Muslim Leader Tried to Crush the Consecrated Host — He Fell to His Knees Instead

I walked to the front of a Catholic mass, took the communion host from the priest’s hand, closed my fist around it to crush it on camera, and my legs buckled, put me on the floor before my fingers could close.

What happens to a man who came to destroy something holy and ended up kneeling in front of it instead? My name is Fared Al Jamal and I am 28 years old from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I need to tell you about the moment my fist would not close.

And I need to tell you about what I felt in my open hand in the 4 seconds before I fell because those 4 seconds ended the man I had been building for 28 years and the started someone I am still learning to become.

Minneapolis carries two identities that most American cities do not hold at the same time.

It is a city of progressive politics and the Scandinavian architecture and the 10,000 lakes shining cold and flat in every direction.

And it is specifically in the Ceda Riverside neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi.

One of the most Muslim communities in the entire country.

Somali families who came as refugees and built something permanent.

Arab families, East African families raising children who speak Somali at home.

and motan English at school and move between those two worlds the way fish move between currents without thinking about the transition.

I grew up on the edge of both communities.

Arab enough to be Muslim, American enough to have gone to public school and belonging fully to neither in the way that people who sit on edges rarely belong fully to either side.

My father Wid Al Jamal came to Minneapolis from Jordan in 1993.

He was 25 and he came because an uncle was already here driving a cab and had found him a spot with the same company.

My father drove a cab for 6 years.

Then he drove for a car service.

Then he drove for himself after saving enough to buy his own vehicle and his own medallion.

By the time I was in high school, he owned three cars and employed two other drivers and had enough steady income that my mother did not have to work unless she wanted to.

And she wanted to, so she did.

He was a compact, energetic man who laughed easily and argued easily and prayed with the same ease.

He did everything else, not as a performance and not as a burden, just as the next thing you did when the time came for it.

My mother Sana was Jordanian American born in Minneapolis to parents who had come in the late ‘7s.

She worked as a dental hygieneist in a practice in St.

Louis Park.

She was warm and precise at the same time, which is a combination that is rarer than it sounds, and that produced in me a deep trust in her judgment that I have not always had for my own.

She prayed five times a day with a consistency I respected and could not match.

D she fasted Ramadan with a joy that I found genuinely baffling because I fasted the same fast and felt nothing except hunger and the performance of endurance.

She was the kind of person who made faith look like a natural state rather than an achievement and I spent most of my life either trying to replicate that quality or resenting my inability to.

I was the oldest of two.

My sister Dina was 3 years younger and had from birth the uncomplicated relationship with faith that I always lacked.

Thus, she prayed because she wanted to.

She fasted because it meant something to her.

She talked about God in the direct to the personal way of someone who experienced God as a presence rather than a concept.

I watched her do this from childhood and I could not decide whether to admire it or to be suspicious of it.

and my inability to decide that question was I now understand itself a significant piece of information about my actual condition.

I went to the University of Minnesota and studied political science.

I was active in the Muslim student association from my freshman year.

By junior year I was running the MSA.

I organized events, led discussions, represented the Muslim student community at university panels and interfaith events.

I was good at this and I knew I was good at it, which was both useful and in hindsight a problem.

Being good at something is different from caring about it.

Marin and I had learned to use competence as a substitute for genuine investment so thoroughly that I had stopped noticing the substitution.

After graduation, I went into nonprofit work.

I joined an organization in Cedar Riverside that did community advocacy for the East African Muslim community, legal support, educational outreach, New York rights workshops.

It was real work and I did it well and I cared about it in the way you care about a cause when you believe in the people affected even when you are not sure you believe in the framework you are using to help them.

I had been unsure about the framework for a long time.

I had not found a better one.

So, I stayed inside the one I had and performed it as convincingly as I could.

3 years into the nonprofit job, I left to build a media presence full-time.

I had been building a following on the side, commentary, and advocacy content, the kind of confident young Muslim voice material that found a ready audience among young American Muslims, looking for someone to articulate what they were feeling with clarity and fire.

I was good at the fire.

I had more fire than I understood and it needed somewhere to go and social media gave it a structure that looked from the outside like purpose.

By 27, I had 95,000 followers and a podcast called Hold the Line that had a consistent audience of young Muslims and was growing steadily.

The content was increasingly confrontational.

I had found the way everyone finds that confrontation performed better than nuance.

I had found an enemy or a series of enemies that my audience appreciated me identifying and responding to.

Chief among them was what I called Christian missionary activity in Muslim spaces, street preachers, outreach programs, evangelical organizations running events in neighborhoods like Ceda Riverside that I characterized as targeting vulnerable Muslim communities for conversion.

I want to be completely honest about what was driving that characterization because I have thought about it carefully since and the truth is not flattering.

Some of what I described as missionary targeting was real.

Some of it was genuinely unwelcome pressure on communities that deserve to be left alone.

But a larger portion of what I was doing was not advocacy.

It was anger looking for an acceptable address.

I was angry in the diffused sourceless way of a person who has been performing a version of himself for years and has begun to feel the cost of that performance without being able to name what is costing him.

The anger needed a shape.

Christianity gave it a shape that the audience approved of and that looked like conviction from a distance.

underneath the anger, underneath the content, underneath the podcast numbers and the speaking invitations and the identity of the confident Muslim voice in Minneapolis media, there was a hollow that I had been carefully keeping moving over for years.

I prayed five times a day and felt nothing.

I led discussions about the richness of Islamic spirituality and felt nothing while I led them.

I went to the mosque for Juma prayer every Friday and I stood in the rose with hundreds of men and recited the words I had been reciting since I was 7 years old and the words were clean and precise and completely empty of everything that should have been inside them.

I told myself this was normal.

I told myself that mature faith did not require feeling that discipline was the point.

that the absence of emotional experience during prayer was a sign of grownup religion rather than a sign of absence.

I had said versions of this on the podcast and the audience had agreed and the agreement had made the argument easier to maintain.

The specific sequence of events that led to what I did in that church began in March of my 28th year.

a large Catholic parish in the Lynen Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis, a wealthy lakeside area on the west side of the city, had launched a program called the Open Table Initiative.

The program was built around Eucharistic adoration, the Catholic practice of sitting in quiet prayer before the consecrated host displayed in a special vessel and was explicitly designed to invite people from non-atholic backgrounds to attend, observe, ask questions, and encounter what Catholics call the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

The program
landed in my inbox from four different followers in 3 days.

D the message was consistent across all four Zmeg brother fared are you seeing this they are coming for our community again within a week I had received the same link from 22 people the response was building before I had organized it I planned my response over two weeks with the same methodical approach I brought to every confrontation I was going to attend one of the open table events which were held on Saturday afternoons and open to anyone one, I was going to participate
in the Eucharistic adoration period and I was going to perform a specific action that would be the centerpiece of the content.

When the priest distributed communion at the end of the service, I was going to go forward, receive the consecrated host and crush it in my fist on camera in front of the congregation.

In Catholic theology, the consecrated host is not a symbol.

It is the body of Christ or literally present in the bread through the process called transubstantiation.

It is the most sacred object in the Catholic practice.

Crushing it publicly was the most extreme act of desecration I could design.

I was going to do it and film it and post it with a prepared statement about the difference between real presence and human construction about the superstition at the heart of Catholic practice.

about what happened when you treated a piece of bread as if it were God.

I reviewed my plan every night for 2 weeks.

I prepared the theological arguments.

I prepared the response to backlash.

I was completely ready.

The Saturday came.

I dressed carefully.

Dark jeans, a dark jacket, a kufi.

I drove to the Lynen Hills neighborhood alone.

The church was called Our Lady of the Lakes and it was a stone building two blocks from Lake Harriet.

large and old and solid in the way that buildings are solid when they have been in one place for a hundred years and have been used continuously for the same purpose the whole time.

The parking lot was filling with families.

The lake was visible at the end of the street, gray and flat under the March sky.

I parked and sat in my car for a moment.

My chest camera was running under my jacket.

My hands were completely steady.

I was ready.

I walked in.

The interior was high ceiling and dim and cool and it smelled of candle wax and old stone and something underneath both that I noticed but did not stop to examine.

The pews were filling a string ensemble near the front was playing something quiet and old.

I took a seat near the middle on the left side and I settled in and I waited with the pre-performance steadiness that had always been available to me before a confrontation.

Everything organized, everything ready, nothing unexpected.

The mass began, the readings, the homaley, the priest, a man about 60 with white hair and a voice that was calm in the specific way of people who have been speaking in front of groups for decades and have stopped needing the room’s approval to continue.

He spoke about the bread of life discourse from the Gospel of John, about Jesus saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven, and about what the church believed that meant.

I listened with the analysts attention I always brought to material I plan to respond to.

I was taking notes in my head.

I was building the counterargument in real time.

Then communion began.

The congregation moved in rows toward the front.

I waited.

I let four rows go before I stood.

I stepped into the aisle.

I walked toward the front of the church with my heart completely steady and my hands completely still and every argument I had prepared organized and ready in the front of my mind.

The priest stood at the altar holding the white host.

He looked at me as I approached.

His face was completely calm.

He held out the host and said, “The body of Christ.

” I held out my hand.

He placed the host in my palm.

I looked down at it.

A small white disc lighter than I expected, almost weightless against my skin.

I began to close my fist.

And something happened in my open hand that I have no framework for.

And that I am going to describe to you as precisely as I can because precision is the only tool I have for something this large.

The host was warm.

Not room temperature, not the warmth of something that had been held in a human hand.

A warmth that was coming from inside it, steady and specific, the warmth of something alive.

And the moment I registered that warmth, something moved through my hand and up my arm and into my chest in the space of one breath.

Something that was not electrical and was not physical and was not the shock of the unexpected.

something that felt like being recognized, being known, being seen all the way through by something that was looking at me from inside the small white disc in my open palm and was not surprised by what it saw and was not angry about any of it.

My fingers stopped moving.

My legs gave out.

I did not choose to kneel.

My legs simply stopped holding me up and I went down onto the storm floor of Our Lady of the Lakes Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota with the consecrated host in my open hand and 200 people watching and my camera running under my jacket and the warmth from that small white disc spreading outward through my whole body.

The way sunrise spreads unstoppable and without edges.

Someone helped me up the second time.

I do not know how long I was on the floor because time had stopped working correctly from the moment my fingers stopped closing.

What I know is that I was on my knees on the stone floor and then I was being lifted gently by two sets of hands and then I was sitting in a chair against the sidewall of the church with the consecrated host still in my open palm and a woman kneeling in front of me asking quietly if I was all right.

I was
not all right.

I was the least all right I had been in my entire life and also simultaneously I was more all right than I had been in years which is a sentence that does not make logical sense and that I am going to let it stand because it is the most accurate description I have of that first 10 minutes.

The woman was a eucharistic minister, a trained volunteer who assisted with communion.

And she looked at the host in my open hand with a kind of attentiveness that was not alarmed but was completely focused.

She said very quietly, “Would you like Father James to come speak with you?” I said, “Yes.

” My voice sounded like my voice.

Everything external was functioning.

Everything internal was something else entirely.

Father James came through the side door.

2 minutes later.

He was the priest who had placed the host in my hand.

Up close, he was tall and slightly stooped in the way of tall men who have spent decades bending towards shorter people.

His eyes were calm in the way of someone who had seen a range of human experiences in a sanctuary setting and had learned not to project a response before he understood what he was actually seeing.

He sat in a chair across from me and he looked at the host still resting in my open palm and then he looked at me and he said, “What happened?” I told him directly in order without softening.

I told him about the plan and the camera and the intention to crush the host and the theological argument I had prepared to deliver afterward.

I told him about the warmth I had felt the moment the host touched my palm.

I told him about my fingers stopping.

I told him about my legs.

I told him all of it plainly because I was a person who processed things by describing them accurately and the accurate description was the only solid ground available to me at that moment.

Our father James listened to the whole account without interrupting.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “Are you injured?” I said, “No.

” He said, “Are you in shock?” I considered it honestly and said, “I did not think so.

” He said, “What do you want to do right now?” I looked at the host in my palm, which was still there because I had not known what to do with it and which was still warm against my skin in a way that I was not going to mention because I was not sure I could describe it without losing the composure I was barely maintaining.

I said, “I
need to give this back to you.

” He nodded and I placed it carefully in his hand and he received it with the specific attention the woman had given it and carried it back to the altar.

He came back and sat down again.

He said I want to tell you something that I want you to hear without feeling like it’s an argument.

I said okay.

He said what you plan to do today? I knew about it.

Someone from your social media following sent me the announcement you made about attending and what you intended.

I prayed about it.

I asked Jesus what he wanted to do.

He paused.

I did not stop the service.

I did not turn you away at the door.

I put the host in your hand when you came forward because I believed he wanted to be in your hand.

Not because I wanted to prove something.

Because I believed he wanted to meet you.

He looked at me steadily.

What you felt in your palm.

Can you describe it? I said warmth from the inside of it and the feeling of being looked at.

Father James nodded.

He said, “Yes, that’s accurate.

” They gave me coffee in the parish office and I sat there for an hour while the rest of the congregation went home and the volunteers cleaned up and the church settled into its Saturday afternoon quiet.

Father James sat with me.

He was not pushy.

He was not performing pastoral concern.

He was just present in the specific way of someone who believed the conversation was important and was in no hurry to end it before it was finished.

I asked him the question I had been circling since I got off the stone floor.

I said, “What do you believe was in the host?” He said, “Jesus Christ present in a way that is real and not symbolic.

In a way the church has believed and experienced for 2,000 years.

” I said, “And you believe he chose to let someone come here specifically to desecrate his presence and then simply allow them to hold it instead?” He said, “I believe he chose to meet you.

I believe he is more interested in you than he is in protecting himself from you.

He’s been here before.

He knows what people are capable of and he keeps showing up anyway.

” That’s the whole story of the gospel.

He keeps showing up anyway.

I drove home to my apartment in the uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis and I sat at my kitchen table for a long time without touching anything.

My camera was still running under my jacket and I reached inside and turned it off.

I had not thought about the footage since I fell on the floor.

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