The Reader Travels

I know this may sound irreverent, but for my nephew’s First Communion, I gave him a little speech about the awesomeness of ritual cannibalism. We talked about the Karankawa tribes of Gulf Coast Texas who would eat the flesh of their fallen enemies to gain their power. The very idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus to gain his strength, love and forgiveness is pretty powerful stuff. You have to admit.

But it’s become such an oft-repeated ritual that the power is lost on most Christians. Although my nephew was a little older for his First Communion, most Catholics indoctrinate their kids into the ritual at around seven years old. By the time they’re old enough to think about how cool it really is, the repetition has numbed them to it.

The numbness might also have something to do with the fact that Jesus doesn’t taste like anything at all. I remember as a kid when my young cousin, who had never been to the Catholic church, visited us one summer. We took her to church with us and sat in our usual spot in the front row. The rest of us went up to stand in line, and my mother made sure she stayed back in her pew.

When she saw us go up and take the wafer , she protested quite loudly, “Is that a potato chip? I want a potato chip!” I assured her when I returned to her side, scrunching up my nose, “You don’t really want that. It doesn’t taste anything like a potato chip.”

What if the second coming was a Martian who liked free sex and free meat? Personally, I might become a believer.

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars, who has been taught it’s the worst kind of sacrilege not to eat the flesh of your fallen friends. It’s truly a sin to “waste food.”

In a later work, Heinlein would goof on himself about Stranger, pondering what some writers would do “for money.” But I actually think it’s quite a poignant novel that helped me to see my religious upbringing in a different light. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Stranger is my Bible, but I will say it was more fun to read, more sex, less violence, and it had Martians.

Even though all of Heinlein’s women were hot nurses, hot secretaries or hot strippers, he was quite the forward thinker. And he turned the words, “eat me,” into the greatest of compliments.

Can you grok?