What You Didn't Know About Wafers

Were it not always thus, the liturgical & the lazy? We who swim in the deep waters wherein the War On Sailing is fought know too too well the intricacies & therefore the inconsistencies of the religious world, the religious world-view. Many books have been written & not quite a few re-written on the subject. There are times when new evidence is apparent & other times when old evidence disappears & shows up again in another place as if to say "I can be new evidence too!" & then there are the warriors, the priests, the warrior-priests, the pedestrians, the poets, the pedestrian-poets, & the priestesses when it's later & women are allowed to become involved. It's more of a muddle than a mess, but if untangling's your thing, you could spend a decent academic career trying to make sense of it all, or an indecent academic career making a buck lying about it to students & New York Times book reviewers.

Into this milieu we throw - regretfully, hesitantly - baked goods. Since human beings need to eat to live, food early on became a regular element in rites, rituals & dinners, sometimes in gratitude for some imaginary being's providing the celebrants with the food, sometimes out of spite for the imaginary being, who often (they are told) has better food he won't share. Into this prosaic stew (no pun intended) (oh, all right, pun intended) many especially irritated initiates decided they would completely piss the imaginary being off by pretending to eat him. While cannibalism has, in most societies, been used mostly as a last-ditch effort to liven up a really awful party, cannibalism-by-proxy has been popular since primates, out of the trees & into the libraries, found out what "proxy" meant & began using the word to confuse stupid baboons. It was not a surprise when the early Christians (so early, in fact, they simply called themselves "Chrises") started to use a wafer, pretending it was their imaginary being, & fed them to each other.

There are rules for how to make & distribute the wafer, of course. In the Specific Telling of the Roman To-Do, it is recommended "that the wafer bread be made wafer thin, with only blessed tongues tasting & slightly blessed fingers touching (too much blessing of fingers makes the wafer too sweet)... When the priest, whose stomach must also be blessed, breaks the wafer thin bread into single wafer thin wafers, he must do so with a minimum of bits on the church floor. In churches where a good doggie is nearby, the good doggie may be blessed & can lick up what are obviously the crumbs of Christ... There are three words that the priest must learn to be able to successfully & regularly break up the wafer thin bread into single wafer thin wafers: practice, practice, practice... Congregants are to be strongly discouraged from watching the preparation, lest they decide that the entire wafer thin bread is the body of Christ & that the parts of the wafer thin bread are parts of Christ. In one gathering in Galatia, one woman refused the host because she was certain it was one of Christ's testicles... The priest is encouraged to break the wafer thin bread into single wafer thin wafers either alone or with colleagues who will not misunderstand the process..."

Why only some Protestants carried on the practice with wafers, while the rest moved on to tastier cookies &/or buttery crackers, is not to be discussed in this monograph. With the importance of the wafer to the regular operation of the church established early on (some say even before Christ, although this is just silly & the people who say it are obviously just looking for an argument), a shadowy group of wafer bakers soon appeared & took over the process. It was this group which gave the Pope & his poker buddies (soon to be called Cardinals) the giant staff called a monstrance, which has in it the world's biggest & tastiest host, edible only by the Holy Father when he's really hungry & the Vatican kitchen is closed. The monstrance is not, as some assume, used in the baking process, but rather is used to knock blocks of stale unleavened bread around the kitchen on breaks &, should there be two host bakeries in the neighborhood, in the streets on sunny days for unofficial street hockey tournaments.

The bakers, while not a secret society per se, are not governed by the rules of capitalism or modern finance, although they have recently gone public & this writer in particular made a sweet pile of change when I dumped my shares last year right before Pope Ratzinger's ill-advised Nazi salute some Israeli visitors to St Peter's Square. He reportedly got a giggle out of it, but it took a lot of wrangling from the two governments to stop an Israeli bombing of Vatican City. & by the way, the SEC totally cleared me of any malfeasance. I was just looking for another investment. It's not like I know anyone who works for the Host Bakers or anything. Anyway.

Going public is only the first manifestation of what two sources I have inside the group call "more publicity & therefore more power to us!" This "publicity" decision is ominous: this is the group to whom Marie Antoinette trusted the creation & distribution of the cake she intended to give to the poor of France during the great French Bread Shortage of 1789, & surely you know how that turned out. An upshot of a more public group might be access to their archives, which have been cooling for some time (apparently, they're edible), but have remained off-limits to researchers. We can hope - & maybe bring our own silverware.

While it is frustrating (& frankly clichéd) to say "time will tell," especially with the rapid speed at which both the violence & the absurdity of the War On Sailing have increased since the turn of the century, at this point this is all we can do.

As a note: Catholic Brand Eternally Good Host Crackers are now available in your grocer's freezer & are delicious with jelly on top. I recommend the "unconsecrated" style, as they have fewer calories.