Touching God

Upon my return from Thailand, my family was wary of this “Baptist” (some thought Jesus freak) in their midst.  To assuage some of their concern, I chose to attend Catholic mass with them.  Just because I was a Baptist did not mean I rejected their Catholicism, a stance I affirmed when I refused to attend a Sunday evening “church school” at my Baptist Church in Bangkok because they were studying Cults, the first of which was “Roman Catholicism.”

At the service, I remembered most of the prayers and the ritual stances (standing, kneeling, sitting).  When it came time to receive communion, and feeling that as a confirmed Catholic I still possessed my union card, I joined the line heading up to the altar.  The first few people opened their mouths and the priest placed the host on their awaiting tongues.  What came next surprised me.  The next few people put out their hands and the priest placed the host into it, which they then put into their mouths. 

My shock was because of my experience the week after making my first Holy Communion, white clothes, white bucks and all.  After receiving the host from the priest and returning to my seat, the wafer became stuck on the roof of my mouth and I couldn’t get it off with my tongue.  What would a 7-year-old do?  I slowly took my index finger and knocked it down so that I could swallow it.  I assumed no one saw me but I was wrong.  Within seconds, I felt a hand tug hard on my ear to remove me from the pew.  It was Sister Ann Sebastian, who in my mind was the gestapo of Mother Superiors.  (When I studied Freudian psychology years later and came across his concept of the superego, the image of Sister Ann Sebastian came immediately to mind.)  When we reached the back of the church, she “blessed” me out asking how dare I, a puny little sinful boy, touch God.  (Of course, I didn’t really understand the difference between touching God with my tongue versus with my finger, but I wasn’t going to raise that objection given the Sister’s angry demeanor.) 

Of course, I apologized but that was not enough.  She demanded that I attend confession for the next several weeks and do penance for my transgression.  I complied with her demand.  Although she meant it as a punishment for my “sin,” I didn’t mind because I always felt cleansed by God when I emerged from the confessional.  If I got hit by a bus on my way home, I would go straight to heaven (until I found out about this place called Purgatory; given my propensity toward other transgressions it was a more likely after-life landing spot). 

As I looked now at what was happening before my eyes, I wondered what had changed.  Why was it now fine for Catholics to touch the host, to handle the body of Christ, with their hands?  Were people fine with it?

Theological education helped with answers to my question.  I learned about the Second Vatican Council called by Pope John XXIII to “bring the Church up with the times.”  I studied Greek thought that influenced the Church as they wrestled with conceptions of the sacred as holy and in some ways untouchable by human frailty:  sin and the holy cannot mix.  But there was also this strain regarding the immanence of God and how God was present in every creature.  A paradox to be sure.

Baptists view communion as a time of remembrance of the sacrifice made by Jesus once on behalf of humanity.  There was no transubstantiation taking place with the bread and wine (for Baptists, if there was drink to go with what I affectionately referred to as Baptist chicklets, it was grape juice.  Damn those tea-totalers!)  However, I always felt something was missing from the Baptist experience, a missed moment of grace.  I did think the Catholic Church made too much of the distinction between God and humanity.  After all, I was taught that Jesus was the God-Man.  How more connected can you get than that!  (Of course, Anselm’s treatise, Cur Deus Homo, Why the God-man, with its insistent Roman jurisprudence mindset, suggested to me that the divinity of Jesus was what made him distinctive, and I wouldn’t have been touched by the grace of God had it not been for his willingness to make the sacrifice.  That penal-substitutionary view troubled me, and perhaps it is why I felt more comfortable with Abelard’s view of Jesus' sacrifice as a model for others to follow, and the mystics’ emphasis on union with the divine.)

Anyway, when I attend Mass periodically at the Catholic and Jesuit college I teach, I continue to show my Catholic union card, tattered and weather-worn as it is, and receive communion in my hands, often with a wink and a nod from the celebrant distributing the host who knows the variations of my Christian background.  The grace I feel from the ritual is not because of some magical transformation taking place, but because I am with a community of people who not only participate in the ritual but embody the example of Jesus as they go out to serve others or work for justice.  In these ways, I know, Jesus is in them, a divine-human encounter, that helps make the world a better place.