Cake friends,
Can Jesus be gluten-free? What even counts as “bread” when it’s also the body of Christ? This week in the newsletter, we’re sharing an excerpt from Daily Bread by Jordan Kisner—author of Thin Places and the recent recipient of the prestigious New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship.
In “He is Risen,” Jordan unpacks what happens when a celiac diagnosis collides with centuries of Catholic tradition at a small parish in upstate New York. The result? A real life comedy of ecclesiastical errors—and an exploration of what happens when doctrine meets dietary restriction. Read on for the full piece.
He is Risen
By Jordan Kisner
Cross my heart I don’t recall how we got onto the topic of whether the body of Jesus Christ can be gluten-free, but I was upstate one afternoon sitting in a small, shaded library with a friend named Jerry, chatting about not much, and suddenly he was telling me about how he and his wife had left their church after much angst and conflict over the issue of communion. The issue, specifically, was the wafer. Jerry’s wife Sharon, who I had yet to meet, had stayed away from cookies and cakes most of her life, always ordering salad instead of sandwiches, that sort of thing. Pie wasn’t for her and neither was toast. Finally, in her sixties, an explanatory diagnosis for a lifelong aversion: Sharon has celiac disease. Suddenly preferences became rules—no bread, no pie, no soy sauce, no French fries out of the shared fryer. And, it turned out, no Catholic communion host.
It’s one of the weirder food items, I think—the “sacramental bread” that is not bread; the cracker that is not a cracker because, through the power of transubstantiation, it’s Christ. I remember being intrigued the first time I visited my cousins in Texas, who were being raised Catholic, and sat alongside them during Sunday mass. My parents had briefly taken us to a tepid Presbyterian church and then ceded Sunday mornings to pancakes, so everything about the mass felt exotic: the long robes and candles, the unfamiliar prayers and chants. I was pleased when suddenly everyone rose from their pews and formed a line before the priest, who seemed to be giving out crackers and juice. Always interested in a snack, I hopped up and got in line, until my mother called me back. That cracker wasn’t for us, she said. My cousins explained to me later, with relish, that they weren’t eating crackers at all: It was Jesus Christ’s actual body and instead of grape juice they were drinking Jesus’s actual blood.
“Ew,” I said. “What does it taste like?”
“Like nothing really,” my cousin said.
Jesus’s actual body, as it is consumed by millions of people every Sunday around the world, is an industrially produced, flavorless disc: an inch or two across and white as an aspirin. Sometimes there’s a cross embossed on one side, though you can also find them etched with Jesus’s portrait, a dove, Alpha and Omega symbols, that sort of thing. You can buy them on Amazon in boxes of a thousand. They taste, as my cousin said, like nothing. And by definition, according to the pope and Catholic doctrine, they may not be gluten-free. The body of Jesus Christ can contain wheat and water only.
This presented a problem for Sharon. At first, her priest kindly found a group of nuns somewhere in rural New York who were making small rice crackers that he would store in a separate Tupperware and slip to Sharon and the others. This worked well until the priest retired. His replacement was a young man, fresh out of seminary, and much more conservative. (The Catholic church is in the middle of a strange bifurcation—an ultra conservative movement has emerged, advocating for restoration of antiquated customs like Latin mass and women staying out of the workforce. They’re known as traditionalist Catholics, or “trad Caths.” This young priest wasn’t precisely a trad Cath—he still did the mass in English—though he was both trad and Cath.) He declared that his would be a parish that adhered closely to church doctrine. Communion is meant to be a reenactment of the Last Supper, during which (according to the Bible) Jesus “took bread” and gave it to the disciples, saying “take this and eat, this is my body.” According to Catholic doctrine, “bread” is made of wheat—period—therefore the host must also be made of wheat.
Eventually Sharon received a phone call from her deacon, who said that the parish was switching to a “low-gluten” host made from a specially processed wheat, and would that be all right?
This irked Sharon. “Well no, Peter, it’s not. If you had a terrible peanut allergy and I served you something with low peanut content, would that be fine?”
Peter allowed that it would not. Nevertheless, the Tupperware of rice crackers was done away with. “For a while, those of us with celiac only took the cup of wine,” Sharon told me. “But then there’s that challenge of people dipping the host in the cup.” There began to be unrest: Several families in the parish had someone with celiac disease, and it seemed unfair that suddenly they couldn’t take communion with everyone else. A meeting with the new priest came to nothing. The entire church choir began refusing the host in protest.
When I called her to talk about the host debacle, I asked Sharon whether she ever thought it was ridiculous, this fierce conflict with a priest over whether the body of Jesus Christ could be gluten-free. She snorted. “Jordan, it’s a man-made rule. This is not what God said. This is what a man said.” She found the pedantry absurd on every level. And in any case, shouldn’t it not matter what the cracker is made of since, by the power of the sacrament, it’s supposed to be transformed from bread into body? In the meeting with the priest, Jerry had asked in exasperation: Do we believe in transubstantiation or not?
Do we? Catholics are hardly the first group of people to see a certain food as symbol more than nourishment. But I can’t think of many other examples where the symbology begins to dictate the scientific makeup of the food itself. I started looking through paintings from different centuries depicting the Last Supper, to see how ideas about the “bread” on the table have themselves changed over time. The Bible specifically says that it was unleavened bread that Jesus ate, probably some kind of stone-ground flatbread, but the sacrament actually used during mass has typically said more about the culture’s current idea of bread. In Leonardo DaVinci’s rendering, Jesus and the apostles sit before a table laid with a white cloth upon which has been scattered an assortment of what look like modern dinner rolls. Jesus is gesturing to one on his left, sitting naked on the tablecloth. In Peter Paul Rubens’s version, Jesus holds what looks like a miche tenderly in both hands. In Agostino Caracci’s, a braided basket overflowing with brioche lingers underneath the table. In these paintings, the light often catches the loaves in some special way so they glow—a hint that, even though the paintings tend to depict the moment before the transubstantiation, before Jesus has even reached for it, the bread is not just bread.
Sharon and Jerry left the parish eventually. Gluten was the canary in the coal mine, foreshadowing conservatism on other subjects, like whether the parish could include members who were gay. “I think for me, this whole issue around the eucharist is that as humans, we gather together often around a table,” Sharon told me. “We break bread together, whatever that means in our tradition, whether it’s soup and bread for supper, or if it’s the eucharist for mass, there is this piece about drawing people together around the table. That’s the part that saddened me the most, to feel like I couldn’t go to the table.”
They have a new homebase now for worship, not a Catholic parish but a Shaker meeting. There’s no eucharist, though most Sundays there are doughnuts and coffee afterwards. They keep something for Sharon, maybe a gluten-free muffin, though she’s not terribly snacky anyways. It’s just the spirit of the thing.
Jordan Kisner is an essayist, author, and neglectful guardian of the 150-year-old sourdough starter she was given by a stranger in Las Vegas. The sourdough starter survives in spite of her because it is basically—per its stats—unkillable.
Attend: London favorite MagCulture is in NYC next week for some special programming! Join Cake Zine co-founder Aliza Abarbanel for a lunchtime chat at their pop-up shop at the Vitsoe store in Manhattan next Fri, May 2. Free RSVP here.
Explore: Pasta Cosmologies, a text with traditional Italian pasta-making techniques and recipes, alongside histories and theories, by Daily Bread contributor Adrianna Gallo, is now available for purchase.
Read: Nettie Jones’s novel Fish Tales has been reissued by FSG thanks to Hagfish, an independent publisher, literary agency, and editorial studio based in Brooklyn. Originally published by Toni Morrison, it’s a thrilling, erotic tour-de-force through the high-rolling times of 1970s New York and Detroit.
Visit: Casey Elsass will be celebrating his debut cookbook, What Can I Bring, in conversation with Wicked Cake contributor Sohla El-Waylly at The Strand on May 21st. Tickets here.
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A Shaker meeting? The "no sex" Shakers? There are two Shakers left in the whole world. That's got to be a Quaker meeting, right?
I remember when we had a new pastor who resigned after just two weeks because the church refused to switch from grape juice to wine (it was a Protestant church). He threw a fit, accusing us of not being “real Christians.” But the congregation was simply being considerate — we had people recovering from alcoholism, and many parents preferred grape juice so their kids could participate too. It struck me as one of those small details that ends up dividing people into “for” and “against” camps — a very predictable (and frankly, silly) part of human nature.