Jenni Murray, the former editor of Woman’s
Hour on BBC Radio 4, once told listeners how she was put off religion by what
she was told by a vicar during Holy Communion.
As she waited her turn to be passed the
chalice containing the wine, from which every communicant would take a sip, she
noticed that the man in front of her in the queue was coughing and was clearly
unwell. She did not fancy being passed the chalice that he had just sipped wine
from, and she said so.
However, it was what the vicar said that
was the real turn-off. According to him, it was impossible to catch anything
from a communion chalice, not because he always wiped the rim before passing it
on, but because it had been blessed by a priest and was therefore miraculously
free of germs.
Christianity asks its adherents to believe
all sorts of highly unlikely things – Virgins births, rising from the dead and
so on – but the ability of a vicar’s prayer to sanitise silverware was clearly
one belief too many for Jenni!
© John Welford
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