Communion Confession

Context: I take other people's religions seriously. I am religious, I work with the religious and did my recent master's thesis on Islam. So then I am placed at my grandfather's (very Catholic) funeral. While I am baptized Catholic, I'm not confirmed and thus am ineligible for communion according to the Catechism. Thus the situation unfolded...

The French spoken at the service is not Parisian (my grandfather being an Acadian), but I can still catch a bit of it. My grandfather by the way was a Jedi Master-level Knight of Columbus. They had uniforms, swords out--everything. During the service it comes time for communion, and while not Catholic, I am aware of the Catholic tradition of the "blessing." With the "blessing," a non-Catholic can approach the priest during communion and receive his, well, blessing without taking the bread or wine. To note that you would like the blessing, you simply cross your arms. I explain this to my wife and sister.

So communion begins and I approach the priest with my arms crossed. The priest offers me the communion bread. I pat my hands against my shoulders to emphasize ("Blessing!").

The priest seems to consider that maybe I don't understand French, so in broken English: "Take...my body..."

Now it's getting a little awkward. I'm causing a traffic jam. So I take the communion bread in my hand and rush to go sit down. My wife does the same. My sister clearly didn't understand my instructions. Once in front of the priest, she crosses her arms, bends down like a vamp at the feeding, and bites the communion bread out of the priest's hand. The priest was left looking at his hand in shock.

So now my wife and I faced a crisis of communion. What do we do with the bread? Obviously, return it. We waited until my grandfather's funeral meal was over and then tried to return to the chapel to give back the bread. Locked. Now at this point, I have to point you back to the context. I take this stuff seriously. So eating the wafer was out of the question. Throwing the communion bread away was out of the question. So...

We ended up taking the Host on a road trip. We had to hurry back to Quebec City to make a flight back to Washington, so I thought maybe I'd run into a Church along the way. We could just run in and drop in the bread like Eucharist ATM. I didn't run into a Church. Eventually, I was out of time, had to make the flight and ended up leaving the Host with my car in the cup holder.

The next person could easily enter the vehicle, see the communion wafer and have a "behold" moment. I consider it auto-evangelism.