The Blood of Christ

A man, new to faith, got hooked on drink through drinking the blood of Christ. He didn't realise this was the case at first. He thought his behaviour was typical of someone newly converted, and indeed he had experienced other moments like this as a young man, when, for example, in the throes of a novel undertaking, such as a book, an idea, a person. He'd always had this tendency to throw himself one hundred percent into something or someone, and wax lyrical for days, sometimes months, on end about it or them and so he assumed he was being the same with the church. After a time, he thought, his keenness, although he hoped not his new-found piety, would transition from enthusiasm into the natural rhythm of his life as he'd arranged it.
That it didn't, and showed no apparent signs of doing so, perplexed him. For he found he wasn't as demonstrably or expressively religious as he had been at the beginning (with this his atheist friends concurred) and yet his church-going had increased and kept increasing. He'd even offered to arrange the flowers and play the organ, though he could do neither well and one very badly indeed, but so desperate was his need (so he thought) to be in the presence of Our Lord, and only realised, with hindsight (and the eventual help of Alcoholics Anonymous), that what he was really doing was trying to find out where they hid the wine. When that strategy had failed he'd visited other churches in the parish with the same end in sight: to receive a drop of Christ either from a bottle or a chalice; he wasn't picky. It had, however, to be church wine. Blessed and ruby red.
He hadn't any illusions that he was aware of: that for instance he was really drinking the blood of Christ. He knew it was symbolic; and even that it was only wine because at one time wine was safer than water. Though he did, on occasion, question whether Bram Stoker's Dracula had so influenced (and terrified) him it had led him to believe that by ingesting the blood of Christ he himself would turn Christlike, or become if not his bride than his groom. This revelation he kept to himself however (only pondering upon it at his leisure in his own private quarters) for he knew it was a mad idea, although it proved (he thought) by thinking so that he wasn't mentally unsound.
Fiction had a way of colouring everything else and his interest in areas, it is true, waxed and waned with books. And it's also true to state that (surely by coincidence?) he had taken up with the church after reading of Count Dracula, which is interesting if only from a psychological angle, as if he thought Dracula might have a second coming and so needed faith of some sort for added protection, though he didn't, it should be noted, arm himself with garlic bulbs or attempt to steal any sacred wafers from the churches he frequented. That Dracula seemed quite fond of churches and churchyards hadn't appeared to cross his mind, or those of the notes he left in his spidery script.
And of wine, well, his journal recorded that he'd never liked it. Red made him feel positively sick when he drank it with spaghetti bolognaise. And white was too dry, sweet or acidic. Bread, which had been his one indulgence with a thick spread of butter, he'd all but given up, save for the odd crusty roll, ever since he'd been scolded by an elderly Father, who'd run out of wafers and so turned to the old tradition, for biting into the Host, which had made him feel like a publicly admonished schoolboy as well as a murderer. Thou shalt not kill. But it had been rather a large piece, that he'd felt sure he would have choked on if he'd hadn't. To eat bread thereafter made him feel cannibalistic. He'd even tried cutting buttered slices into soldiers, as these could be folded over and placed into his mouth, but the very name they were known by of course made him think of men, so when he ate the bread he sobbed thinking of the countless lost, the many lives he'd gobbled. His mouth, a killer and a coffin.
It became apparent in the telling of his story as it did to his multidisciplinary team, if not immediately to him, that he was very obviously a literal person, though they weren't in full possession of the facts, and manipulative, too. For he blamed (and still maintains) the acquisition of faith formed his filthy wine habit.

Picture credit: Glass of Wine, 1908, Pierre Auguste Renoir (source: WikiArt).

Written January 2020.