A sacrilegious dream and a factoid:  A week or so ago, I dreamed that Mohamed and I were walking through a woods when suddenly we stumbled across a huge open-air Mass being conducted by Pope Francis.  There were thousands of people cordoned into six sections.  We slipped into the back of the last section.  The Pope--ever the iconoclast--announced that he was going to do communion first, so we waited patiently while all those people stood in line to receive communion.  I told Mohamed he should just stay in his place (there were no seats), since the Pope wouldn't give him communion, but he insisted on joining the line.  After hours of waiting, which passed more quickly in dream time, we were the last two left.  I held up my hands, and the Pope said I was doing it wrong.  He said he'd go get a booklet on how to take communion and then disappeared.  Everyone was impatient.  I remember that someone was listening to a basketball game on a transistor (!) radio; someone else was sitting in a rusted-out pickup smoking.  That made me want a cigarette, but I decided it wouldn't be in good form to smoke while I waited for the Pope.  Finally he returned, gave me the brochure, told me I still wasn't holding my hands right, and gave me the wafer.  And then with no hesitation he gave one to Mohamed too.  I was embarrassed and angry, so instead of putting the wafer in my mouth, I palmed it.  I wasn't going to stay for the rest of the Mass, and on the way out, I decided to prop the host up at the base of a shrub to see whether the Pope would have a miraculous intuition that Christ's body and blood were exposed to the elements.

The doctrine of transubstantiation has some philosophical complications--and some technical ones.  Millions of times a day, according to the doctrine, the bread and wine are miraculously transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.  That's a hell of a lot of miracles!  If it takes two miracles for someone to be canonized, sainthood should be a snap for every priest who's ever lived.  Or do some miracles count more than others?  And then there's the ewwww-factor.  Should a religion actually be based on eating and drinking flesh and blood?  And what about that moment when you realize that the wafer stuck to the roof of your mouth isn't bread but flesh?  Less significant perhaps, but something that always fascinated me during by brief life as a Catholic, were the consequences if a consecrated host was dropped or wine was spilled.  If the priest or a communicant should unintentionally drop the host, there are complicated rules for what to do (and no, the three-second rule doesn't come into play).  If the wafer is intact, then either the priest or the congregant should eat it.  But what if it is broken and there are crumbs?  There are elaborate procedures for what should happen.  What if drops of wine are accidentally spilled?  After the communion is over, the priest scrapes up any crumbs on the altar and puts them in the chalice.  He then adds water, swishes (the chalice, that is), and drinks whatever wine has remained.   But what of any spots?  And here's what I always found fascinating.  Every Catholic church has a separate drainage system for washing anything that's potentially come into contact with the consecrated bread and wine.  You can't just pop these things into a washer that will drain into the sewage system.  There must be a separate system so that the water goes into the ground.  So, too, if you've got a spot of wine on your shirt, you must hand wash it, air dry it, and pour the wash water into the ground, not down a regular drain.

As for the disc I left under the shrub, I haven't had a second dream to reveal what's happened to Christ's body and blood.  If revelation strikes, I'll let you know.