The Body and the Blood

Casting a big shadow
on my first communion.

Becoming a "bride of Christ" with my Catholic first communion at age seven was a joyous occasion. I had a pretty good if unconscious affinity for myth, parable, and fable (thank you, Aesop, and Sunday school, too) but not much of a grip on metaphor so the transubstantiation was as it should be: a mystery. Honestly, that we would eat the body and blood of Christ on a regular basis makes a lot of sense if you grow up understanding that Christ is the spirit of the world -- love -- and you need to physically ingest this spirit to become and live it.

If you don't grow up with that understanding, it's possible you do not hold food as sacred; and this in turn has supported the development of a White American culture in which food is cheapened, made unhealthy for our bodies through over-processing and additives, and then wasted while too many children experience food insecurity.

You may also believe Catholics are cannibals. Or worse.

Being confirmed by the Bishop of the Diocese of Norwich, CT in 1975 at age 14 WAS worse. I had already read Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle and quite possibly Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation lurked as a stolen library book beneath my bedroom chair. The photos of my confirmation all feature me red faced and swollen from the sobbing, screaming, middle school tantrum I seemingly held right up until the moment I was standing alongside the Bishop.

I quit going to church the moment I stripped off my hand-made red sash sporting my confirmation name in honor of my beloved grandmother, Mary. I spent the next four years in my parents' home enduring not the wrath but, much worse, the quiet disappointment of my family members.

Since then, the Catholic Church has not improved much over its history of witch burnings during the Inquisition; its Doctrine of Discovery justifying the genocide of native peoples; the sexual abuse of uncountable numbers of children and the death of many more in native boarding schools; and homophobia and the myopic misogyny of its all-male priesthood and anti-abortion policies.

Yet somehow, in the face of all this and despite 30 years of Buddhist practice, I still hang my deep faith in the mysteries of this world on the Catholic liturgy of my youth -- on communion, forgiveness, love, service, congregation and praise -- and attend mass when I can.

The reconciliation of all of this -- the differences between the shame of the institution and its many lovely people and the liturgy itself -- is no small hat trick and keeps me hard at work.

Let me just give you this. During my radical lesbian separatist heyday in the early 1990's, when I was employed by The Village Voice and also an editor for TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas and Firebrand Books, my mother would take the train from Mystic to visit me in Brooklyn every Mother's Day. One morning I woke up to find her reading one of my issues of TRIVIA, which was crammed with lesbian-feminist philosophers, artists, and theorists including the likes of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. Later that afternoon as we were walking down a shady block of 6th Avenue past a beautiful old Romanesque Catholic church which many Haitian immigrants attended, I asked her if she still went to church every week as she insisted we did throughout my childhood.

Mae shook her head. "The Church is just something created by men, right?" she asked me. "And they change the rules all the time. I feel closer to God in my raspberry patch."

#transubstantiation

#communion

#lesbiannation

#rubyfruitjungle

#reconciliation

#liturgy