Staring Down the Serpent (Faith in Reverse, Part 7)

How the Eucharist, church pain, and the story of the serpent pushed me from one place to the next.

A day in the Vatican Museum.

It’s been a while since I’ve popped up in this space with a Faith in Reverse story. (Click this link to start at the beginning.) In part, it’s a product of an insane season of work and writing. (Amber and I just finished our first collaborative manuscript.) In other part, it’s because the story takes a tricky turn after I picked up the Catechism, a story I haven’t written much about. I may not go into all the details in this series… or I might. The jury is still out. But to go forward, let’s take a step back.

1.

Here, we’ve come. From the haunting of childhood epiphanies. Through the accidental acquisition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to the opening lines that grabbed me by the throat: “The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God.” There, I was drawn to a point a point. This point—like so many points—was the culmination of many moments. Among those moments: the early-sobriety experience that I describe as nothing short of a mystical moment of communion.

Let’s rewind. Reverse. Go back to the spring of my sobriety.

In March of 2014, only six months into being undrunk, I was blindsided by what can only be called a full-blown Eucharistic experience. After a lavish dinner party at Mike Rusch’s house—one in which I remained stone-cold sober—a group of faith-bearing men and women sat in the living room when a friend made a simple suggestion. Here’s how I describe that moment in The Book of Waking Up.

Sitting in the living room, the dregs of a good dinner party grace the table. A left-over chunk of rustic bread. A plate of uneaten olives. A greasy plate emptied of cheese. A quarter-bottle of undrunk red.

It’d be a shame to let the bread and wine go to waste, the minister in attendance says, pouring the wine in a water goblet. They laugh. I don’t. He doesn’t turn the glass up like I thought he might. Instead he takes it in his right hand, reaches for the bread with his left. He holds them up, recites the words of institution.

This is my body.

This is my blood.

Take; eat; drink; and whatnot.

Float above the table; be a fly on the ceiling. Watch the group pass the objects of creation— flour, yeast, fermented grapes. See me wringing my hands, small-swaying side to side, eyes squeezed shut. Fly down to my now-empty dinner plate, see how shallow my breathing is? Scan the party-goers, see them staring at me wearing a collective expression of fresh alarm as they remember a shaky six-month sobriety. Had anyone thought this whole cup-of-salvation thing? Would Christ blood wash me off the wagon?

Mike sits to my left, and he takes a chunk of bread and dips it in the water goblet of wine. He eats, then passes the near-spent loaf and wine goblet my way. Hold your breath with him, with the rest of the table, with me.

Is a sobriety that can’t withstand communion any sobriety at all? Let’s find out.

The bread is a sponge, and when I dip it into the wine, it fills fast. (Take. Eat. Remember.) In the eating, a portal opens. I know this smell, this flavor; don’t I? The flavor of my skinned palm when I fell off my bike as a boy? The smell of the delivery room when my first born came screaming into life? The taste of the thumb I almost lost to a chef’s knife a year ago? It’s salt and iron, water and wound, flesh and blood. It’s a full-bodied.

What I’d once considered some sort of metaphorical memorial takes the form of a real presence in that moment—bread and wine full of life. The wine of my poison—it has become the substance of salvation.

This moment of communion gave rise to months worth of questions and partial answers. For sake of brevity, those months of questions and answers can be summed up this way:

Question: What is the Eucharist really?