We Filmed Ourselves Mocking Communion and The Camera Captured Something Unexplainable

We pointed the camera at the altar, made our jokes, hit record, and posted the video.

And when I watched it back alone that night, there was something in the frame behind us that none of us put there and that I have never been able to explain to anyone who has seen it.

If you have ever done something you cannot take back and wondered whether the god you insulted would still be willing to talk to you, what happens when the answer arrives on a screen at 2:00 in the morning? Uh my name is Samir Khalil and I am 25 years old.

I grew up in
Toronto, Ontario in a Lebanese family that had come to Canada in two waves.

My grandparents first in the 1980s during the war and my parents after them in the 1990s when the peace that followed the war turned out to be the kind of peace that was only comfortable if you had money and connections and my father had neither in sufficient quantity to stay.

Toronto received them the way Toronto received everyone without ceremony and without complaint.

The way a large body of water receives rain, absorbing it and becoming slightly larger without making a fuss about the addition.

We lived in Missaga, which is technically its own city, but which the rest of Canada treats have a suburb of Toronto in the way that the rest of the world treats New Jersey as a suburb of New York.

Technically wrong and practically accurate.

Missoga in the 1990s and 2000s was one of the most diverse places on earth in the specific way that Canadian diversity worked.

Everyone maintaining their own thread while living inside the same fabric.

Lebanese and Tamil and Gujarati and Chinese and Polish and Jamaican all buying groceries at the same no frrills and sending their children to the same schools and largely leaving each other to the practice of their own lives without much interference.

My father Honey ran a
small import business from a unit in an industrial plaza on Dixie Road bringing in Lebanese food products, canned goods, olive oils, dried herbs.

the specific ingredients of a cuisine that did not exist in sufficient supply at the regular grocery stores.

He worked long hours in the specific way of immigrant small business owners for whom the business and the survival were the same thing and for whom stopping was not a conceivable option.

He was not a demonstrative man.

He expressed things through presence and provision and the fact of the business functioning every day as evidence that the family was being cared for.

He prayed but not loudly.

He fasted Ramadan completely.

He gave his zakat through a Lebanese community organization in Missoga that he trusted to distribute it correctly.

My mother Rim was the active one, the one whose personality filled the rooms my father quietly occupied.

She had been a school teacher in Lebanon and in Canada.

She channeled the same energy into every organization she joined.

The school council, the community association, the women’s group at the mosque, the Lebanese cultural society that put on a dinner every spring that the whole Missoga Lebanese community attended and that my mother organized with an efficiency that would have impressed a military commander.

She was
warm and specific and remembered every person’s name and every person’s story and asked about them.

the next time she saw them, which made everyone feel noticed and which was not performance but simply how she was built.

The faith in our house was consistent and uncontested, not heavy.

I want to be clear about this distinction because it mattered.

The faith in our house was not the heavy kind that produced anxiety and monitoring and the constant assessment of whether you were practicing correctly.

It was the ambient kind, the kind that is simply the air in the rooms, present in every direction without being the subject of every conversation.

We prayed and fasted and the mosque was the community center as much as it was the worship space and the faith was real without being the only topic anyone discussed.

My parents had brought enough of the old country to feel connected and had made enough of the new country to feel at home and the faith sat inside both of those worlds comfortably.

I was the middle child.

My sister Nora was three years older and my brother Zead was four years younger.

And I occupied the specific middle child territory that people who study these things describe as the most freedom and the least attention, which in practice meant I had room to develop in directions my parents noticed only partially.

I was a reader, which my
mother approved of.

I was a curious person, which my father found useful and occasionally exhausting.

I had developed by high school a habit of asking why that applied to everything including the faith.

Not aggressively, not with the intention of dismantling anything but because accepting things on authority without understanding the reason had never come naturally to me and the faith was not exempt from the habit.

The Islamic education I received was solid but not deep.

Weekend school at the mosque from age 6 to 14.

Quran memorization, the basics of prayer and fasting and the five pillars and the articles of faith.

Enough to identify confidently as Muslim and answer basic questions about the religion with accuracy.

Not enough to engage seriously with the harder questions that started appearing in my mind around age 16.

questions about theodysy and free will and the nature of God and why a God who was all powerful and allloving permitted the specific categories of suffering that the news showed every day in the specific detail that modern media showed it.

I brought these questions to my parents occasionally and they answered them in the ways available to people who had not been trained as scholars with reassurance and with the basic frameworks they had received and with a genuine belief that the answers existed even if they did not have them fully in hand.

by university at the University of Toronto studying media studies and sociology.

The faith had thinned in the specific way it thins for second generation Canadian Muslim kids who go to large secular universities and discover that the world is larger and more varied and more interesting than any single tradition had told them.

and that the answers their tradition offered were not universally accepted and were not self-evidently true to the smart engaged secular people they were now spending most of their time with.

I still identified as Muslim.

I still fasted most of Ramadan.

I still went to the mosque occasionally for aid and for the big Ramadan nights when going felt social rather than strictly devotional.

But the practice was maintenance at best and the belief if I was honest with myself in the way I was only honest with myself late at night was thinner than the identity that contained it.

What grew in the space where deep practice had been was something I am less proud of now than I was at the time.

I was studying media and I was smart about it and I had developed a habit of analysis that I applied to everything including religion and the application of media analysis to religion produces in 20 year olds who are not careful a kind of detachment that looks like sophistication and is actually just distance.

I could analyze religion, any religion, as a cultural system, as a set of narratives and rituals performing social functions, as an institution with power dynamics and historical contingencies and rhetorical strategies.

This was not useless.

It was genuinely interesting in many ways, but it was also, I would come to understand, a way of being very close to very important questions without actually being asked them.

My two closest friends at university were a man named Idris, who was from a Moroccan family in Montreal and had moved to Toronto for school, and a woman named Sophia, who was from a secular Turkish family in North York and who had no religious practice to speak of, but a genuine intellectual interest in religion as a phenomenon.

The three of us were the core of a larger friend group, and we shared a specific sensibility, curious and ironic, and slightly too comfortable with the sound of our own arguments.

The communion video was Idris’s idea.

This is not to blame him.

I want to be precise.

We were all three equally willing to do what we did.

But it was his idea in the way that certain kinds of trouble have a source you can identify, even if the execution was collective.

We had been to a house party in the annex neighborhood of Toronto on a Saturday night in February of my final year of university.

And afterward at 1:00 in the morning, walking back toward the subway, we passed an Anglican church whose side door was propped open for reasons that were unclear.

The light from inside was visible through the gap.

Idris said, “You want to see what’s inside?” Sophia said.

It’s 1:00 in the morning.

Idris said the door is open.

I said nothing because I was 25 and mildly tired and mildly not tired.

And the open door was doing the thing open doors do at 1 in the morning when you are 25 and walking past with friends, suggesting that the interesting choice was inside rather than out.

We went in.

The church was empty.

The side door opened into a corridor that led to the main sanctuary.

We followed the corridor and pushed through a heavy interior door and the sanctuary opened up around us.

High ceiling, wooden pews in two rows, stained glass windows, dark now from the outside, but holding the color they would release in daylight.

And at the front, elevated on a step, the altar.

On the altar, a white cloth, two candles not currently burning, and at the center a flat gold dish with a cover over it.

A kiboreium.

I knew what it was because I had done enough reading about Christianity in my media studies work to recognize the vessels.

The cover dish held or had held that at the last mass the consecrated bread that Anglicans and a Catholics treated as the body of Christ.

Idris had his phone out.

He was already recording.

He was a person who recorded things reflexively who saw everything through the frame of potential content before he saw it any other way.

which was a habit common in our program and which I shared more than I liked to admit.

He pointed the phone at the altar and said, “This is their communion table.

This is where they eat the body of God.

” He said it with the specific tone of a person performing analysis for an audience distanced and slightly contemptuous.

The tone that our shared sensibility produced when it encountered things it had categorized as a superstition dressed in tradition.

I said something.

I am not going to tell you exactly what because the exact words matter less than the fact that I said them into a recording that was happening in a church at 1:00 in the morning when nobody had invited us.

Sophia laughed.

Idris laughed.

I was already slightly uncomfortable in a way I was not examining clearly.

The way you are uncomfortable when you have stepped into something but are moving too fast to assess what it is.

The recording ran for maybe 45 seconds.

Address lowered the phone.

We looked at the altar for a moment in the specific silence that follows something you cannot take back.

Then we left.

I did not think about it seriously for several hours.

We took the subway home and I went to my apartment in Kensington Market and I made tea and sat on the couch.

And the uncomfortable feeling that had started in the church was still there.

a low persistent thing like a sound at the edge of hearing.

I told myself it was nothing.

I told myself we had walked into an empty building at 1 in the morning and made some jokes that were in poor taste but were ultimately just jokes about an institution rather than a person, which was the frame my media studies training made available and which I found temporarily useful for making the discomfort smaller.

At 2:00 in the morning, I opened my phone to look at the video Idris had sent to our group chat.

I pressed play.

The sanctuary came up on the screen.

The angle slightly low from where Idris had been holding the phone.

The altar visible in the upper portion of the frame, the saborium on the white cloth in the center.

I saw myself in the frame and Sophia and heard the voices, mine included, and the discomfort I had been managing all night sharpened into something more specific.

Because behind us in the upper left corner of the frame where the wall made the darkness near the ceiling of the sanctuary, there was a light.

Not the electric light of the church, which was off.

Not the stained glass, which was dark.

A light that had no source I could identify.

Soft white, perfectly still, roughly oval in shape, about the size of a large book held at arms length.

It was there from the first frame of the video to the last.

It did not move.

It did not flicker.

It was simply there, present in the upper corner of that sanctuary the entire time we were making our jokes at the altar below it.

I watched the video three times.

Then I sat on my couch in my Kensington Market apartment at 2:15 in the morning with the February cold pressing against the windows and I felt something that I did not have a word for and that my media studies training had absolutely no category for.

I felt like I had been watched doing something I was ashamed of.

Not by a camera, not by a person, by something that had been in that room before we arrived and had stayed in that room the entire time we were there and had remained exactly where it was while we performed our cleverness at the altar below it.

I did not sleep well that night.

I did not expect to.

I texted Idris at 7:00 the next morning.

I said, “Watch the video again.

Top left corner.

” He replied 20 minutes later with a single question mark.

I called him.

He had watched it.

He said, “It’s a light reflection of the windows.

” I said, “The windows are dark.

” He said, “Of something else.

” I said, “There is nothing else.

” He said, “Then the camera glitched.

” I said, “For 45 seconds, perfectly still in exactly the same position in every frame.

” He did not respond to that immediately.

Then he said, “I don’t know what it is.

” I said, “Neither do I.

” He said, “Don’t overthink it.

” I said, “I’m already overthinking it.

” He said, “Samir,” I said, “I know, but I could not stop.

” This was the thing I had not expected about whatever had happened in that church and on that video.

I was a person who had spent four years in a media studies program learning how images were constructed, how footage was edited, how lighting created effects, how cameras produced artifacts, how human perception filled gaps with expected content.

I had the full toolkit for dismissing visual anomalies and the toolkit was not working.

I had watched the video 11 times by Sunday afternoon, going frame by frame through the section where the light appeared, looking for the explanation that my training said must exist.

And the explanation was not there.

The light was in the frame.

It had no source.

It was present the entire time.

It did not behave like any artifact I could identify from my technical knowledge.

It behaved like something that was simply there.

Sophia watched it on Sunday afternoon when we met for coffee at our usual place on Blurry Street.

She watched it on my phone twice without speaking.

Then she put the phone down on the table and wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and said, “Okay.

” I said, “Okay, what?” She said, “I don’t know what that is.

” I said, “Me neither.

” She said, “Should we delete the video?” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because it feels like we shouldn’t have it.

” I sat with that for a moment.

Then I said, “I’m not ready to delete it.

” She said, “Why not?” I said, “Because deleting it feels like pretending it didn’t happen.

” She looked at me.

She said, “What do you think happened?” I said, “I think we walked into a church at 1:00 in the morning and said things we shouldn’t have said, and something was already in that room that we didn’t know about.

” She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “That’s not a sentence I thought you’d ever say.

” I said neither did I.

The discomfort did not decrease over the days that followed.

I had expected it to.

Discomfort generated by unusual experiences typically decreased with distance as the mind found its footing and constructed the explanations it needed.

My mind was constructing nothing.

The light in the video sat in my memory the same way it sat in the video.

Perfectly still in the upper left corner of everything, not moving, not diminishing, not becoming explainable with time.

I began researching.

This was my default response to things I did not understand.

The same instinct that had driven four years of academic work.

Find the information, build the framework, understand the thing.

I started where I always started with the technical looking for camera artifacts and lighting anomalies and the specific behaviors of phone cameras in low light environments.

I found things that were interesting and that covered a wide range of visual phenomena, but that did not account for what I had seen.

Phone cameras in low light produced grain and noise and motion blur and lens flares from bright sources.

They did not produce soft, perfectly still oval white lights in the corners of frames when there was no bright source present.

Then I moved into the other kind of research, the kind I was less comfortable acknowledging I was doing.

I started reading accounts of unusual experiences in churches, the kind that people described in terms that my academic training classified as anecdotal and my increasingly unreliable rational framework classified as the only available category for what I was looking at.

I found more of them than I
expected from many different countries, many different backgrounds, many different types of churches.

The variety of the accounts was itself data.

They were too different from each other in their specific details to be explained as a single shared cultural narrative.

But they had a common center, the sense of something present in the space, something that did not belong to the physics of the room, something that was aware of the people in it.

I was 4 days into this reading when I found the specific body of material that shifted the direction of my searching.

accounts from people who came from Muslim backgrounds who had gone through a process similar to what I could see beginning in myself, the thinning of practice, the questions that the practice did not answer, the encounter with something that the framework could not contain, and the period of searching that followed.

There were more of these accounts than I had expected.

They were not uniform in their specifics, but they pointed in the same direction toward a person rather than a system, toward a direct encounter rather than an inherited framework, toward a God who was close rather than the God who was great and therefore necessarily distant.

I had been raised with a clear understanding of Jesus.

He was a prophet, honored, given miracles, born of a virgin, not crucified, but raised directly to God.

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