The Body and the Blood

So I decided to do Finslippy's "The Practice of Writing." The eleventh prompt is about forgetting perfection, because it’s impossible. Forget safe and publishable and go for wild. Have fun. The prompt was our choice of the Higgs boson, the Marshall Plan, or transubstantiation. I had to look up the Higgs boson.

I wasn’t never one for going to church. Not ever. I went a couple of times when I was a kid, you know, just to see what all the fuss was about, and we ate sweet Hawaiian bread and drank tiny little cups of grape juice carried around in a fancy brass and velvet thing, but they didn’t believe it. There wasn’t no passion in it. Not in the songs, neither. They was just dancing a slow dance with each other, but Jesus wasn’t there in that room. I know. I’d have felt Him. I know that now.

But I found the thing. I found it now. It was a lot of long years in my life, long years full of falseness and pain, but I found it now. It took studying. I had to work to find it, to find Him, but now I did and things is different. That’s Jesus I’m talking about. I got Jesus in me now, and things won’t never be the same again. Not for me. I got Jesus in me.

Did you know He fed 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish? Did you know that? It’s a documented fact. That’s the bread of Jesus. That’s what He’s capable of. He can feed the whole world. He can heal the whole world. And I got him in me.

I couldn’t get it at first, with the bread and the wine and all. I couldn’t get it. But I met a man one night when I was low, and I mean low. You don’t know how bad things got. That’s when I met him. I think Jesus put him there for me. Special, just for me.

We talked a lot. We talked. I told him how low I was, and I mean low. He talked about church, and I said, ‘No, I done all that already.’ And he said, ‘No, but you ain’t done this church!’ He said, ‘They do it right in this church. They got things in this church those other ones don’t have!’ And I said, ‘What kind of things?’ and he said, ‘Come see!’ and I did.

Now I know he didn’t mean things like things you can touch, though they had those too. They had fancy robes. They had smoke burning in these big bells on chains. They had a giant building with ceilings so high you could practically see the angels swirling around up there.

But those weren’t the things he was talking about. He was talking about other things. Procedures. That’s what they had special, secret ways of doing things passed straight down directly from those first men who saw Jesus and sat down with him and saw him feed those 5000 with 5 loaves of bread. Those other churches, they got it wrong. They didn’t know the special procedures. They thought it was a story like, like they didn’t even believe it was true. Parables, they called them, stories. Not history. Not gospel truth! That Hawaiian bread and grape juice wasn’t the Body and the Blood! Because they didn’t believe it! They didn’t know how to make it real!

But now I been to the right place. It took me a long time before they’d give it to me. I had to work real hard for a long time. I wasn’t low no more. Because I knew the real truth. And I wanted it in me. And now I got Him. He’s inside me. Him, that could walk on the top of the water. Him, that could feed the world and heal the world. I got Him inside me now. Don’t you see? Don’t you see there’s nothing I can’t do now? There’s nothing!