First Communion

Second grade is the grade you receive the "Holy Sacrament" of communion for the first time. There's a lot of preparation and build up to this wonderful event. There are special rehearsals and the priest will come to talk to your class about what a big deal it is. Well, being the eight year old that I was, I didn't really understand the enormity of this event, and, honestly, I didn't understand until about two years ago...

Sometime in the year leading up to my own first communion I was sitting in mass, listening for once, and I heard the priest say "This is my body [or flesh, not sure which it was then], shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven," and "this is the cup of my blood, the cup of the new and ever lasting covenant," while holding the communion bread and wine. I tugged at my mom's arm like, whaat? Body and blood? That was totally gross to my eight year old mind. My mom just looked at me and said "It's just bread and wine. You can eat it. It'll be fine." Well that made me feel better. I wasn't so concerned then when first communion rolled around.

Any Catholics or people familiar with Catholicism are at this point wondering exactly why my mom didn't tell me the truth. I don't know. People unfamiliar with the truth, let me lay it out for you. Catholics believe that during the mass when the priest blesses the bread and wine, that they actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ and that taking communion is a spiritual nourishment one should receive from the earliest age possible on a regular basis. This... This I did not learn until my freshman year of college (i.e. two years ago). But because my mom told me that as a little kid, I spent the next eleven years believing that communion and all the stuff the priest says before hand was just a metaphor. I believed that Jesus was just being a little dramatic at the Last Supper and that the priests kept it going as tradition... or something like that. This also led to serious issues understanding the trinity (more on that later).

The reason I bring all of this up is that when I went to college, I had three Catholic suite-mates who went to church every week even though there were no parents forcing them - weird right? Anyways, after a while of them asking me to go and refusing, I started to come around. They wore me down a little, I guess, and I thought I could try out church. Maybe it wasn't as bad as a remembered. I thought I'd give it the ole college try. I did still believe in G-d after all. But when I finally learned about the whole communion business in a history class, I got a little freaked out and didn't know what to do with that information. How was I supposed to just undo eleven years of thinking it was just metaphoric bread? There's no way that this bread was somehow actually Jesus.

This was just one of many issues I had during my trial period at the college church. You will come to learn more of them later.