Jesus in the Holy Water

In January 2003, some of the friends I’d made at the Green Lake Christian Writers’ Conference–we’d dubbed ourselves the BAGS, Bad-xxxxed Girls–came to see me in Cincinnati. A lot had changed for me since the previous summer.  I was getting a new boss; the old friend who had brought me to the company in November 1998 was leaving. It seemed unlikely that the BAGs would recapture the spark that had been ignited at Green Lake.

I was wrong. We giggled like schoolgirls as we caught each other up on our lives and saw the sights of Cincinnati. But on Saturday evening came the inevitable question: “Where’s your church, Mel? When do we need to leave for services?” my friend Julie, the American Baptist minister, asked.

You see, the BAGs knew I didn’t go to church much, but they didn’t know just how little “not much” was. I stammered and stuttered until another BAG, Pat, offered that her cousin, who lived about twenty miles away, wanted us to come to her church. One crisis solved, but another was looming. I was, after all, supposed to be Catholic. Maybe Julie and our other friend wouldn’t know the order of the mass, but Pat would. I decided my best bet was just to do whatever Pat, who was on my left, did when we got to church on Sunday morning. She stood up, I stood up. 

That worked for a while. The trouble came when we prayed and Pat knew all the words, so she didn’t use the book. The “Glory to God in the highest” thing was done before I could find the page. The creed they all said was sort of like the Apostles’ Creed I’d learned as a child, but not exactly. I kept up with the Lord’s Prayer until they got to the kingdom and the power and the glory part—when had Catholics started saying that?

Then it was time for communion. I stood up to let Pat get by me. She elbowed me.

“Go,” she said in a whisper loud enough that I was sure all 200 massgoers heard her.

“I can’t!” I hissed back.

“Why?”

“I haven’t been to confession.”

She laughed. This time, everyone had heard her and was watching us.

“Just GO!” She pushed my shoulder, and out into the aisle I went.

I had not been to a regular mass more than a couple of times in more than thirty years. I did not know this newfangled creed. But I did know that a woman who hadn’t been to confession in thirty years and who had been married to a Lutheran by a justice of the peace did not qualify to receive the Body of Christ.

So I did the least disrespectful thing I could think of. As I dipped my fingers into the holy water as we left, I dropped in the wafer. Holy water, holy wafer. At least they’d both been blessed.

“Why were you so funny about communion?” Pat asked me later when the two of us were alone.

“Because I can’t take it.”

“You know it’s not like when we were kids. You don’t have to go to confession every week.”

I was tired of not telling her the whole truth.

“See, I don’t go to church. I just don’t. I got married by a justice of the peace. I joke about being a lapsed Catholic, but really, I’m nothing at all. I think I want to go back to church, have what you guys have, but I don’t know how.”

Pat looked at me a little quizzically, almost with some pity.

“OK,” she said, giving me a hug. “It’s OK. You’ll find it.”

I hoped she was right, but I couldn’t imagine how.