The wine tasted sweet in my mouth and had a distinctively beautiful, warm feel to it as it glided down my throat. It was my aunt’s baby dedication in an Anglican Church in 2003, I think. The priest made a call for communion and I made my way forward.
We were all Christians and in the house of God weren’t we? Forget confirmation, forget catechism, and all that stuff. I was a Christian, and that was enough.
Fortunately, nobody questioned me, unlike the time when I went out for communion in the protestant chapel at FGGC Owerri because I was hungry and there was nothing to eat. Never mind that I didn’t even know what had been going on during the service prior to that point, I raced to my dorm to get a scarf which was requisite for joining the communion queue.
When I got to the priest, he obviously noticed my childish stature, bent his head to my ear, and asked, ‘Have you been confirmed?’. I was lost. That was the first time I was hearing about confirmation. He noticed my bewilderment and saved me from a potentially embarrassing situation.
Anyway, I loved the taste of the wine I’d been given at the Anglican church but best of all was that warmth in my throat. There had to be something about this wine! After the service, I asked my uncle, ‘Was the wine alcoholic?’, to which he responded with a ‘Yes, of course!’ Wow!, thought.
Thus began my alcohol-seeking journey.
First of all, though, I had to check the Bible. I used the reference in my mother’s Dake’s bible. I checked left, right, upandan. Nothing to say taking alcohol was a sin.
My luck shined a few weeks later when my father hosted a visitor and served an alcoholic wine. Immediately the guest went out the door with my father, I dove for the wine that was left in the bottle. Alas, it was not the same taste as the one I’d had at church. I grimaced as I experienced the sourness of it. I was very disappointed, and my alcohol craze calmed down.
Please eh, if your church serves that kind of wine that I drank years ago, mbok, I want to be your friend. Please invite me to your service because ees like your church is very holy and it is the holiness that makes the wine sweet like the one Jesus made at Cana of Galilee.
All these ones that don’t serve sweet throat-warming wine, I don’t know what they are doing. Ordinary holy, they can not be.
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Photo by Geda Žyvatkauskaitė on Unsplash
