Gluten-Free Jesus

“And to the right we’ll have gluten-free hosts suitable for coeliacs.”

Originally uploaded by seminarianvoitus

With that sentence, according to old Christian doctrine, will my soul may have been cast into the eternal fires of hell, as it signalled the end of my belief in holy communion.  It’s quite a bizarre feeling, fiery damnation. Uncomfortably warm. But, by the old rules, that little PC slip of the tongue, if you’ll excuse the pun, would have put the priests doling it out in Satan’s company too. Confused? Amen to that.

It happened at a funeral I attended recently, where gluten-free communion was offered. What a bizarre world we live in when a holy wafer the size of a 50cent piece must meet special dietary needs. However, let’s not look into the recommended daily allowance of gluten in your average communion wafer. That would be silly. More importantly, didn’t we learn in school that the wafer is no longer just a wafer after the benediction? Is it not – shazam – entirely composed of the body of Jesus Christ? Surely, if that’s the case, there’s no need to provide for coeliacs, because the process of transubstantiation would, miraculously, remove the gluten in the ‘fleshing’ process? Not so, and neither is it right to suggest that the ministers of the eucharist, on this occasion, were flirting with fiery oblivion.

Back in the olden days, apparently, anyone who would deny transubstantiation was deemed a dangerous heretic, and was to be subjected to an excommunication so severe, so irrevocable, that it could only be carried out by the Pope himself. If you presumed that the wafers were not eclusively made up of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, you were punished by anathema and cast out of the church for eternity. Scorching damnation awaited anyone who “denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue”

A pretty severe penalty, but with the inconvenient advent of ‘science’ and an rise in the questioning of holy authority, an increasingly unlikely one.  Salvation’s retail outlets began rolling back their definition in the light of atomic science, offering a new deal. They began defining transubstantiation more figuratively. The host was now something not phsyically derived from Jesus’ physical person, but imbued with his metaphysical properties, while remaining bread-like in this, human, world. Convenient.

Convenient, in the current world of dietary sensititivy, because it meant that when the priest provided a coeliac option, he wasn’t suggesting that Jesus Christ’s carcass came in a wheat-free form. THAT would be crazy, and mean instant death. He was merely suggesting that the bread which was imbued with the metaphysical properties from Jesus would not inflame the gut of anyone with a gluten intolerance. It was stomach-friendly soul food, but soul food none the less.

All of which makes perfect sense, a religious work-around you can believe in. If, that is, you can swallow it.
Update: When the Staff of Life is Toxic