Explaining Communion to Children

I was raised Protestant, and I remember my first teary-eyed conversion experience, no later than junior high. I went up for the altar call, the pastor was handing out the bread and grape juice, and he paused at me. I was so excited about being a Christian and loving Jesus and everything that I took the bread out of his hand and put it in my mouth. I still remember the look of shock on the pastor’s face– not at my audacity, but because he hadn’t made sure I was truly repentant. I remember wondering why the pastor didn’t trust me.

In conclusion, it was probably explained to me after the fact, but by then it was too late…

Raised Methodist. While I don’t recall the explanation precisely, I do remember being unconvinced by it. It seemed like a promise in form, and I’ll be damned if I’ll make a promise I don’t entirely understand, especially to a vague and powerful shadowy being.

Maybe it was just a result of too many cartoons where the bad guys controlled people by using pills or something, or fooling people into signing a binding contract.

Not taking communion was the first major deviation from the orthodoxy, but the great thing was that no one could say anything about it without making a fuss during the service itself.

And even within countries, the Catholic Church isn’t nearly as homogeneous as they’d like you to believe

This is absolutely true. I used to joke that my wife and I were raised in completely different religions – Catholic.
See, I was raised in Oklahoma where Catholics are the wacko liberals. She was raised in Virginia where Catholics are the heart of conservatism. Plus, I am male she is female and that makes a huge difference.

Anyway the truth is I had my first communion classes in Spanish and I don’t speak Spanish so I probably missed a lot. I don’t remember transubstantiation being explained in any one moment, but have that feeling I knew all along. I do remember asking one of the priests at the monastery where I went to college when the exact moment was that transubstantiation took place and he didn’t know and admitted it was an angels on the head of a pin sort of question. The nun in the video seems to know exactly when, though I don’t know if that’s orthodoxy.

Oh, and even then I had no doubts. Doubts came about 3 years after that, when I was in grad school.

I was raised Catholic, and went through 2 years of religion classes before making first communion, and I don’t recall literal transubstantiation ever coming up. We talked about the Last Supper story, and I always thought we were re-enacting that scene (kind of like the Christmas pageants re-enacting the birth of Jesus: we didn’t believe the baby playing Jesus actually became Jesus during the play!) Of course, I received a copy of the New Testament when I made communion, and the indoctrination went downhill from there. (I convinced my mom to stop making me go to religion classes when I was 7 or 8 years old)

I don’t think I knew about transubstantiation until there was a world religions section of my 9th grade Social Studies class. We talked about the schism in the churches and whatnot, and then about the different beliefs between the different sects of Christianity.

I love that the guy at the end of video says that for half the students the religious significance goes “over their heads”. Perhaps the same half that, even at a young age, have logic and critical thinking skills?

Bread magically becoming Jesus in a LITERAL sense (not symbolic, which is understandable, kinda) is just stupid. It’s entirely in the same realm as pixies, or Santa Claus and his magic sleigh and time-freezing abilities.

When you look at this video you really do realize what Richard Dawkins means when he calls is “child abuse”.

I recall that around 7th or 8th grade, our teachers did explain the nature of transubstantiation. I accepted it fairly blindly, being very impressionable at that age. However, because my dad is Episcopalian and my mom Catholic, I had to understand the protestant angle; so at some level I knew that other people believed differently.

In fact, that even came as a point of superiority – they only believed in this metaphor, and we had a haunted cracker, in the same way that some congregations drank grape juice, and we were so hardcore/awesome that we drank wine.

I remember learning that the cracker really became Jesus. A brief summary of how it went (I think I was about 7 or 8 year old):

Me: Is it really Jesus?

Them: Yes

Me: How does it become Jesus?

Them: God does it.

Me: How does God do it?

Them: Because he is God.

Me: Oh, so it’s another one of those where we all pretend it makes sense? Okay, I’ll take my cracker now.

See, I always just figured that all the parts of the bible that didn’t make sense to me as a kid didn’t make sense to anyone else and that we were all pretending together so that god wouldn’t get mad.

Nah, I don’t remember it too well. We do not examine these things closely. However, if I were to construct my former belief from vague memories, this is how I would describe it: Obviously, the eucharist doesn’t become real life flesh and blood. Jesus simply inhabits it, the same way he lives in everyone’s hearts.

I was raised lutheran, but we had communion class as well. They didn’t teach transubstantiation, they simply said that it was a sacred ceremony, commemorating the last supper. That communion was the part where the actual forgiving-of-sins took place. I always knew it was just a ceremony, and even at that age (5th-6th grade or so?) i valued ceremony as much as a bloody nose, and so i never really put much value in it.

Ironically, i often ended up in the position of the guy who takes the tray around and collects all the little cups after ppl drink their grape juice/wine (we had both, i prefferred the juice to the wine, wine tasted nasty). They had this whole assembly line thing going with communion, our church had around 250 members so they had to be kinda organized. Ushers would let people out of their pews to join the communion line down the center aisle, the line would lead up to this banister thinger on the side of the raised stage/preaching area, and everyone would kneel and take their wafer and juice. Meanwhile, in the back they’d have 8 or 9 trays already made up with the juice/wine, squirted into the cups with a little squirt bottle, like the one for distilled water in my chemistry lab :).

One thing that was stressed about communion was that you didn’t take it if you didn’t believe. It was only allowed for true believers (which is why some churches refuse to serve communion to non-congregants, although my parents frowned on that and our church said “Communion is open to all who accept jesus christ as their lord and savior” before each communion). As such, when i stopped going up for communion, that was when it really hit home to my parents that i wasn’t coming back to religion. They actually instructed me to go up and take it, but i told them that that would be hypocrisy and I’m not a hypocrite.

bad times… 8

This was the breaking point for me as a young Catholic going to a Catholic high school. I remember the conversation pretty well:

“Father,” I said to the priest teaching the religion class (Father Joe, who was actually a very nice man who liked kids and did a good job teaching both French and algebra), “I have a question about transubstantiation. Now, I understand that eating the host symbolizes taking Jesus into our hearts.”

“No, my son,” he said back. “It’s really the body of Jesus Christ.”

“But Father, it just isn’t. It’s a piece of bread. And usually it’s stale.”

“That’s an awful thing to say about Your Lord And Savior!”

“But it’s not My Lord And Savior. It’s a symbol of My Lord And Savior.”

“No, it isn’t. The miracle of the Mass is that this piece of bread literally and miraculously transforms into the body of Jesus Christ.”

“Well, that means that we’re all cannibals because we eat human flesh.”

“No…”

“…human flesh that looks and tastes like stale bread. I mean, it’s obviously not made of meat.”

“You need to go see the principal now.”

That was pretty much the end of my being Catholic.

Growing up in my former Southern Baptist church communion was explained simpler. Basically it was considered a reenactment of the last supper Jesus shared with his disciples, so it never really seemed weird to me. Even today, it is hard for me to understand how some could view it as a symbol of cannibalism. The idea of transubstantiation just seems silly to me.

I was raised non-religious, and I didn’t know about transubstantiation until PZ pulled his cracker stunt. I knew about the metaphor of it being Jesus’ body, but not that people actually believed it was flesh.

Weird.

With all the nonsense I put up with as a Protestant, I was always relieved that I didn’t have to deal with transubstantiation. I remember wondering why the Catholics had prettier churches than us, though…

Not a Catholic, so I can’t answer the question. But after having watched the video, I feel compelled to say this:

Ewwwwww.

Oh, and T’s Grammy?

this is your brain on religion.

That is brilliant, and effing hilarious. I am totally stealing it.

Here is an actual interchange I had with my brother very recently about this subject:

Let me just run a quick reductio absurdum to see if I have your explanation
right:

Jesus was both human and divine, right?
Human is that which has a body and a soul.
Therefore, since Jesus was human, Jesus has a soul.
During mass the wafer becomes the body of christ.
The Eucharist is now body and soul.
Therefore the Eucharist is human.
You then eat the human flesh, presumably ending its life.
Oh, wait, I made a mistake there. You never said the Eucharist had life. So I
guess it’s lifeless human flesh.
That’s okay to eat then. Not only okay, but mandated.
But isn’t Jesus alive when you eat of his body?

and his reply:

Yes and yes.

(this was in the context of a discussion of legal abortion)

I don’t remember being told that the it was Jesus until years after first communion. I think that’s the plan, they tell you it’s symbolic and then years later tell you it’s really jesus. Because you’ve been eating it for all those years it’s not as weird. I still don’t find it weird, I just find it ridiculous.

Living in the Philippines, Catholicism is everywhere and the fact that I spent my elementary years in a not-so-religious-but-so-Catholic school, I am no exception about the communion wafer.

I was 8 years old when the idea of communion entered in our studies (since the school wants their students to have their 1st communion at the age of 8). They explained that the simple white round thing eaten in the church is the body of Christ. I had doubts, since how can Christ divide himself into a thousand pieces and how can he fit in a wafer that has the same size of a five peso coin.

Also, our Christian Living teacher told us that after eating the wafer, Christ will enter in our hearts. But how? I thought food goes to the stomach.

But I found myself taking my first communion because everyone was doing it. During my first communion, I remembered that they dip the wafer into some kind of wine which was so bitter. I didn’t felt any kind of holiness, all I know was that combination of tasteless wafer and bitter wine was disgusting.

I had to go to catechism and have my first communion, etc, and I always thought it was a symbolic thing. I’m pretty sure they explained that we were eating Jesus, but it never occurred to me that they thought we were literally eating him – always a metaphor to my mind.

It wasn’t communion that put me off of Catholicism so much as confession – I could never think of anything bad I had done (at least nothing bad enough to tell a priest – I never killed anyone or got in huge trouble with my parents, etc), and I didn’t understand why anyone needed to know. Apparently I really wasn’t paying that much attention in catechism.

@ cathy

back in the day, they were made by nuns. Now, you can order them from various companies online.

I went to a big parish, and I just remember them coming in a large, clear plastic bag. The priest used to let us kids eat the un-blessed broken ones. Why we even wanted them, I don’t know. They have absolutely no flavor.

Grimalkin! I was totally stuck on the same thing! maybe it is different in England?

When I was at school they used to give us drink (usually milk) and cookies. I was a milk monitor for a year. If someone had told me that it was blood and flesh I would have been sick. What a horrible thing to say to someone who is so impressionable.

Playboy sheets and clothing have been popular with increasingly younger kids for some years in England. I think the connection to the porn industry isn’t even considered. Not that I’d ever buy them for my kids.

This is where it needs to be remembered that there is diversity within Christianity. Transubstantiation is a Catholic teaching, not a Protestant one.

I remember learning about transubstantiation in religion class in middle school when I was 11. I had just been baptized into the Catholic church and I actually won a book about miraculous experiences of transubstantiation. My family went on a road trip and I brought the book. The book contained stories about when the communion wafer itself actually turned into flesh and blood. Catholics believe it becomes Christ but remains in the wafer form, but this book told stories of times when people bit into the Eucharist and they tasted blood and flesh. I read a couple of these gruesome stories, getting sick and disgusted. For awhile after I was afraid I would get a Eucharist that would actually turn to flesh in my mouth. Even looking or touching the book would make me feel ill so I had to hide it from plain sight.