the church of dirt, trees and sky

My parents never urged me to eat the body of Christ, although I did once when I was eight. He appeared before me as a bleached wheat cracker and a plastic thimbleful of cheap red burgundy.

I knelt down on the hard linoleum with a line of other folks, and a man in black put the saltless cracker in my mouth. I wondered if his hands were clean. It was dry, and I started to chew demurely, in keeping with the others. We had to wait until everyone got a cracker before the wine was passed out. By that point, and I'm sure I wasn't alone, I was working to choke down my holy cracker, and so the harsh swallow of wine was a blessing.

Years later I went to a babtism service with my aunt and cousin. I was a bookish teenager that liked to draw, listen to reggae, and go on hikes in the hills surrounding Santa Fe. At one point in the service we had to rise, then kneel on a board attached to the high-backed pew in front of us. I did, and my knees began to hurt, and when we were done singing, everyone stood up just to sit back down again in the pew. So being a teenager, I skipped the standing up part and went from kneeling straight back into the pew in a lunge that ended with my back hitting the pew hard.

But I hit something else. Something about the size of a pork chop. I turned around to face an elderly nun and realized that she had braced her hand on the pew to stand, and that I had smashed it hard when I had lunged back. She was trying to smile as I whispered an apology, but she didn't look happy, and she had the square jaw and giant forehead of a professional wrestler or a football defensive end. She had such a large head, and her huge fingers, while I was crushing them, had felt like antique slim jims, dried as hard as iron. I still wonder if she wasn't the captain of her order's football team, but I recognize I'm close to sacrilege to have such a thought, and so will try and unthink it.

The service went on. We'd been there for at least two hours, and I was starting to get jittery. Sit stand kneel sing, pray, stand sit pray, kneel, lunge. Lunge? Oh no, I had hit something again. I didn't want to turn around but I had to and there she was, lifting her giant hand up slowly in rebuke. I had smashed her hand again! In the exact same way! Smashed a nun's hand twice! I couldn't believe it. I whispered a thousand apologies, I tried to look abject. But she trained her eyes on me just like an elderly nun eyes a young pagan fool who has caused her pain twice in the space of an evening. Her mouth was grim and unforgiving, and I imagined her thinking uncharitable thoughts involving a candlestick and the back of my head.

Finally the service began to wind down. The pastor brought a giant lit candle down the aisle--it looked like a novelty prop--and we all lit our small candles from it. I couldn't look at the nun anymore. I needed to get out now, so made a weak excuse, and sidled out in a fast trot. Once I was outside in the parking lot I looked up at the clear New Mexico sky full of stars and felt so good all of a sudden that I ran down the street and kept running past my old truck and into the neighborhood. I was free.