If Google Were Only So Good

Today being June 1st, I noticed the cover of the June issue of the Magnificat, a monthly booklet that contains the Catholic Mass liturgy for the month. This month the cover depicts a painting of an angel offering the Eucharist host. I was curious about the painting and the Magnificat always has a page describing its selection for its cover picture. It tells that it is an 1848 painting by the artist Sébastien-Melchior Cornu originally for a chapel in the Elysée Palace. It is now hangs at the Louvre Museum.

What happened next was amazing, although I have experienced similar amazements before, and which leads me to entitle this blog, ”If Google were only so good.”

While thinking about the story of the painting, the thought popped into my head of experiences that sometimes occurred while I was in grade school. Occasionally, when there would be a funeral mass at church during the week, altar servers would be excused from class to assist at the services. (My school was a parochial school adjacent to the church.) Sometimes it would occur that one of the ladies of the parish would be making the hosts that would be used by the priest and distributed as communion to the people. She had a small room next to where the altar servers stored their cassocks. She would mix up the flour and bake the unleavened batter into a flat disc about the size of a dinner plate. She had a press that would stamp out the hosts, a big one for the priest at Mass and little ones to be distributed to the people. She would end up with a remnant of interconnected “lace.” If the timing were just right, servers suited up in their cassocks, waiting for the priest to appear before the funeral service, and the lady well into the host-making process. Seeing us curious boys (no girl servers then), she would offer us the lace left over after she had cut out all the hosts she could derive from her master piece.

And as seamlessly as you swipe an iPad to a new page, my thought jumped to a Polish custom in my family that would occur at Christmas time: the sharing of “opłatek”. Opłatki (the plural of opłatek) are sheets of unleavened bread often embossed with a religious scene such as the Holy Family at the manger. At our family Christmas dinner, usually with one or two families of my aunts also present, my Mom would present the opłatek, say a few words about deceased family members and offer best wishes to all present, and then she would break off a piece to each member present. In turn, each person would take their piece and share it with all the others at the table. It always struck me that we were doing a very “holy thing.”

What’s the theme? A picture of a host held by an angel, a childhood experience in the making of hosts, and the offering of hosts (unleavened bread) to relatives at Christmas time. Oh Google, if you were only so good! And all of this, flowing out of a water logged, spongy brain, carried around for over 80 years, and no batteries required!