Eating Jesus
Catherine of Siena drinks the blood of Christ. This is going to get theological, philosophical, and gross. Much of my young adult intellect was wrapped around the two sacraments recognized by the United Methodist Church. A sacrament, in the traditional Methodist lingo I grew up with, is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." More concretely, it's a ritual that gives believers a tangible experience of the ineffable. Methodists recognize baptism and communion as sacraments. In baptism, the believer is symbolically drowned so that he or she can be resurrected to new life as a Christian. In communion, the believer eats a small bit of bread and drinks a sip of wine so that he or she can be sustained by the symbolic body and blood of Jesus Christ. Although I grew up in Methodist parsonages, my parents were always Baptists at heart, and held off having any of us baptized until puberty, at which point my father found an immersion baptistry ...