1. When it is time to set the table, stand behind it–in the center–and a young man or woman will bring you the place setting. There is only one place setting, even though a hundred people are here. The place setting is for you.
2. Everything you will need has been prepared for you in one stack. On the top of the stack is a kind of wallet, a pocketbook, a purse–they call it a burse. Lift the top and take out the wide white placemat, unfurling its nine folds and spreading it before you. The embroidered cross lies facing you. This is the corporal. The corporal is for the corpus, the body. It is there to bear the body you will break.
3. Set the rest of the stack in the middle of the corporal. Think of the hands that prepared this stack. Women in the back room, in the sacristy, in the sacred room where sacred objects live, have done this work for more than 150 years. Before that, men did the work, because only men could touch the sacred vessels. One man, the sacristan, tended and prepared them all. Then someone decided that really, weren’t women better at polishing silver, ironing linen, stitching up the fraying embroidery? Better at it? Born to it, maybe. Why should they not do here what they did in their own homes–the washing, the shining, the mending?
4. Remove the thick satin veil from the top of the stack and hand it to the dozy teenager at your side, who startles for a moment before receiving it. Remember all those veils, all the mantillas and hats and scarves that once were required, so women might safely enter the space. Remember women from your childhood, entering in procession on Maundy Thursday to strip away all the vessels, all the hangings. Remember their blue smocks, the blue doilies pinned to their hair, obeying the mandate to cover and conceal.
5. Lift the white card from the top of the stack. It is a square of cardboard, covered in white linen. It is the pall, from pallium, cloak. It cloaks the rest of the stack like the burial cloth of Jesus covered his body. It is supposed to remind you of those burial clothes, of a funeral pall, of a pall falling over the company, of fatigue and expiration and death. Except it is just a square of cloth-covered cardboard. You can use it to cover the chalice and keep the flies out, if there are flies about. You felt like a fly, didn’t you, that day you asked to become an acolyte, just like the lackadaisical teenager behind you? You felt like a dirty, disease-bearing fly when that nice man, that nice father, said oh no, my dear. Because if you think you are worthy to stand here, near the table, well, what if that led you to believe that you belonged here, where I stand, where I serve, where I speak? And that could never be.
6. A little white napkin folded in thirds lies across the mouth of the cup. Remove it. You will need it to wipe and dab and clean as you go. It is the purificator, to purify the cup, to remove the strings of spit and smears of lipstick and ribbons of wine that threaten to leach into the cup, into the wine, into the sacred Blood itself. By morning’s end, it will be just a battered rag, blood-stained with port wine and cosmetics. Later, a woman will come to pour boiling water through the stains, over and over again, until the cloth is white, until the tangle of impure lipstick, invisible saliva, and consecrated wine washes together down the special drain, down the piscina, which drains into the soil, not the sewer–because the wine, at least, is holy. This woman will then take all the linens—damp from their ordeal—to her home to launder, to starch, to iron, to fold, three by three, a nine-fold square.
7. A tiny silver plate sits on top of the cup with a single round wafer laid upon it. You may lift this paten from the cup and set it on the corporal. The wafer is thin and white, incised with a cross. Lighter than a cracker, it has the quality of extruded Styrofoam. This is the corpus, this the body to be fractured at the fraction, snapped in two like a broken bone, the paten there to collect any fragments or crumbs, preserve each morsel of the consecrated host from desecration. Someone has shined the plate so you can see yourself reflected in it. Check your reflection. Is your hair all in place? No one will know that you peeked.
8. All that remains is to fill the cup. Take the two matching cruets from the teen at your side. One cruet is filled with Taylor Tawny Port, the other with tap water. Pour the cheap wine into the gold-lined cup and dilute it with a small dribble of the water. One of those blue-smocked women has told you of her adventures at Tom’s Party Store, buying cases of Taylor Tawny Port, her fear of running into a neighbor or colleague, as she rolls the cases out the door to her minivan. In the sacristy, the bottles stand like green-shouldered soldiers in neat cardboard boxes, a ready supply.
9. Hand the cruet lids to the young person, who carries them off and leaves you alone. The table is set, again. All is prepared, again. How many tables have you set in your lifetime, beginning as a little girl with a fistful of forks and knives, your mother bending over you, showing you: fork on the left, knife on the right. How many dishes have you washed and dried, starting with those tiny doll dishes that you had arranged for a toy tea party? What about the time you played a different game with that pink plastic ware, the time you laid a Ritz cracker upon a plate, filled a tiny goblet with Welch’s grape juice? What about that time when you didn’t want to don a blue smock or a blue doily? When instead, you taped a piece of cardboard around your neck, put on a white nightgown, and pulled your blue poncho over it? When you lifted up your hands and said to the assembled stuffed animals, “Let us pray”?
Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer who has published in River Teeth, EcoTheo Review, Blue Earth Review, Bending Genres, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook, as well as the Kenyon, Orion, and Collegeville writing workshops, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of Short Fictions. Kit lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.