The following Monday, at 9:01 a.m., the priest made a call from the sacristy to the regional alcohol and tobacco authority, introduced herself as the assistant pastor of a newly formed congregation, and wondered if there was any situation in which a liquor license was required to serve communion during a service.
No, the straight-laced representative of the authority informed her. Communion could be freely served.
At this, the priest asked—to be on the safe side—if there was any limit on how much wine each member of the congregation was allowed to toss back.
The strait-laced man seemed to lace himself even straiter as he sensed something untoward about the question. As a result he chose to supplement his formal answer with a personal reflection. “While the amount of communion wine served is not the sort of thing the licensing authority has any opinion on, becoming intoxicated is not, in the eyes of the law, the main purpose of communion. One might wonder, for example, if the religious message will get across if too much wine is served.”
The priest was about to say that, in this case, it would probably be just as well if the message fell by the wayside, at least parts of it, but she thanked him briskly and hung up. “Green light!” she said to the receptionist. And then she turned to Jerry the Knife, who was present in the same sacristy. “I want at least two hundred gallons of red wine delivered on Saturday. Can you make that happen?”
“Sure,” said Jerry the Knife, who had plenty of contacts and then some. “Two hundred one-gallon boxes of Merlot from Moldova, at one hundred kronor a box, will that do? It doesn’t taste all that—”
“Bad,” was what he was about to say, but he was interrupted.
“Alcohol content?” said the priest.
“Enough,” said Jerry the Knife.
“Then let’s do it. Wait, just get four hundred boxes all at once. There’ll be more Saturdays after this next one.”