sacraments

404?  Error, troop not found.  I must have moved out of the orbit of Elsdon before I decided to don the uniform and be always prepared.  Well after a point, I got  to hating, hating, hating, going to church.  I wasn't  an atheist yet, I just hated putting on a suit and going to a place where I had to sit still and listen, still do, weddings, funerals, graduations, a pox on them all.

I was all pumped up about going camping, went  door to door selling first-aid kits (how boy-scoutty) to get the money to pay for our pup tents and the first time we actually camped out I hated it. 
Well it was fun until I woke up and it was cold and wet and you had to take a shit in a hole in the woods and there was no tv, and for breakfast I believe we had shit on a shingle.  I'm not sure if we called it that, being sponsored by a church and all, but on the other hand old Martin was pretty scatological.  It seems like we went camping a lot, or maybe it was served on some other occasions, but it seems like there was a period in my life when I ate a lot of shit on a shingle and then suddenly, no more.  Can't say that I miss it.  Does anybody still eat it?

There was a movie about  Martin Luther that came out in 1953, and though it was banned in Quebec, wiki knows nothing about it being banned in Chicago, more likely I think that the few prots of Gage Park were not enough to fill the cavernous Colony theater.  I'm wondering if Elsdon Methodist ever said much about John Hus.  I never heard about him until after college.

When Elsdon took up communion (I'm pretty sure we didn't always have it, I seem to recall a murmur of dissatisfaction among the faithful that this seemed awfully, well, Catholic) we used grape juice for wine, and maybe we had little chunks of bread instead of wafers, not so sure about that last thing,  I imagine it's a lot easier to think of wine, rather than grape juice, as blood.  As for those dainty wafers, I don't see how anybody could think of them as part of a body.

A funny story, I think I have told it before, but as Beagles is fond of saying, I never let that stop me.  My sister was among some Anglicans, I think, a few years ago, and then they passed around the body and it didn't look so bad so she had a piece, but when she saw the blood coming around in a jug that everybody was taking a swig out of, she demurred.  So the body was okay with her but not the blood, sort of like eating chicken and saying, oh, I'll just have the white meat.

I'm not sure how familiar Beagles is with Methodist lore.  I believe we came down from the
Church of England who were certainly transubstantianators and I believe we also had predestination in our ancestry, but somewhere along the line we dropped both.  I'm not sure where we stood on baptism.  You know in the movies, when they go down to the river to pray and they are wearing those white robes and wading in the water and the preacher man, you know, he seems to dunk them a little harder than he needs to, just for the fun of it, that seems like a good time, better even than eating the body and drinking the wine.

And what about the trinity?  I don't know if there was too much of difference between the views of the two sides during the reformation, but it was a big troublemaker towards the end of the Roman Empire.