I’m new here, and none of you know me. You’ll have to take it on faith that I’m not as crazy as my story sounds. Really, I am not a person to whom unexplainable things tend to happen. This occured on a few separate occasions when I was about 7 or 8.
I was raised Protestant and had a Roman Catholic best friend, at whose house I had occasional sleepovers. If I slept over Saturday night, I went to church with my friend’s family Sunday morning instead of my own. I regarded this as a huge bonus because the Catholic mass was short - about 45 minutes compared to the 2 1/2 hour God-o-thon one had to sit through at my family’s church.
At the Catholic church I visited, the communion wafers glowed with an internal brilliance. My friend had not yet had his first communion, so both of us just got to observe the holy glowingness from our pew. I was just a little kid, of course, and this was almost 30 years ago, but I remember vividly the internal glow the wafers had. Each wafer placed on each communicant’s tongue glowed like it was radioactive.
I asked my friend, What’s up with the glowing? He responded, it’s the Light of Christ. Even then, I was looking for a scientific explanation, and thought my friend was full of doo-doo. I figured they added radium dust to the flour or something.
Since becoming an adult, I’ve attended any number of Catholic masses and never seen this effect again. And of course I know now they weren’t adding radioactive ingredients to the communion wafers. (Hmm, unless Jack Chick has the RCC pegged correctly? - wink)
I don’t expect an explanation for the phenomenon now. My friend and I probably imagined it, or hallucinated it. Or perhaps it was a Miracle of God. I doubt it. But has anybody else ever heard of such a thing?
“Take this, the Body Of Christ, phosphorescence he shall be in you.”
Say, this wasn’t St. Mary’s Church Of The Three Mile Island, was it???
OK, OK, before some nun whacks me on the knuckles with a yardstick…no, I’ve never seen a Magical Glowing Wafer in church before. Granted, it’s been like 20 years since I ate one of those things, but as I recall, they were just stale, white wafers. Maybe if someone had cut the lights I would have seen something?
Perhaps, the people who made those communion wafers glazed them with some kind of wash (egg, cream, etc.), which would have left a shiny surface on the wafer. I’m no expert on the production of communion wafers, but it’s a possibility.
WAG - the implements used to serve communion, including that little tray they held under it all the way to your mouth, were always highly polished. The wafers were very thin, and somewhat translucent. I’m guessing you are remembering an effect from the reflected light filtered through the wafer.
And, nah, wintergreen would require you to chew on our savior to produce sparks, and the nuns sternly told you not to do that. It always did seem rather inelegant to get the Lord stuck to the roof of your mouth, however.
Sorry for the completely wiseass answer. I was R.C. until abvout the age of six so technically I’m really, really lapsed. I went to Easter mass last year with then GF and noticed nothing unusual about the wafers. Real wine though as opposed to the grape juice we Lutherans dunk 'em in.