Breaking bread for stuffing just now with DW. I uttered a mock sacrament blessing – She was slightly amused, I ended up slightly annoyed that I still have that kind of dribble taking up brain space. I had washed my hands of course but then thinking back to all the years breaking bread for sacrament I realized I never did….ever…wash my hands before sacrament . So I want to know, was it just me? Or did all you other not so worthy preisthoodies not wash your hands either?

Serving the public a food item, no food handlers permit, just shook hands with half the congregation, just out of the bathroom, just don’t want to think about all the places a teenage boys hands have been. And then up we’d go and pinched all that soft WonderBread into individual pathogen cubes for your consumption. I am not a germo-phobe but today knowing what I do….I would not take the sacrament and certainly wouldn’t trust the prayer to kill anything other than brain cells.

So who else will confess to not washing their hands? Would you dare partake?

I always washed my hands, but then I was in a YSA ward and older than most bread handlers...

What concerned me more was all the todlers pawing the bread and drooling on the water.

I always sat in the very back row to be first one handling the tray. Mormons don't stay home from church when they are sick. They could care less if they get 200 others sick.

I tried not to think about where the servers hands had been. That would have been my undoing.

I do know that one ward I was in the bishop had ocd. He made sure the trays were washed every week, and the boys washed their hands.

Now thats the case where the old version of the sayi ng should be used. They litrealy couldnt care less and dont even care enough to say anything about it.

My parants always had the mentalaty that if I could walk I was well enough to go to church or school.

Nope. We were teenagers. We dipped our fingers in the water bowl before breaking it though. I did however scratch my nuts and pick my nose - I was a teenager.

Not to mention some of these young men are less than honest in bishop interviews.

There is a fairly good chance they just masterbated before breaking your bread, and probably did not wash their hands.

It brings a whole new concept of sharing the seed.

If they would just pass out a loaf of bread to each few people and allow them to dip it into a bowel of nice wine it would make a wonderful sacrament everyone could relax a little with a low buzz going. Add some good live music with a beat, maybe a drum circle...

You would hear a lot of sticks dropping on the ground out of people's a$$es with that kind of sacrament meeting. It would get kind of loud for a while. Not a bad idea you have there.

Had I been drinking when I read that, my monitor would've been soaked with nose-laughed wine.

they were stored under the sacrament table.

In full view of the whole congregation, we wiped our hands at the beginning of the service.

The old ladies in the ward insisted.

I don't know what they thought we'd been up to.

Thanks, everyone. Now I can look back to each and every time I accepted the holy bread and wonder just what kind of ugly bacteria were squatting on there. Makes me feel all warm inside. /end sarcasm

I used to make homemade bread, and because it didn't have preservatives, it didn't keep very well, and what we didn't eat, we would save as "duck bread," in a separate bag, to feed the ducks. One Sunday, I noticed the sacrament bread tasted like mold, and I looked at the tray, and the bread on it looked familiar. Yeah, everyone ate duck bread, and no one said a word. My son said someone had forgotten the bread, and because we lived nearby, he had run home and gotten the wrong bread by mistake. Serves them right for being too cheap to buy their own bread.

But now that I think about it, I'm sure that's the LEAST of my worries with sacrament bread.

You think that's gross, we literally had a deacon projectile vomit while holding his bread tray one Sunday, and a leader got up, took his tray, and continued to pass it. I wanted to hurl when I saw that. Felt bad for all the TBMs on that side of the room who ACTUALLY ATE the bread after that. Why would you DO that?!? Dear god, it's making me gag just thinking about it.

Never recall a directive to wash hands before breaking the bread. After pondering this for a few seconds, I do remember when I was kid (a few decades ago) that in some wards we attended the Priests had a small bowl of water that they gingerly dipped their fingers in and wiped with a cloth before breaking the bread. Perhaps this is an old tradition that has fallen along the wayside over the years.

I always gagged a bit partaking of the bread after thinking of where those hands had most likely been....

The stuff evaporates pretty quickly, but I imagine some got on the bread. Ethyl alcohol may break the WoW, but I guess isopropyl is OK.

CZ

we had the fingerbowl which did nothing. One thing we did was after sac meeting me and another priest would go up shove all the leftover sacrament bread in our mouths under the table under the guise that we were cleaning it up.