying over an empty box of communion wafers with cream cheese under my fingernails, wondering:

Will God ever forgive me?

Perhaps that was punishment enough.

If an Almighty God really is watching me, I like to imagine that my existence at least provides occasional comic relief between the migraines I presumably cause. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea which of my actions produces which response.

There was, however, a lesson buried beneath all that ranch dressing.

When you encounter a religious object and genuinely don't know how it should be handled, don't panic. Don't improvise. And perhaps most importantly, don't immediately open the refrigerator and start evaluating your available condiments.

Politely ask someone knowledgeable about the faith.

Because whatever the correct answer turns out to be, I am increasingly confident that “Cheese Whiz” will rarely be part of it.