Note: This essay was originally written to be read during a service at my church, Genesis Church. It has been edited for relevancy to a wider audience.
I am an Eucharist Enthusiast.
We moved to our current home in 2018. We live across from a lovely park, just a few blocks from where our church meets. One day the summer after we moved in I noticed some wild black raspberries growing along the fence by the railway adjacent to the park. Not being one to say no to a free snack, I began picking a few whenever I’d walk by with the dogs. The next year, I picked enough to make some jam. I called it Trashberry Jam, because the raspberries grow amongst the trash that collects along the fence, and I’ve been making it every year since. At some point, I think maybe during season two of the novel coronavirus pandemic, I read a story about our then mayor spending a lot of time as a kid picking fruit along the very same railroad tracks. That made me curious about the other plants I’d seen there. I’d noticed various small berries, but I assumed they were all poisonous. But I took some photos of leaves, did some research (I used an app on my phone), and it turns out that some of them were wild grapes! The exact variety is Vitis riparia, or riverbank grapes. They are native to Minnesota, and grow along woodland edges and fence rows throughout the state. Once you know what they look like, you’ll see vines everywhere, even along freeway fences. Most don’t produce fruit, but some do. However, the vines along the railroad fence? Prolific. But the grapes are very small, roughly pea sized, and a large portion of their volume is taken up by the seeds. I tasted some, found them to be quite astringent, but I was undeterred and picked what I thought would be enough to make some jelly.
I spent the next several hours picking the tiny berries off the stems. After a quick rinse, I followed a process I found online to extract the juice and make jelly. It was unlike any grape jelly I’d had before, but I found it quite enjoyable, as did the rest of my family. It was more berry-like than what I’d associated with grape flavor. Being the information seeker that I am, I later learned that the dominant flavor in commercial grape jelly, and commercial grape juice as well, is the chemical compound methyl anthranilate, which is only present in Concord grapes and other varieties descended from Vitis labrusca, another grape species native to the Americas (although not Minnesota). Apparently it’s a flavor quite specific to North America as well, as no one else really grows that kind of grape. When folks in Europe make fruity purple candy, they flavor it like blackcurrant instead – a flavor not well known in the US since we mostly eradicated the plant in the early 20th century after an outbreak of white pine blister rust that threatened the timber industry. But that’s a different essay.
The next year, we were finally back to meeting in person for church again, and as I kept an eye on the grapes as they grew, I wondered if there was anything else I could make with them besides jelly. Wine was an obvious option, but I don’t drink much, and from what I read, you would want to wait to pick the grapes until after the first frost, by which time the local wildlife will have pretty much cleared it out. And then, being a Eucharist enthusiast, I wondered if maybe I could make juice with it for us to use when we celebrate the Eucharist! So that’s what I did. There wasn’t quite enough juice for a whole year, but to make up the difference I found a group on Facebook where people with excess cultivated grapes ask people to please come pick them lest drunken raccoons battle each other over the bounty contained in their gardens.
Making grape juice was pretty similar to making jelly. The main difference was the amount of sugar added. After boiling the stemmed grapes for about 10 minutes, you start filtering the juice from the seeds. This is a messy and time consuming process; you’ll want a ready supply of bleach available, unless you have a desire for purple countertops. I found that running the juice through a colander, then a mesh strainer, and finally a jelly bag was the most efficient way to do it given the materials I had on hand. Once strained, let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours or so. During this time, tartaric acid present in the juice will crystallize. If you’ve ever used cream of tartar, perhaps in snicker doodle cookies, it’s made from this stuff! Strain it one more time to remove the crystals. The resulting juice is pretty different from what you buy at the store – quite thick and prone to staining anything it touches – not unlike blood, actually!
I grew up in a conservative Lutheran church, and we used thin, cheap, watery juice just like our church did for many years. In confirmation class I learned that Lutherans believed that Christ’s presence is in and with the elements but does not become Christ’s body and blood, which is what the Roman Catholics believed. That made sense to me, because that little vial of off-brand Welch’s they gave us on the first Sunday of the month when we’d take communion (making the service longer and thereby creeping dangerously close to the kickoff of the Vikings game) didn’t look anything like actual blood. I could buy into there being a spiritual presence, even that there’s a union made between the bread and wine with the body and blood, but as a chronic Nosebleed Haver, I knew what blood looked like and Welch’s ain’t it. In reality, it turns out there’s a bit more nuance and I may have been fed some anti-Catholic propaganda, but I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand why all the denominations have spent so much effort trying to dunk on each other over what it is that happens during the Eucharist or exactly why we do it. Is He present in the elements, physically and/or spiritually? Is it just something to do to remember His death and resurrection? I suppose I have an opinion, but I don’t really know. But I do know that Jesus asked his disciples that in remembrance of Him that they eat some bread, that it was His body; and drink some wine, that it was His blood. If I were going to tell people that something was my blood, having now made juice from actual grapes, I totally get the choice.
I like that we celebrate the Eucharist every week at our church. I like that we’ve used the same invitation, adapted from the Iona community every week, and that sometimes we even say it together, inviting each other to the table. I like that we practice intinction, and I like that we are considerate of dietary restrictions. When I’m the reader, one of my favorite parts is watching the kids attempt to guess exactly how many prepackaged elements they can grab without risking a parental rebuke. And I love that I’ve been able to spend some time in the late summer the past few years picking grapes and making juice while I think about the people in my church who will come to the table and receive God’s goodness by way of some grapes that I found growing along the railroad tracks a few blocks west of where we meet.
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