Jesus Is Delicious by Monica J. Casper

I was small when my mom and my sister, and I left a drafty old house in coal country for Chicago. We had tickets to Bozo’s Circus, which we’d only ever seen on TV. My dad had let us make the six-hour journey north because he didn’t know we wouldn’t be returning. We didn’t know either, my sister and me, on that long drive through endless Illinois prairie. We were just excited to meet Bozo and Cooky.

We were unaware, then, that our grandfather and uncle would later travel back with Mom to retrieve our precious few goods. That they would load up the cars while our landlady Nelly – who hunted and skinned animals and hung them on her porch like bloody tinsel – would stand guard with her shotgun, protecting my mom. Or that our dad had isolated all of us in that derelict house for months, with no hot water and only a cast-iron stove to cook on.

None of us understood that he suffered from schizophrenia, but one of us surely believed he was dangerous. And so, we fled, a television clown our ticket to freedom.

St. Luke’s, a turn-of-the-century Lutheran church in Logan Square with glorious stained-glass windows, became our home away from home. After leaving our dad, it is where we found family and song and friends and refuge. Where my mom ran a summer camp for kids and was part of the women’s Ruth Circle, and where my sister and I were baptized.

It was also where I discovered that Jesus Christ is delicious. A memory:

I am kneeling on the cushion in front of the altar at St. Luke’s, awaiting my turn. I’m eight years old, almost nine, with spindly limbs and crooked teeth.

My mom is dating the pastor, and sometimes he takes us for malts on Milwaukee Avenue. We adore our pastor, whose office is decorated with hundreds of yellow happy faces and colorful yarn god’s eyes made by the kids in Sunday School.

Before he reaches me at the altar, as I’m anticipating the tasty crunch of Jesus, I stick my head through the elegant cutout in the wood. When he arrives, I am looking up and he is looking down, a curious smile on his face. I try to pull out my head, but now it is stuck.

The pastor hands his bowl of wafers to the assistant pastor, who is bearded and looks a bit like Jesus, or maybe Kris Kristofferson on my mom’s album cover. Then he bends down to uncork my skull back through the altar.

I’m worried our pastor might be mad at me. Like the time I accidentally wore my duck pajama bottoms under my dress to church and couldn’t stop giggling, so he came down from the pulpit, sat next to me, and finished his sermon with his warm arm around my bony shoulders.

But he isn’t angry. He just places the Lamb on my tongue and gently pats my blonde head.

Communion wafers are as old as the Lord’s Supper.

Also called altar bread, sacramental bread, the Lamb, and “the host,” the wafer is one of two elements in the Eucharist. The other being wine, water, or grape juice.

The word “host” is derived from the Latin hostia, which means sacrificial victim.

Commemorating the Last Supper – the da Vinci painting which either erases or misidentifies Mary Magdalene – the Eucharist uses bread and wine to symbolize the body and blood of Christ.

Lutherans use unleavened flour in their wafers. It used to be mostly white flour, though now there are whole wheat and gluten-free options, too.

Nuns traditionally made the host, to support themselves and their orders. But they, like Mary Magdalene, like too many girls and women, have largely disappeared.

Now, more than 80 percent of wafers are made by a Rhode Island company, Cavanagh Altar Breads. It is a secular, family-owned business, recently venturing into altars and other religious products.

Like faith itself, wafers have become industrialized.

Cavanagh’s sales dropped when sexual abuse rocked the Catholics. But the market rebounded because you can’t have communion without wafers. Especially the most popular wafers, with molded and sealed edges.

As one priest who relies on Cavanagh’s wafer told the New York Times, “It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor.”

After our escape to Chicago, we lived with Gramps, my mom’s dad, in his apartment on Hamlin. Some months later, my mom finished her GED and found an apartment for us, also on Hamlin but several blocks away from Gramps, across from our new elementary school.

But it wasn’t too long before our dad started showing up. Once, I looked out the front window and there he was, standing across the street smoking and staring up at our apartment.

Another time, we came home from school to find armed policemen storming our building. Standing outside our apartment, we learned that my dad had reported someone being murdered in our apartment.

Then there was the time he phoned a bomb threat into our school, and we all had to evacuate, and some of the kids knew it was our fault. I remember feeling so small the next day as if my body was shrinking in on itself.

He also had the apartment’s gas and electric turned off while we were away one weekend. Our homecoming was all melted freezer rot and spoiled food.

This was a year or so before the Big Event, the thing we still talk about and sometimes try to laugh off (ha ha, trauma!), when he kidnapped my sister and me.

We were visiting him in Southern Illinois when he picked a fight with my grandmother. He threw a heavy glass ashtray at her, cutting her hand so it bled. He shoved us into the old Plymouth with its sticky plastic seats while she watched crying from the driveway.

We lived in the car for six weeks that summer, crisscrossing the state with my dad’s cigarettes fogging the windows. We hung out at Midway Airport, ate Salisbury steaks cooked on the engine block, paid for restaurant meals with bad checks, and acquired a puppy that my dad hit with his keys when it whined.

The whole time we were gone, nobody knew where we were. Not even us.

My mom revealed much later, when I was an adult, that she was afraid my dad was going to kill us and himself during those weeks we were taken. This was after she had reassured us for years that she never truly believed he would harm us.

I’m not saying it wasn’t confusing.

After church service at St. Luke’s, everyone would gather in the fellowship room downstairs. There would be coffee and cake and the adults would talk while the children tussled and fidgeted.

My sister and I, and the assistant pastor’s daughters, would sometimes go outside and sing “Taking Care of Business” and other popular songs on the bench in front of church. At the top of our lungs, Susan Dey hair swaying across our shoulders, bell bottoms in motion, we were free as birds.

Most Sundays, though, I preferred to sneak alone into the nave.

Inside, I would gaze at the beautiful stained-glass windows and inhale stillness. Then, I would tiptoe forward like Pink Panther, scale the altar, and steal the wafer bowl. Treasure tucked into my ribs, I would climb down next to the organ and sit cross-legged on the cool floor in fractured jewel-light. And I would eat every single wafer in the bowl, one by one, letting each dissolve on my tongue almost it was almost nothing.

In those stolen moments, it was just Jesus and me. The wafers, round and thin and bland, were a poor substitute for an estranged father, but they delivered their own kind of nourishment. I stuffed my face with pieces of Jesus until I felt less alone and confused, less abandoned. Until I grew plump with sanctuary and salvation.

Sustenance, embodied.

My sister and I were eventually retrieved by off-duty Cook County sheriffs, enduring another long drive up the middle of our flat state, huddled together in the backseat, skinny girl- bundles of fear.

Once home, we tried for normalcy.

My mom later remarried, a kind and funny man who fixed trucks for a living and already had two sons of his own. With our new stepdad, we moved to rural Wisconsin, near where his boys lived with their mother.

We lived in Wisconsin for eight years, in a small town at the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, our location unknown to our dad. You could hide more easily then, before the Internet, especially from a man increasingly disconnected from reality.

I did not see my biological father for many years.

And when I did, it was the strangest thing in the world.

Jesus preached love and forgiveness and laid his hands on the aggrieved. I wonder – what would he have made of my dad? My dad never made much of Jesus, but the spaceships and aliens he sometimes drew spoke of a certain fascination with the heavens.

I am a mother myself now, of two young women, 19 and 21. Daughters with their own fears and anxieties, including dark streets and planetary annihilation and men trying to control their bodies.

I am a woman twice rendered fatherless.

Once by madness and the upset of a man left behind, and again by a hospital infection that stole my beloved stepfather’s life after routine knee replacement surgery. Ten years now he has been gone, while my blood father languishes in a care home, sometimes falling when he tries to get out of bed.

I am no longer a Lutheran. Or maybe, I’m a lapsed Lutheran. I’m not sure I’m much of anything at all, religiously speaking, except a reverent of Nature. A lover of birds and bees and

trees, and mosses and mushrooms and elephants who mourn their dead, and tides washing in and out and the smell of creosote after a desert rain.

Maybe because of my own experiences, I think often about Mary Magdalene and so many other women distorted by history, by the inked lies of men, by their entitlement and threats and ungodliness and power. Sometimes, I imagine Mary is my familiar. Matron saint of lost girls and captured wombs and rebellious women.

Mary is her own kind of sanctuary.

I also think a lot about Jesus, especially for someone who isn’t churchgoing. I consider, especially lately, how the Jesus Christians are so much kinder than the God Christians, who are angry and white and male and afraid. And so very unforgiving of girls and women, brutally so.

I also think about Jesus because he is said to have lived in truth and beauty, opening his lambkin heart to the most vulnerable and marginalized. Jesus would never call a bomb threat into his kids’ school or threaten to kill Mary or steal her children or let the food spoil out of spite.

Born of an earthly mother, Jesus was – I believe – a corporeal and spiritual bridge between patriarchy and matriarchy, between his father and his lover, between sacrifice and free will, between a dying planet and a flourishing one. The original girl dad.

And so, of course, he was murdered. Nailed to a wooden cross and memorialized with disks of dry toast.

For some, a self-righteous bite of salvation. For others, the acid taste of suffering.

For me, the crunchy promise of sanctuary. A girlhood, survived.

Delicious.

Monica J. Casper is a writer, scholar, gardener, and mom living on a half-acre in Southern California that used to be avocado farmland. The author of several books, articles, essays, and op-eds, she strives for a kinder, safer world. Her research and writing interests include trauma, violence, reproduction, nonhuman animals, war, and the human brain. Her most recent book, Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z, was published in 2022.