Gracias por los Matzos, Ché

There are many things about belief that I have a hard time believing. Sure, it's easy to understand – or believe, if you wanna use that word – how folks can believe that there is a divine being floating around in space/time who controls all the stuff we see every day, except for the car wrecks and homicides and earthquakes killing children.
     All the bad stuff is caused by – dare we say it? – Satan.
     That's what they think or take as true in the absence of other evidence (or logic sometimes even): that there's an almighty, loving, judgmental guy in space/time who's on top of it all, right down to the cell growth in your belly that you're gonna find out about some time soon enough, pilgrim.
     But me, well, I don't see it that way.
     I ain't gonna go into the way that works right now. Right now I have this thing about one of the doodads in the Christian religion that is part of every single Christian belief system – and there's almost as many of 'em as there are "sects" of Islam – since the before time.
     The Eucharist. Εύχαριστία in Greek. Means "the giving of thanks." The bread that is either taken as a sign of remembrance of the death of Jesus for your sins or as a means of becoming absolutely one with Lord Jesus his own self, right down to every cell in your body becoming of his.
     That eucharist, the one the Protestants call "The Lord's Supper" or "Breaking of Bread" or "Sacrament at the Altar" or just plain "Communion." That's what the Catholics call it, by the way: "Holy Communion."
     And if you're even the least bit familiar with this sacrament you know the drill: Jesus is sittin' at his "Last Supper" before his torture and brutal death and he hands out bread saying "This is my body . . . Do this in remembrance of me." The handing out of the bread & all that, that's what you do to remember Jesus' having snuffed himself for your sins, you heathen.
     So, carrying on a modification of the Hebrew tradition of Passover, Christians, since they finally figured out how to organize themselves some 200 years after the supposed Jesus story, get together to break bread, share the bread and remember how Jesus saved them from just turning to dust when they die and get buried.
     Didn't know it was that complicated did you?
     Well, it is.
     First there was that deal with the apple (or fruit of the forbidden tree), which pissed God off so mightily that he gave everybody a birth and a death, at least at first. Then he decided to be nice and send a piece of himself to earth, which piece he allowed – or designed the scene so as to allow – the death of that piece of himself at the hands of humans . . .
     Well, you know the drill, right?
     No? Well, I hate to say this but it's in that myth book, the Bible.
     At which point we can get back to the breaking of bread thing, which was borrowed from Hebrew "Passover" tradition.

You google it yourself, yo. I'm on this bread tear.

Now this all started with me 'cause I happen to like Goya crackers. These are the so-called "Mexican crackers" that the big food company Goya makes, which they sell in the local Krogers under UPC code 0 41331 03945 1. They're kinda like ordinary crackers but they ain't dusted with salt and they're about two inches in diameter with a deckled edge. Like biscuits or something. Resemble them crackers came in a can in C-rations. Anyway, that's what I like for snack crackers and that got me started on the communion crackers.
     See, the RC kids generally hand out the communion bread in little white disks that – at least in my childhood did – stick to the roof of your mouth once you get one in your mouth at communion time.
     "Corpus Christi?"
     "Amen."
     Stick out your tongue and the priest (or celebrant) puts one of the little disks on your tongue and you nod reverently and go back to where you was sitting.

Momentary aside:
Back when I was a church-goin' doubter, the worst part about communion was trying to remember just where heck it was that I had been sitting. Like I step over half a dozen other kids (or adults on Sunday mass) and walk up the central aisle to the communion rail. I kneel, do the tongue out & host on the roof of my mouth schtick and then get up reverently to go back to my seat.
     That was the easy part.
     Then I'd have to remember how many rows up I had walked or who had been sitting at the end of the aisle or whatever. It got so my mother would stand up and wave at me to find my way back to the family brood kneeler.
     The most terrifying thing to me then, that getting lost. Took a lot out of the meaning of the Eucharistic ceremonial, let me tell you, Maurice.

. . . and now back to the previous rant . . .

But it turns out that other Christian sects use different stuff. Some, like the Eastern Orthodox (and similarly Byzantine-oriented groups) use bread that comes out much like a regular loaf, which is then cut into cubes for the ceremony of handing out the remembrance breads. Some western or Protestant sects do the same thing, adding, as the Byzantines do, the small cup of sacramental wine.
     No, not like Gallo or Rufino Vespucci or Ripple. Sacramental wine, like hardly got any kick at all, yo. Remember, they's kids takin' the sacrament too, see?
     Other groups use cracker sorts of things, matzos (מַצָּה) and the like.
     At which point enter my Goya crackers again.

Before you ask, however, I am aware of the strange irony of my favorite non-salt crackers being made much like Jewish מַצָּה by a company with the name Goya. I noticed that right up front when I found 'em in the store. Right across the aisle from the kosher products.
     And yet, here I am, chewin' on one of 'em right now, right after lunch, during which I had the ultimate of non-kosher, a beef burrito with sour cream & extra lettuce on it, plus some hot sauce.
     Come to think of it . . . the burrito was an unleaven bread product too!
     Oy vey!
     So I go looking for the event of the communion wafer becoming a wafer, as opposed to the more (almost) rational leaven bread that was probably available throughout Mediterranean Europe when the Christian myths were being finalized, codified and generally agreed upon by the early self-designated "church fathers."
     And no, I don't wanna talk about the church mothers.
     At some point it was, I can guess straight easy, the matzo as sacramental bread. After all, Christianity is an accretion of Mithraism, Isis-worship & other Gnostic elements out of Judaism (check out Saul the Rabbi becoming Paul the Apostle [even if he never met Jesus]). In as much as Easter came to be celebrated during the Passover time, the extension of one bread product from Judaism into the favored bread product of the bacchanalian community meal, starting out with matzos wasn't that big a deal.
     Unless you were one of the hated Jews.
     Which probably led to the establishment of the Byzantine loaf cut down to cubes being the preferred form. More pleasing unto the eyes of the Almighty than to have that flat Hebrew cracker held aloft for the transubstantiation than that heeb cracker thingie.
     Of course, it's probably impossible to know with any reasonable certainty – and I'm good for thirty years either side of an established date – when the host (wafer) became the host and the cubed loaf was relegated to those infidel Byzantines.
     And don't you love the brotherhood and community that implies?
     But I digress.
     Back around three hundred years after the death & putative resurrection of Christ, a bunch of the aforementioned "church fathers" got together and decided what it really meant to be a Christian & ultimately what it meant to be a Roman Catholic. That was the Council of Nicaea, which gave unto us the Nicene Creed.
     Now we'll avoid the tangent about a meeting three hundred years after Jesus is supposed to have lived being a direct line from Jesus himself. What we can't avoid, however, is the distance in time between that Last Supper in the Upper Room. The place where the bread was passed out and the idea of remembrance was introduced to the religion.
     Three hundred years, a whole herd of dissenting and factional sects all claiming to represent the same Christ (and there must have been plenty if we take Paul's references as gospel [no pun intended]) and probably a few million deaths here and there over those sectarian distinctions lead to the Nicene Creed and the shape of the host.
     And you can bet there was an argument over the shape of the host.
     Look what Christians fight about among themselves today.
     And no, I ain't talkin' about Paul Crouch or the wonderous and weird things that he & his followers believe. Yeah, as in: take as true that which cannot be substantiated by evidence.

Such as the evidence of the host tasting different, church from church. Or how it represents – or in Catholicism actually becomes – the body of Jesus his own self, all of him, hair follicle to toe nail. Which then derives the question of which part of the divine body one is upon having taken communion.
     That's why the call it communion, dig? You commune with Jesus by eating Jesus, which makes you part of Jesus, body, soul, mind & spirit.
     And somebody please explain them parts: body, soul, mind and spirit.
     The body I get.
     The soul, well, that means there's an afterlife. But since I don't remember the beforelife, I have a hard time understanding how I remember life in the afterlife. But we'll just take the idea that the soul is what is purported to live on after you have died.
     Mind, well, for me that's a no-brainer: nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain, which means that I am not a Cartesian. I see Descartes statement (Cognito, ergo sum) as wrong. Descartes thought the mind was separate from the brain, some sort of operative working in the brain or throughout the body so that the body felt that it was apart from itself, special in every way.
     Science proves otherwise. Hell, neurological knowledge from the 19th Century proved that otherwise.
     Spirit?
     Didn't we just cover soul? Spirit is what? A stand-in soul for when you need to have some motive force within the soul making the soul work.
     Can you say infinite regression
     And there we were, stickin' our tongues out at the communion rail all them decades ago waiting for Jesus to hop in and turn us into shining beings of light (sounds pretty newage-ish don't it?), being as how the bread wafer thingie stuck to the roof of your mouth really is/was Jesus.
     And it was anathema to put your finger in your mouth and dislodge the host from the roof of your mouth 'cause, well, your fingers were unclean. As opposed to the roof of your mouth, which, providing you had gone to confession and gotten absolution & had brushed your teeth, was clean as clean can be.
     Ah, what a joy beyond compare.
     Right.

I remember all the prep to First Holy Communion. Sister Merry Discipline beating the words into our heads. Memorizing this or that piece of mythic lore. Getting measured for a suit & tie. Shiny shoes. Going through rehearsal after rehearsal. Over and over until we could just about do it in our sleep.
     Then going to confession, getting absolved for our six-year-old sins. As if a six-year-old kid could have done anything contrary to the divine laws other than pause to wonder what the hell this was all about.
     Which I did even back then often enough.
     Like what sin could I have committed that would have kept me out of heaven?
     I was six. I didn't even know what sex was. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke boo. I didn't cuss or stab people or rape little girls or steal money from the poor box. I was a six-year-old kid, fer cryin' out loud.
     Even so, there we were one Sunday morning, all dressed up special. Boys in black suits with white shirts & ties. Girls in frilly white dresses & white shoes and stockings. Little angels going off for their first time encounter with the all-encompassing, total-body awareness of the life of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord hopping in our mouths, getting stuck to the roofs of our mouths and eventually, slidin' down the old esophagus and into our pure little bellies, becoming part of us. Body, soul, mind and spirit.
     And getting lost on the way back to the pew.
     Yeah, I remember it all.
     But I remember most of all thinking that I didn't feel any different. There was no overpowering, all-encompassing, top-to-bottom, inside-and-out sense of being in the Lord's divine presence.
     I remember it 'cause somebody asked me what it was like, having Jesus in me.
     I dissembled.
     There was a piece of cardboard-like bread stuck to the roof of my mouth; I didn't remember where I had been sitting, and I didn't feel different at all.
     Body, soul, mind & spirit.
     Many years later I would remember this while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
     Cutting to the chase, Sri Ramakrishna was a Hindu ascetic who, his followers claim, was god incarnate, a divine emanation, an incarnation of the divine. He was born a human person like you or me but at some point in his life he was filled with the knowledge that he was god itself. The various moments when he was aware of this were filled with such ecstasy that he was unable to live as a normal human. Divine, he was above everything physical. Divine, he was metaphysical in such a way that when he died, he just sloughed off his corporeal body and slipped out into the great divinity-filled void of creation.
     Written like a true believer, ain't it, that paragraph?
     Well, reading that book I realized that what I'd missed in my first holy communion was exactly what I'd missed about a religious life that cast all fate to the divine wind and cared not for this world.
     If such souls really exist, I ain't met one yet. And of all the ones I've read about, well, they all end up being human beings in the end, just like you or me: they get born, learn about life, get old, get feeble and die. Every single one of 'em. At least the ones we can document, which we can't do for Jesus or any of his disciples or followers or any such until about 1500 AD. And even then the trail gets dodgy.
     And thus the bread of remembrance is now a wafer to some, a cube to others and a bit of fanciful cogitation to me. Even when I was a nominal believer, back when I was a kid, I didn't get it. Still don't.
     But I'm glad Goya makes these crackers, yo.