Communionism
By James B. Nicola
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
When I was in second grade, at my parish, we Sunday-schooled in preparation for First Communion, a big celebratory mass to be held in the spring where all the second-graders were required to wear white and file down the aisle in pairs. Boy-girl pairs. As I recall, this is the first time adults informed us that absolute loathing for the opposite sex does fade over time. They probably didn’t have to in my case, though; with two older brothers in the same church, I had witnessed not only the pomp-and-circumstance but also how unscathed after the ordeal they actually were.
What it all meant was still a bit of a mystery, however. That’s the year two nuns, instead of friends’ parents, taught Sunday school, soon to be known as Catechism, as if something even more important was going on than what we covered in first grade. Something requiring the officialdom of, well, officials. With uniforms. The nuns were nice and knowledgeable and happy to answer questions, which I suppose was one of my requirements for sticking around as this particular Pandora’s Box was being opened.
Anyway, one day they brought in a bowl of white “wafers.” Actually, discs. “Unleavened bread,” the nuns called them, but they didn’t look anything like bread. Unleavened meant no yeast, so never risen, like matzah. But these, each one between the size of a quarter and half-dollar, were flat and smooth as paper. They handed them out.
They told us “Now is the time to touch one and see what it feels like—first and last time—because at Sunday mass the priest will consecrate them so they actually become the body of Christ...” — consecrate meant bless, but officially, as only a priest could do — “...after which, no lay person is allowed to touch them.” Lay meant us.
“Except with our tongues?”
“Except with your tongues.”
“Why? What’ll happen?”
“It is a mortal sin for anyone but an ordained priest to touch the consecrated Eucharist with hands or fingers.”
Eucharist meant the disc. I wasn’t too sure about ordained, but we all learned about mortal sin in first grade. Mortal sin was when you missed Sunday mass without really being sick but only pretending. Ticket straight to you-know-where. None of us ever missed Sunday mass.
The miracle performed by the priest was called transubstantiation, which meant what it sounded like—a substance being transformed, yes, as if by magic. You can bet I had plenty of questions. But the very nice nuns had plenty of answers. So I stuck around. Mostly to see if I, like my brothers before me, would survive unscathed.
***
Whether I did nor not, is arguable. Over the next five years I developed more than my share of doubts. I learned that over the course of two millennia plenty of priests and popes (and monks and friars, for that matter) were fake. So the magic powers of a priest, acquired upon getting ordained—were not necessarily—certainly not verifiably—handed down directly from Jesus to the twelve-later-eleven Apostles (Apostles are Disciples if you are Protestant) and then to all the popes and cardinals and bishops and monsignors and priests ever since in a direct uninterrupted line, as the nuns assured us the very first day when they listed the Seven Sacraments (Baptism, Communion, Matrimony...) on the board.
Sacraments were the occasions when the priest invoked his magic powers, and I needed to be pretty darned sure of them. After all, my dad had been making Coke® bottles disappear for years, so magic was very important to me. And since the little Eucharists were not actually supposed to change in shape or color or whatnot, how were we supposed to know for sure they had transubstantiated? An altar boy did tinkle a little bell during mass, right on cue, twice, once for the bread, once for the wine. But I found that rather more cute than convincing.
As an adult, I eventually figured out that maybe the magic wasn’t so much that the bread and wine actually took on the molecular composition of the body and blood of Christ, but that folks believed it did. By the time the nuns answered all my questions, I probably did too. In second grade. Not so much in seventh.
***
It was decades later, in directing Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor, that I realized something else. It is a totally secular comic romp; the only sacrament involved is Matrimony, and only in a sub-plot. In the main plot, the allegedly cuckolded Mister Ford actually tries to assassinate Falstaff—with a “blunderbuss,” no less—for seducing his wife, as well as seducing best friend Mistress Page. (Blunderbuss meant old-fashioned shotgun.) When a revenge prank is played on Falstaff and the truth revealed in Act V, Mistresses Ford and Page are proven faithful after all. But then, well, get this: Mister Page invites everyone for a meal and celebration—in Act VI, so to speak. Including Falstaff.
What’s that? The guy you or your best friend just tried to kill, or who was about to kill you—you then break bread with him—in peace? Wow. There’s real communion in that, as far as I’m concerned. As if the act of breaking bread together is the “Body of Christ." Not necessarily the bread itself, but the ritual, the meal, the Love-of-Thy-Neighbor-as-Thyself—restored.
At least it made sense to me at the time, and has ever since.
***
Soon after my rise from Catholicism—decades ago, now—the priest began placing the blessed Eucharist right in the communicant’s hands; you plop it into your mouth yourself. Saves a priest’s fingers from transposing germs from one tongue to another and another and so on down the line, I guess. So the sin of touching one must not have been so mortal after all.
The first time I saw a blessed wafer going directly onto the palm of someone’s hands, it was my friend Judy who showed up unexpectedly at my father’s funeral mass. (He was her godfather.) I hadn’t been to a Catholic church in years. For a split second I thought she was going straight to you-know-where. And I gasped. Out loud. Real loud. From the first pew, front row, just off-center. Whoever was sitting next to me softly explained that the rules had changed, and I was fine.
But at the time of my Merry Wives episode, recalling this procedural adjustment got me to thinking: If, instead of kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder across the front of the altar, you could take Communion by sitting at one giant dinner table and passing around a similarly giant loaf of real bread—the chewy kind with a crust and puffy air pockets because the dough had risen a time or two before being baked—you would literally be breaking bread together, wouldn’t you? Would that be cool or what? They’d need to dole out Wet-Naps®, of course, because of those germs. Or little hot towels like at a fine restaurant. But shouldn’t Communion be at least that fine? Even I might be up for something like that. Way up.
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James B. Nicola’s nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. Recent nonfiction can be found on-line at About Place, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Unlikely Stories and Lowestoft Chronicle; fiction, at Neither Fish Nor Foul, The GroundUp, and Sine Qua Non, forthcoming in Platform Review. The latest of his eight full-length poetry collections are Natural Tendencies, Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, and Turns & Twists.
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A graduate of Yale and returning contributor to Heimat Review, he has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice award, a Best of Net and a Rhysling Award nomination, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels both stunned and grateful.
Author’s Note:
The notion of communion has probably infused every aspect of my life as stage director as well as a writer.
From my nonfiction book, Playing the Audience:
- To get the audience to laugh together, cry together, feel together, think together, realize the truth together, hope together, change together— that is the charge of the theater. “Together” is the point. It is what makes the Theater our last best hope.
From my poetry collection, Fires of Heaven:
- The destination is . . . the very Fires of Heaven, where a soul may smolder not only from blind faith but also through questioning, contemplation, and searing skepticism. By journey's end, the reader comes full circle, as this sequence of “religious” poems (or are they?) aims to achieve precisely what the etymology of the word religion suggests, linking us once again to divine creation, to the miracle of everyday existence, and, perhaps even more urgently, to each other.