The One With the Communion Bread

I spent my teenage years in a small country church. We all knew each other very well. When there was a potluck meal after church, we always knew who had brought the tater tot casserole. If a certain girl wasn't there for the service, we knew immediately that the singing would fall flat without her soprano voice to carry us through the chorus. We didn't pay attention to other trendy styles going on around us. We had our own trends, which most consisted of ruffles, circle collars and florals. (Not the cool kind.) We liked to wear matching dresses and wore our hair swooped over our ears and thought we looked cool.

It was in this church that my father was voted in as a vice leader and, at one point, the head leader. The official term was Moderator, but it meant that he had to be there on time, do the welcome, announcements and most of the preaching.

When you were the head Moderator, your wife and daughters had the distinction of being in charge of communion bread and grape juice. (A select few of the attendees drank wine, just not in church.)

When dad got voted in, the former Moderator's wife handed up the sacred recipe for the communion bread. We didn't buy it. Oh, no, we were dedicated Christians and dedicated Christians made their bread for communion by hand.

The recipe looked simple enough. It was mostly flour, salt and water, if I recall correctly. We started out hopefully enough. The first batch didn't turn out quite right, but that wasn't a huge surprise and we persisted. Getting the right taste and consistency of texture wasn't going to be effortless. The next batch was a failure. It didn't make your taste buds shrivel up and your tongue feel like a desert storm had hit. Third time is the charm? Nope. Once again it was a complete flop. We broke down and called the former moderator's wife. She gave us her tips and insisted that it was really very simple. Simple Shmimple. Ha. We made batch after batch of that dreadful communion bread. There was bread piled on the counters and on the table and even on the floor. We were up to our eyeballs in discarded communion bread. I think we made at least 10 batches of it. Finally, around midnight on that Saturday, we gave it up as lost.

On Sunday morning, we went to church with our pitiful pieces of bread, hanging our heads with shame. The bread was like crackers. Not like the consistency we were used to all. It was supposed to be cakey and dry and make you feel like choking. We wondered how we could do such a poor job at something so simple.

There really is no moral to this story or a great ending.  Some of the congregation mentioned that the bread was tastier than usual. Some of them refrained from commenting. When it was our turn to partake of the bread, my family all got the tiniest crumb. Saturday had given us enough tastes of communion bread to last us for years.