Written Statement
When I first started at [my church], I was very busy and very stressed and very tired a lot. As a priest one of the vows we
take is to treat the sacrament with reverence and to dispose of unconsumed elements with revereance, either by consuming them,
returning them to the earth or in the case of consecrated wine, pouring down a special sink that drains into the earth. The
most basic thing you’re taught is to never pour it down a regular sink so that it drains to the sewer. Because we believe that
the real presence of Christ is in the bread and the wine in a mystical way that we can’t fully explain.
So on this particular day after taking communion to a sick parishioner and generally being exhausted. I decided not to take
the Eucharistic kit to the sacristy to clean it as I was supposed to do. Instead, I poured it down my bathroom sink within a
day that sink drain began to smell of rotting flesh. It was awful and it persisted for about a week. I brought every member of
my family and asked them if they smelled anything without pre-biasing them and everybody said it smelled like something had died
in the sink.
I tried cleaning it. I tried pouring every other manner of liquid down it. Nothing would make the smell go away.
When I explain what happens, the three members of my family started researching what chemical reactions might cause that smell
and could not find a solid reason why.
The smell went away a week later as abruptly as it arrived, I poured the same unconsecrated line down it to see if I could
replicate, but to no avail.
I spent the next year, trying to pick apart the experience and find a reason for it. I have come to accept that something I cannot
fully explain happen and that what happened fits with other stories about consecrated bread and wine and it also fits with my own
personality. I don’t think I could have accepted an experience like this as supernatural had I’ve been in anyway virtuous. I think the
only way I can trust the experience if I was the Person who failed at the most basic duty entrusted to me by the church.
As a result, I changed how I approach the Eucharist and how frequently we offer it, and it has shaped the growth in the church.
Recorded Statement
N/A
Follow Up
As this was submitted by a family member, neither I nor my Brother could in good conscience declare scholarly neutrality.
Personally, I do not remember this event, but I remember little of my past in general, and I trust him on this. Also, my
Brother confirmed this - I mentioned only the first half, and he filled in that the sink smelled like sulfur, which is
among the scents produced by a decaying body [1].
Either way, I’m happy about the scientific approach taken to confirm this miracle, and even if I did not know the priest in
question, I would trust this experience because of it. I think one of the things that makes faith difficult in the modern
world is that we can find much easier explanations for things than ever before in history, and anything else is often not
well documented or tested, and so it is easily brushed away.
The only non-supernatural explanations I can think of for this are a shared hallucination or an issue of some sort further
down in the pipes. Neither of these feel satisfactory, but are possibilities. I’m not sure which is true myself, but a
miracle is the simplest explanation, and the only one which doesn’t require something that wasn’t documented.
External Refrences
Audio Recording: https://youtu.be/kqSgT3aU3eI