We Tried to Rip the Host From a Woman’s Hands and She Spoke in an Unknown Tongue


I reached across that woman and grabbed the communion bread right out of her hands while my group filmed it.

And what came out of her mouth next made every single one of us freeze where we stood.

What do you do when the person you just attacked starts speaking in a language that no one in the room has ever heard before? My name is Nasim Bilhaj and I am 27 years old.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of an Algerian father and a French Algerian mother who came to the United States in the mid ’90s and settled in the Ceda Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis.

The place locals call Little Mugadishu, though the Somali community there would rightly tell you the neighborhood belongs to many communities and not just one.

I need to tell you what I did inside Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on Nichollet Mall on a Sunday morning in March and what happened when I did it.

I need to tell you about the woman and the bread and the sound that came out of her mouth and what that sound did to every wall I had built around myself for the previous 6 years.

But before I tell you any of that, I need to tell you about Cedar Riverside and my father and the mosque and the particular kind of young man who walks into a Catholic church on a Sunday morning not to worship but to disrupt.

You need to understand the building before you can understand the demolition.

Ceda Riverside sits just west of downtown Minneapolis.

a neighborhood of high-rise towers and narrow streets and corner markets and the steady smell of East African cooking coming from every other doorway.

It is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Minnesota and one of the most diverse and also one of the most religiously concentrated.

The Mazjid al-nur on South 6th Street draws several hundred worshippers to Friday prayers.

The call to prayer echoes between the towers on a clear morning for the children who grew up in these streets.

Islam was not a Sunday activity or a holiday custom.

It was the structure of daily life, the framework everything else was built on.

My father, Fuad Bhaj, worked as a translator for a legal aid organization in downtown Minneapolis.

He was a compact, precise man with wire rims glasses and a measured way of speaking that came from decades of choosing words carefully in multiple languages.

He was devout in a quite intellectual way.

His faith was rooted in what he had read and studied and concluded not what he had been told to accept without examination.

He prayed five times a day and he could explain the theological basis for every element of every prayer.

and he held his faith the way a scholar holds a well-made argument with confidence and without aggression.

I was nothing like him.

I had his intelligence and none of his patience.

I had his certainty and none of his groundedness.

I was the version of my father in which everything that was disciplined became impulsive and everything that was measured became explosive.

I knew this about myself from a young age and I spent most of my adolescence building a structure around the explosive parts to make them look like conviction.

By the time I was 21 and studying political science at the University of Minnesota, I had found my structure.

Online communities, then local organizing, then the slow steady assembly of a group of young men around shared grievance and shared identity.

The grievance was real.

I want to be honest about this.

The specific experience of being a young Muslim man in post201 America was genuinely difficult in ways that created real wounds.

The surveillance, the profiling, the casual assumption of guilt, the way certain rooms went quiet when you entered them.

The wounds were real.

What I did with them was not healthy.

I built a group the way angry young men build groups when nobody teaches them another way to use their pain.

I found others who were hurting in the same direction and I organized the hurt into action.

The action started as community organizing real and legitimate pushing back against housing discrimination in Cedar Riverside challenging police practices in the neighborhood advocating for Somali and Arab community members who were being failed by city institutions.

There was important work being done and I was proud of it.

But under the legitimate work was a layer that got darker as the years passed.

We began targeting Christian outreach activity in the neighborhood.

When churches send volunteers into Cedar Riverside for community events or food distributions or what the flyers always called love your neighbor campaigns, we showed up.

We organized counterpresents.

We made the work difficult and sometimes we made it impossible and we filmed everything and posted it and collected the validation of people online who called us warriors and defenders.

And the line we told ourselves was this.

We are protecting our community from people who are using kindness as a disguise to convert vulnerable Muslims.

Some of that was not entirely wrong.

Some missionary activity in lowincome Muslim communities is predatory and uses material need as leverage for spiritual manipulation.

Some, not all, not most.

But we applied the accusation to all of it, to every church volunteer and every food bank run by a Christian organization and every Bible study offered in a community center.

And we did not ask whether the accusation fit because asking would have slowed us down and being slowed down would have left us with ourselves and ourselves without the movement was something none of us knew how to face.

The leader of our action group which we called Cedar Defense was a man named Bil.

He was 33 years older than me.

Tunisian American built like a welterweight with a mind like a trap.

fast and specific and very difficult to get out of once it closed around you.

Bil had a gift I have seen in certain people who organize around anger.

The gift of making every individual grievance feel like part of a single coherent story that was much larger than any one person’s pain.

He could take your specific wound and place it inside a narrative that made the wound feel meaningful rather than just painful.

That is a real skill and in the wrong hands it is a genuinely dangerous one.

I was Bel’s most visible partner for 4 years.

I was the one who spoke at events.

I was the one who went on camera.

I was the one whose face was associated with Cedar Defense in the coverage we occasionally received from local media.

Always framed as controversial community activists which we took as a compliment.

I had built a self out of this work.

Not just an activity, a self.

My identity was the movement and the movement was me and without the movement I did not know who I was and the not knowing was the thing I was most afraid of.

The action at Holy Redeemer was Bill’s plan.

He had identified the church as a target weeks before.

Not because of anything Holy Redeemer had specifically done in Sida Riverside, but because of its visibility.

Holy Redeemer on Nicollet Mall was a large prominent Catholic church in downtown Minneapolis.

Architecturally impressive, well attended.

They were with a Sunday mass that drew several hundred people from across the city, including a significant number of East African Catholic immigrants from the community that Bil argued we were defending.

He wanted to go inside during mass.

He wanted to disrupt the communion service specifically because the eukarist, the communion bread was the most sacred element of the Catholic liturgy and disrupting it would generate maximum outrage and maximum coverage and maximum validation from the online community that funded our work through donations
and attention.

I want to be precise about where I was the morning of the action.

I was not uncertain.

I was not secretly conflicted.

I was 27 years old and I had been doing this for six years and I was good at it and I believed with the complete sincerity of someone who has never seriously examined his own motivations that what I was doing was righteous and necessary and worthy of the community I claimed to be protecting.

I believed it the way you believe something you have never looked at directly because you are afraid of what you might see if you do.

We drove to Holy Redeemer on a Sunday morning in March.

A five of us in Bel’s car.

Minneapolis March is late winter cold.

The kind of cold that has been going on too long and has a different quality from December cold.

More tired, more stubborn, gray and heavy.

The church on Nichollet Mall was a red brick building we with stone details and tall arched windows and a bell tower that you could see from three blocks away.

People were going in through the front doors as we arrived.

The usual Sunday morning crowd, slow and purposeful families and the older people and younger people and couples and singles.

The ordinary cross-section of a large urban church.

We went in behind the crowd.

We had been in churches before for filming, for disruption, never for anything that crossed into physical intervention.

What Bill had planned for this morning crossed a line we had not crossed before.

He had not told all of us the full plan before we arrived.

He told me in the car on the way there.

He said when they do the communion about we go to the communion line.

We get the host, we take it from someone and we film it and we walk out.

He said it the way he said most things flat and certain like the decision was already made.

I said nothing.

I said nothing because saying nothing was what I had been doing for 4 years.

When Bil said something that was further than I was comfortable with and I did not want to be the person who slowed the movement down.

I said nothing and that silence was a choice and the choice has weight and I own it.

We sat in the back of the church.

The mass began.

The smell of incense reached us before the procession did.

that ancient specific smell that Catholic churches have had for a thousand years and that my nose registered as deeply foreign and deeply old at the same time.

The church was full, maybe 300 people, the organ playing something slow and resonant, the sound moving through the stone and wood and filling the space completely.

I sat in the pew and I watched and I waited.

And in the back of my mind, underneath the plan and the movement and the six years of certainty, something small and quiet was making a sound I did not want to hear.

It sounded like a question.

The mass moved through its rhythms, the reading, the homaly, the prayers of the faithful, the preparation of the altar.

I had been in enough Catholic churches to know the basic structure, and I watched it with the detached eye of someone doing reconnaissance.

Bil sat to my left completely still which meant he was focused.

When Bil went a still he was at his most dangerous all the energy drawn inward calculating waiting for the exact moment the communion service began.

The priest consecrated the bread and the wine at the altar.

The moment Catholics call the consecration.

The moment they believe the bread becomes the actual body of Christ.

I had arguments against this.

I had read enough Catholic theology to know the doctrine.

The word is transubstantiation and I had a prepared reputation of it that I had used at debates and online and in the content we produced.

The reputation was clean and sourcest and had performed well.

I was thinking about the reputation when the communion line began to form.

People rose from their pews and moved toward the front of the church in a slow steady stream.

old people, young people, families, singles.

Their faces had a quality I had seen before at these moments and had always categorized as performance.

The put on solemnity of people doing a ritual that social expectation required them to treat as a significant.

I had filed it under performance and moved on every time I had seen it.

But sitting in the back pew of Holy Redeemer on a cold March morning, watching 300 people rise from their seats and move forward, I looked at their faces more carefully than I usually did.

And what I saw was not performance.

Performance has a self-consciousness to it.

The performer knows they are being watched and adjusts their face accordingly.

These people were not watching themselves.

They were not performing for the room.

They were moving towards something.

They were entirely focused on something in front of them, something at the altar, and their faces held the look of people in genuine anticipation of a real encounter and not a ritual one.

I did not want to see that.

I pressed it down.

Bil touched my arm.

He looked at me and tilted his head toward the communion line.

It was time.

We stood.

We joined the back of the communion line.

Five of us filtering in among the parishioners, moving slowly forward as the line advanced.

I was third in our group, bel directly ahead of me, two others behind.

We moved up the center aisle step by step.

The line was quiet.

A people had their hands folded or their eyes down or they were simply present in their bodies in a way that was very different from the restless forwardleaning energy of our group.

Bill reached the front of the line ahead of me.

He received the communion bread, a small white disc the priest placed in his palm.

He turned away from the priest and I saw him close his fist around it.

His plan was to film himself holding it to close it in his hand and walk away with it and film the reaction.

That was the content.

I was two people behind him.

The woman ahead of me in line stepped forward to receive the host.

She was older, maybe 60, Somali by appearance, tall and thin, with a blue and white head scarf and hands that she extended forward with the unhurried confidence of someone who had done this many times.

The priest placed the bread in her hands.

She stood for a moment with her eyes closed and her head slightly bowed, both hands cuped in front of her, the host resting in her palms.

Bill saw her from 3 ft away.

He stepped it back to me and said quietly, “Take it from her.

” The woman’s eyes were still closed.

Her hands were still covered.

She was completely still, completely inward.

In that specific state of concentration that prayer produces in people for whom prayer is real.

I reached forward and grabbed the host from her hands.

The moment I touched it, the woman’s eyes opened.

She looked at her empty hands.

Then she looked up at me and what came out of her mouth was not what I expected.

She did not shout.

She did not call for help.

She did not accuse me or beg me to return it or look at me with the fear I had seen on the faces of people we had disrupted before.

She looked at me with complete focused steady attention and she opened her mouth and she began to speak.

The language was not English.

It was not Somali or Arabic or French or any language I had ever encountered.

The sounds were not random.

Thus, they had a rhythm and a pattern that was clearly linguistic, clearly intentional, clearly directed, but they belong to no language in my experience or anyone else’s in the immediate vicinity.

The woman spoke in this language with her eyes open and her hands still cuped in front of her and her voice completely steady, not loud but completely audible in the silence that had formed around us because the silence had formed instantly the moment she began to speak.

The priest had stopped.

The people at the front of the communion line had stopped.

The people in the nearest pews had turned to look.

The church, all 300 people of it, had gone almost completely quiet.

The only sound, this one woman’s voice speaking a language nobody present could identify.

I stood holding the communion bread in my fist, and I could not move.

I want to be as honest as I can be about what I felt in that moment.

I had been in many confrontational situations over six years of this work.

I had been shouted at, threatened, challenged, physically pushed, reported to police.

I had been in rooms where people were angry and rooms where people were afraid and rooms where people wanted me gone.

I had learning to stay calm in all of them.

I had built a steadiness under pressure that I was genuinely proud of.

What I felt standing in the communion line of Holy Redeemer Church with that woman speaking in an unknown language from 2 feet away was something I did not have a category for and could not manage.

It was not fear in the conventional sense.

It was not the fear of physical consequence or legal consequence or social consequence.

It was a deeper older kind of fear.

The kind of fear that arrives when something you have organized your entire world view around the absence of suddenly makes itself undeniably present.

Not loud, not theatrical, just present.

The way truth is present when it arrives and the room around it has to rearrange itself to accommodate the arrival.

The woman spoke for 30 seconds, maybe 40.

Then she stopped.

She looked at me for one more moment.

Then she looked at my closed fist and she said in perfect English in a voice completely calm, “That belongs to him, not to you or to me.

To him.

Please give it back.

” I opened my fist.

The host was in my palm, slightly crushed at the edge from my grip.

I looked at it, then I looked at her.

Then I set it on the flat of my palm and held it out toward her.

She shook her head gently.

She said, “Give it to the priest.

” I turned.

The priest was three feet away watching me with an expression I could not read.

Not angry, not frightened, just watching.

I held the host out to him.

He took it from my palm without a word.

Bil was already moving toward the side door.

I heard him behind me saying, “Let’s go.

” The sharp controlled voice he used when an action was not going the way he planned and needed to be ended cleanly.

The others were following him.

I should have followed him.

Every piece of my training said follow Bil and regroup and reframe the narrative and move on.

I did not follow Bil.

I stood in the communion line of Holy Redeemer Church in Minneapolis on a cold March morning and I watched him go and I did not follow him.

I turned back to the woman.

She was looking at me with the same focused, steady attention she had had when she opened her eyes and found her hands empty.

She did not look like a person who had just been the subject of a confrontation.

She looked like a person who had been expecting something and had watched it arrive on schedule.

She said, “Come sit down.

” And because I had no plan and no script for what had just happened, and because the six years of certainty had in the past 30 seconds developed a crack that went all the way through it, I followed her to a pew near the front of the church, and I sat down.

Her name was Sister Amina.

She was 63 years old, born in Mogadishu, raised Muslim, converted to Christianity in her 30s when she was a refugee in Nairobi, and had been a member of Holy Redeemer for 11 years.

She was not a nun.

The title sister was what the congregation called her because of the way she moved through the community.

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