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karmakaze · 10 days ago

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The 1969 Easter Mass Incident

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.” He waved.

The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.

“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”

Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.

A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.

They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.

This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.

Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”

The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.

Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.

“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.

At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.

“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.

“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”

“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.

“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.

What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”

He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.

“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”

“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.

And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.

This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.

“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?

“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”

Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.

Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.

Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.

Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.

Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.

However, two things happen that were not planned on

1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because

2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.

Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.

However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.

There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.

Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:

“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”

…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.

“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.

“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”

“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.

As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”

“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.

It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.

“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.

“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.

“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.

“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.

Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?

Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.

*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.

If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or subscribe on Patreon, Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it!

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karmakaze · 3 months ago

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A Timeline and History of MLKSHK, MLTSHP

👋 Hi, I’m Brad Choate. Here’s a recollection of my involvement with MLKSHK and MLTSHP over the years. The following is pieced together from bits of email, Twitter, TypePad, Tumblr, database records, and aging neurons.

A timeline of mlkshk.com

Domain registration - 4/13/2008

Initial commit from Andre - 3/13/2010

First commit from Ivan - 10/1/2010

AWS database created - 10/20/2010

First posted file (“farrrrrt bird”) - 10/27/2010

First users created (82) - 10/28/2010

Opens to limited audience - 10/28/2010

First TypePad blog post - 12/29/2010

Opens to wider audience via invites, waitlist - ~¼/2011

First comment - 1/11/2011

Opens to general public - ~4/26/2011

First commit from Mark - 5/19/2011

Shutdown announcement - 5/1/2014

Andre is hired at Slack - ?

Shutdown averted? - 6/18/2014

Shutdown averted announcement - 6/30/2014

First commit from Brad - 8/3/2014

Good Web Bundle promotion - 11/19/2014

Subscription woes - 5/20/2015

More subscription woes - 7/9/2015

Subscriptions restored (delaying another imminent shutdown) - 3/24/2016

Final shutdown announcement - 2/22/2017

Enters read-only mode - 3/31/2017

Waxy.org post about MLKSHK’s closure - 4/13/2017

Closes - 5/1/2017

Lifespan from 10/27/2010 - 2,379 days, or 6 years, 6 months, 5 days.

Lifespan extended 3 years from 5/1/2014 shutdown announcement.

A timeline of mltshp.com

Continuation community assembles itself… on Facebook?! - 11/3/2016

mltshp.com domain registration date - 3/9/2017

Initial commit to Github by Brad - 3/17/2017

Fundraising - 3/24/2017

Gettin things done - 3/31/2017

MLKSHK user login support - 4/30/2017

GIF to Video feature - 5/9/2017

First Tumblr blog post and launch - 5/16/2017

Dropped Google Analytics - 5/10/2019

2019 State of the SHP - 8/29/2019

Site search introduced - 9/3/2019

4th birthday - 5/16/2021

Fastly CDN switch(back) - 12/22/2022

6th birthday - 5/16/2023

Happy 7th Birthday - 5/16/2024

Lifespan to date (as of this writing on 12/24/2024): 2,780 days, or 7 years, 7 months, 9 days.

Some personal history

I joined MLKSHK by invitation on January 6, 2011 as a regular user. I found MLKSHK to be a breath of fresh air compared to your typical social media site (which still holds true today). After the shutdown announcement in 2014, I tried to offer help and reached out again around July 2014 after the announcement that the site would not be closing. I had met Andre once before, but mostly knew of him through colleagues at Six Apart. Andre took me up on the volunteer help… remember, by this time he wasn’t running MLKSHK as a business, so the ~3 years that follow are maintaining the site as a hobby, particularly since it was still losing money.

Initially, I helped with site performance issues, including some query optimizations. As time passed, it became clear that the site was still in danger of closing due to the cost of services it was incurring, which was not offset enough by subscriptions. So Andre and I went through a cost assessment process and we identified a number of things that could be done. Switching away from Fastly to a cheaper CDN (KeyCDN at the time) shaved CDN operational costs by 66% (Fastly charges 12 cents per gigabyte of transfer and KeyCDN charges 4 cents) so we started there, since it was the easiest change to make and had the most impact.

I also helped with the site’s participation in the “Good Web Bundle” promotion which brought in a few subscribers and returning members. The following year (2015), we had to rebuild subscriptions from scratch since both Tugboat and Amazon payments had to be retired, and we replaced those with Stripe. Alas, the site was still just not able to sustain itself as it was, and a decision was made to close for good in 2017.

Before that happened, the MLKSHK community began a conversation with Andre to transition the site to a community-run operation. I wasn’t involved in discussions, so don’t have insight into the choice behind creating a new domain and brand instead of adopting MLKSHK outright (I suspect Andre just preferred a clean break). Andre agreed to share all data and source code to the transition team. I helped with transitioning the source code for MLKSHK; cleaning it up for the basis of the MLTSHP repository to become an open source project.

It was decided that it would be best to make MLTSHP more closed in nature… so much of MLKSHK was open to free users, even some allowance for post creation. The plan was to relaunch with a membership requirement, but also with two price plans - the regular $24/year membership (plus an option to specify any amount over $24/year if the member wants to), and a new $3/year membership which effectively was the same level of service that was provided for free registered users before. While posting was being restricted to members, we wanted to keep certain things open for all: our “Popular” page, and individual post links which can be shared anywhere.

There would be some downtime between MLKSHK’s closure and the launch of MLTSHP. We aimed to keep that downtime low, but it gave us some time to make some larger changes that would make for a more sustainable and cost-efficient service.

Switching off of Amazon AWS for web server and database service was a big one. I had wanted to do this for MLKSHK as early as 2014, but we never did. I took a snapshot of AWS expenses from January 2017 and costs for that month were $400 (just RDS + S3 + EC2 and outbound data transfer to our CDN). We switched these to use Linode. For CDN service, KeyCDN was more cost effective than Fastly was, but we decided to switch to using Cloudflare for CDN since it wouldn’t cost anything (ironically, MLTSHP has since switched back to Fastly after receiving an offer to operate at no cost). The only remaining AWS feature MLTSHP is using is S3 for block storage. There are some cheaper S3-compatible services available, but the potential savings have never justified the task of a migration. Operational costs today are less than half of what we were spending for AWS alone, and we pay nothing for CDN service.

We also set up a real deployment process, utilizing Buildkite (they offer a free account for us to use), making it easier to test and deploy community-led changes. This also included utilizing Docker which also makes it easier for contributors to run their own copy of the site locally for development.

Ahead of MLTSHP’s launch, a service was built that would transcode GIF images (a popular, but heavy file format) to video formats that those would serve instead of the original GIF file. This was a cost-saving measure, since popular GIFs lead to a lot of traffic, so the smaller the better.

Another must-have for relaunch was a process that would migrate a user’s MLKSHK data when they signed into MLTSHP. This required us to load all the MLKSHK data into the MLTSHP database (in a separate set of tables) and we also had permission from Andre to make a wholesale copy of the MLKSHK S3 bucket to MLTSHP’s S3 bucket so all images were preserved.

And we also had a full rebranding to do. Replacing all site design and assets so that it was different, but retaining the spirit of the original site.

There have been a lot of changes to the site since that time. We’ve added site-wide search, responsive design so the site works well for mobile devices, support for light and dark mode, an alt text field so images can be described, and many other things. Big feature releases are few and far between, but the site is stable which is a great feature.

Our Github repo has had 412 commits from 26 different contributors. There’s still a lot of stuff to do (patches welcome)! But the most important feature we’ve developed is a self-sustainable community. We don’t have to worry about closing.

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