And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried.
—ELIE WIESEL
It is 7 a.m. I am in the sacristy, where our vestments are kept. The early morning sun is barefaced. It blazes through the window, the sash bars splitting the gleaming light into slanting shafts that reflect off the polished gold chalices and candlesticks kept on the shelf reserved for altar furnishings. Even as the priest, I do not have to be at the church this early. The Holy Eucharist is not for another hour and a half, but this is the first time I will be at the altar as the celebrant. In just ninety minutes I will make my maiden voyage, leading the people through the liturgy of the Great Thanksgiving, the prayer of thanks the priest says on behalf of the congregation, asking the Spirit to mysteriously knead his presence into the bread and wine. Then we feed the kneeling faithful.
I have carried a paten and distributed the bread before. It’s always moving. Young couples come up, arms loaded with squirming babies. They look tired. I want to tell them it’s okay to come back to the rail if they need seconds. Some parishioners are old and palsied, and I worry they’ll splash the blood of Jesus all over themselves when their shaking hands grasp the chalice. Then I think, Worse things could happen than being old and drenched in the blood of Christ, and I stop worrying.
I have introduced and served Communion a thousand times in nondenominational churches. Those times, I made up the Communion prayer as I went along, and there is something wonderful about that kind of heartfelt spontaneity. But this is a high-church Episcopal parish where the liturgy is more like a choreographed ballet. For well over a thousand years, priests have said and used nearly the same words and gestures I will say and use this morning. Folks come to this church to meet God in a way that is continuous with this long history. They won’t be impressed if I get flustered and start winging it, no matter how authentic and earnest I sound. Some might ask for a refund if I screw it up. I wouldn’t blame them.
Earlier in the week, I shared with an elderly cleric my anxiety about serving as the celebrant. He told me of a young priest’s debut as celebrant that he’d witnessed some years ago. This young guy liked himself a lot. He believed he possessed great liturgical chops. He spoke in a booming, affected voice that sounded more like the English actor Kenneth Branagh performing King Lear than a young priest from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, celebrating his first service of Holy Eucharist.
There is a solemn moment in the liturgy when the priest lays the large priest Host on the altar and briefly bows over it, in a gesture of reverence. While bending over the Host, this kid’s sweaty forehead accidentally made just the slightest contact with it. When he stood up again, the congregation gasped. His sweat had acted as an adhesive, and the Host was now squarely stuck to the center of his forehead. Even worse, he didn’t know it. Red faced, he scrambled around for several minutes, searching for the Host, before it finally fell off his forehead and plopped down on the altar. The old priest thought the people had left him swinging in the breeze because he had been so pompous.
“Can you imagine what was going through that poor kid’s mind when he couldn’t find the Host?” the old priest said, laughing and wiping a tear out of the corner of his eye. “Maybe he thought he’d caused an ascension or something.”
I’m sure he thought the story would get me to loosen up about my first time as celebrant, but when he was finished, I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my hair. I added this story to the growing catalog of potential disaster scenarios that had been roiling around my head all week.
Now the day is here, and I am surprisingly serene. I am savoring the time of preparation for the service of Holy Eucharist. For a priest, leading worship begins in the sacristy. A colleague gave me the prayers that are traditionally said by the priest as he or she dons each vestment. Not knowing them by heart yet, I read them off index cards.
First, I wash my hands and whisper, “Cleanse my hands, O Lord, from all stain, that, pure in mind and body, I may be worthy to serve Thee.”
I pull on my alb. I tie the internal string that secures the all-white garment to me; I fasten the three buttons around my clerical collar while praying, “Cleanse me, O Lord, and purify my heart, that, being made white in the Blood of the Lamb, I may attain everlasting joy.”
Then I tie the cincture, a braided rope, the symbol of chastity, around my waist and pray, “Gird me, O Lord, with the girdle of purity, and extinguish in me all evil desires, that the virtue of chastity may abide in me.”
As tradition dictates, I kiss the cross that is stitched on the part of the stole that rests on the back of my neck. Before draping it around myself, I intone the words, “Give me again, O Lord, the stole of immortality, which I lost by the transgression of my first parents, and although I am unworthy to come unto Thy Holy Sacrament, grant that I may attain everlasting felicity.”
Finally, I pull the sleeveless, poncho-like vestment called the chasuble over my head and adjust it so that it sits evenly on my shoulders. Only the celebrant gets to wear this vestment. All the other priests wear plain albs with stoles. It is Pentecost, so the chasuble is red, and the gold satin lining makes it heavy. On the front there is an intricately embroidered dove fashioned from silver thread soaring like a rocket out of orange and red tongues of fire. It’s no wonder the vestment makes me feel so warm. I look at my card and whisper the prayer, “Lord, who hast said, ‘My yoke is easy, and My burden is light,’ grant that I may so bear it, as to attain Thy grace.”
Now I am ready.
I look in the mirror and pick a piece of lint off my shoulder. I don’t recognize myself. I am someone else, but altogether me at the same time.
“It’s all come down to this, hasn’t it?” I say to my reflection. I nod. This is the life to which God has asked me to say yes.
The Eucharist has followed me through life like my own shadow. It is the string on which the pearls of my life’s experiences, burnished white and dirty gray, have been strung. I still feel out of true. Is there any other way for us to be in the world? Yet when I kneel with palms upturned to receive the bread and then drink deep from the chalice, I feel the crooked made straight, the uneven made smooth, and the torn, patched. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue,” wrote Eugene O’Neill.
This is my glue.
God is present in that bread, but he is not alone. Beside him is the unrelenting grief of the parents seated in the last pew whose son was killed in Iraq last year. Five rows in front of them is the young couple with hollow eyes who learned on Friday that their in vitro procedure failed again. Present in that Host is the Scripture reader’s struggle to accept his gay son. We stretch forth our hands and take not only God but a portion of each other’s burdens as well. Life is hard enough. No one should eat alone.
I go into the church to be sure that everything I need is there. As I check to make sure we have enough Communion bread, I am reminded of a time when I did the unthinkable.
One day, after serving as an altar boy, I stole one of the leftover consecrated Hosts that Father Durcan hadn’t consumed after the Mass yet. I knew it was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. For a week I carried that Host in my pocket everywhere I went. It was a secret between me and God, who as far as I could tell didn’t mind the adventure. At night I’d place it in a small white cardboard box that a pair of my mother’s earrings had come in, and I hid it in the tight crevasse between my mattress and the wall. In the morning I would take it out of the box and carry it with me to school. I relished the idea that I had God in my pocket and no one else knew about it. After a few days, though, the Host started to get squishy and dirty from my touching it over and over to make sure it was still there. It was starting to have the consistency of soggy Wonder Bread.
I began to fret about Jesus.
One night I fell asleep in my clothes, and Nanny undressed me and tucked me into bed. The next morning I awoke in a panic. I hadn’t put Jesus in his box. Where were my pants? Was the earth still on its axis? Had the heavens fallen? I opened the wicker clothes hamper, but it was empty. I ran downstairs to the kitchen and asked Nanny what she had done with them.
“I put them in the wash,” she said.
I crumpled to the floor. Jesus was gone. She’d drowned him.
The gravity of this sin was too much for me to bear. The next morning I went to the rectory and asked Father Durcan if I could talk to him.
He was seated at a small writing desk in his study. He turned his chair around, and I stood in front of him.
He smiled. “What is it you need, Ian?”
“Father,” I blurted, “Jesus was in my pocket all week, but then my Nanny drowned him.”
Father Durcan cocked his head to the side, the way Labrador retrievers do when you ask them if they want a treat.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowed.
I paused to take a deep breath. “I stole a Host after Mass last Friday and brought it home,” I said, my gaze cast downward.
Father Durcan became quiet. “Why did you do that?” he asked gently.
Oddly enough, I hadn’t thought about why I’d taken the wafer until he asked. Then it was clear. “I wanted him with me all the time,” I said, now choking back tears.
Father Durcan took both my hands into his. “Where is the Host now, Ian?”
“My Nanny washed my pants,” I cried. “She didn’t know she was sending Jesus down the drain. It was my fault. I’ll never do it again, I swear, Father,” I said, taking my hands from his and covering my face with them.
Catholic priests get a bad rap these days, and yes, there are those who have heinously betrayed their vocations. But there were and are some good ones, men who are wise and saintly, like Father Durcan.
He gently pulled my hands away from my face and held them again. “Ian,” he said, “you don’t need to carry a Host in your pocket to have Jesus with you all the time. He’s right here,” he said, placing his warm hand over my heart.
This was good news, but I was not interested in theological propositions. My mind was consumed with a vision of Jesus bobbing around in Long Island Sound like a discarded wine cork. This demanded swift action.
“But Jesus went down the drain. What about the Host?” I asked.
He squeezed my hand and winked. “Ian, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. I think he can swim.”
Would that I would grow to be this wise.
I am at home behind the altar. I breathe deeply the faint scent of incense that remains from a previous service. It smells like my boyhood. We have arrived at the moment in the service when I say, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name . . .”
This is the cue for the choir and congregation to sing the ancient words called the Sanctus. As tradition dictates, I bow as it’s sung, and I choose to close my eyes.
Then it happens.
I hear Nanny.
I see her crazy eyes and bluish hair. I smell the lavender-scented powder that came in the round plastic container with a puff inside that I gave her every year on her birthday until I was twelve. I am surprised to see the gentle faces of Father Durcan and Sister Margaret with Bishop Dalrymple beside them. The rope he tied to my waist long ago proved strong, and it has led me home through many storms. I even imagine the voices of Dennis Coughlin, Billy Dempsey, and John Babcock, who might as well be dead for all the years I haven’t seen them. They are all gone now, but their voices reach me from that better country, the one whose map I saw in a water stain on the ceiling over the bed where I slept as an eleven-year-old boy.
And then I hear him.
Though his voice is only one among the uncountable saints, I would know it anywhere. And yet it is different than I remember, not cutting or arrogant, but brimming with kindheartedness. Only a soul who has learned to love and be loved can sing so sweetly. I am glad for him.
How can you tell when you’ve crossed the meridian that divides hatred and forgiveness? Is it when the dirt path beneath your feet, frozen hard by winter’s bitter wind, softens under summer’s grace? Or is it when words you’ve worked so long to free stroll out of the prison of your heart without your help and to your amazement speak themselves?
“I wish you well,” I whisper.
And with an exultant swell, the choir replies:
“Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”