BY SEAN WALSH
Jesus had a mischievous side. The hapless Simon Peter was almost always the foil, on one occasion even being “invited” to take a walk on a lake (see Matthew 14:28 if you don’t believe me).
I don’t routinely compare myself to the first Pope. That said, I was recently presented with a comparable challenge. The results were mixed, and I was, wrongly in my view, co-opted to confession by an unsympathetic and incomprehensible cleric. Worse, because I wasn’t expecting to be there, I had to make stuff up for that priest, so now must get to another confession to own up to the lies I confected to wing it through the unnecessary one. Either I get the next one right or I risk an infinite regress of avoidable sacramental vandalism.
Some context may be helpful.
My relationship with alcohol, once complicated, is now quite simple: we are permanently estranged. Like an irregular migrant at large in Greggs, alcohol (admittedly over time and with greater stealth) wandered into my biological system and made off with most of my liver. Wine and I no longer speak, not even when we find ourselves at the same party, where people who should know better still try to hook us up.
I’m no puritan. We must be tolerant of those who choose to drink moderately. But we should acknowledge as well that if you’re going to drink at all you might as well do it to excess. Yes, there is a place for milquetoast, moderate Aristotelian alcohol consumption, but the Dionysian alternative is more interesting. Both, needless to say, are preferable to the voluntary teetotaller who, except for Trump, add little to the overall joy count in my experience.
No, drinking is fine. It generates social and spiritual capital and makes it possible for ugly people to make babies. It’s just that this pleasure is no longer available to me, not if I’m to live long enough to be around for that occasion when my teenager staggers in pissed up for the first time (or better still is brought home by the police). Every decent father wants to be there to witness that beautiful rite of passage, which my own son—now 15—seems to be leaving a bit late.
The life of a recovering alcoholic is almost as weird as that of a practising Catholic. There is a moment when these two lived eccentricities converge and battle it out, and that is in the Mass, the timeless sacramental space in which we become melded onto the sacrifice of Our Lord, and which for Catholics is the “source and summit of the Christian life.”
In terms of theological complexity, the mystery of the Eucharistic celebration—what is happening when you take communion—is up there with the Incarnation and the Doctrine of the Trinity. Scripturally, it is prefigured in John 6 and codified in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, as well as in Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth.
When the bread and the wine are consecrated, they become, through a sort of delegated divine speech act, the literal body and blood of Our Lord, who is taken to be really present, even if it doesn’t look like that to the neutral, heathen observer. Eucharistic participation is, in other words, more than just an inherited symbolic practice. If it’s just about symbols, Flannery O’Connor once remarked, then to hell with it.
What do you do, then, as a recovering drunk, when the priest dips the consecrated host in the wine before offering it to you? Your choices in this situation are neither many nor great. It feels like that thing the chess players call zugzwang: it’s your move and you are out of good options, including the choice to do nothing at all.
You can pretend to swallow the host and clandestinely spit it out again when the priest turns his back (logistically, this is more easily accomplished during the Traditional Mass, assuming you can find one). But if he clocks you, he will probably think you’re planning to smuggle it out of the service for use in pagan practices (this is known to happen). Thus, the calculation becomes: is it better to risk relapse than have your priest think you are a Satanist or, worse, a New Age druid, Channel 4 documentary filmmaker or similar?
The possibility of this dilemma clearly did not occur to the church fathers who were, to be fair, writing some years before the development of the first 12-Step recovery programme (circa 1935). I can report that my recent encounter engendered in me a bifurcation of the soul, a spiritual schism or moment of crisis. My alcoholic hemisphere, the left one, became stridently supernaturalistic and insisted that since the wine was now fully consecrated it could do me no harm, so get it down your neck. And then possibly ask for more.
The sober part of me urged the more reductionist position: the immanent causal properties of the wine remain intact, I argued against myself, therefore Aquinas himself would probably not have risked it were he also an addict in recovery (there is little evidence that he was). The doctrine of the Real Presence does not imply the negation of worldly physics; it merely adds to them.
Thinking quickly, I realised that there was a third option and indicated that I would prefer to receive a blessing in place of the full communion.
Should I have followed Peter onto the lake? Perhaps. Of the very many vignettes of grotesquerie thrown up by the lockdown madness, the memory of people waiting in line, masked up, to receive Our Lord is the one most seared into my brain. This, I thought at the time, is bad Catholicism and poorer manners. If Jesus, and therefore God, is there in the bread and wine then what harm can come to you? And why are you hiding your face from Him?
What you could call the problem of discernment, of developing the habit of seeing the transcendent as revealed in the quotidian, is a familiar difficulty of the life of faith. This is one instance, the revelation of God in the wafer and the thimble-full of sickly-sweet altar wine. Mine was, at best, an inadequate response to the benign invasion of grace.
My rebuke came via the abovementioned accidental confession, insisted on by my priest, who interpreted my odd behaviour as an admission of some recent sin, and intervened accordingly, appropriately and embarrassingly.
Which brings me to another catechetical question. My (Indian) priest’s interaction with spoken English is very intermittent, haphazard and seemingly unguided by the Holy Spirit. In a situation where neither sinner (or in this case, pretend sinner) nor confessor know what the other’s going on about, are the acts of contrition and absolution valid?
Because if not, is it even worth going back again? Can it not keep until after I’ve been lucky enough to do something that’s bad but also fun?
Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has. Sean was recently appointed Associate Editor of this magazine – we are honoured to have a man of his talents onboard.