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<\/a><\/div>\nI attended my first post-reversion First Communion last Saturday. My friends\u2019 daughter Sylvia wrote and shared with me a terrific journal entry at the end of the day. Favorite observation: \u201cThe Wine was much better than I thought it would be,\u201d which if you think about it is probably what the guests at that wedding in Cana wrote in their journals afterward, too. Inspired by Sylvia, my reflections on the event.<\/p>\n
We offer you these gifts . . .<\/b><\/p>\n
In preparation, I asked Sylvia\u2019s big sister Clare for First Communion gift advice. \u201cShe already has most of the holy stuff,\u201d Clare mused. \u201cBut remember when I got a little makeup kit for my First Communion two years ago and Sylvia was really, really envious?\u201d (I did remember. Sylvia\u2019s envy, and Clare\u2019s choice not to share the beauty booty on that one night, prompted a wonderful moment of maternal catechesis when my friend Ann Marie cradled a sobbing Sylvia and talked about free will and rewards in heaven. Apparently Clare learned a lesson that night, too, and not only shared the next day but prompted me to make sure that Sylvia didn\u2019t need to wait for heaven for the rewards of bubble-gum lip gloss.) So I filled a little tin locking trunk with innocuous kid makeup, including something called hair mascara\u2013brush-on glitter paint\u2013that initially caused Ann Marie, not seeing the \u201chair\u201d part, to wonder what the heck I was thinking. And then, feeling the need for a bit of \u201choly stuff\u201d anyway, I paid a visit to Dayton Church Goods, a three-story (not including the basement warren known as The Catacombs) Aladdin\u2019s bazaar of Catholic holy stuff in which I have been known to lose all track of time, grazing happily amid the holy cards and medals and statues and could-I-really-afford-one-these-for-home thuribles. Until a few weeks ago, Dayton Church Supply had the distinction of being located next door to a now-defunct purveyor of \u201cadult\u201d merchandise, the profane and the sacred nestled cheek-by-chaplet, as it were. (It was that juxtaposition\u2013captured in a national news photograph accompanying a story on the Dayton Peace Accords\u2013that convinced me this was a place I could call home.) I navigated the Saturday-morning-of-First-Communion-weekend crowds and scored a rosary bracelet and First Communion wrapping paper replete with traditional Eucharistic imagery. I got my own reward slightly short of heaven later that night, when after she opened her gifts Sylvia\u2013in shorts and t-shirt but still with her updo and pearl tiara\u2013rushed outside to the deck where I was sitting and shrieked, \u201cI DIDN\u2019T EVEN KNOW THEY MADE<\/i> SCENTED FAKE NAILS!\u201d I\u2019m sure I missed a teachable catechetical moment by not pointing out that the rosary bracelet was probably the better reason for joy, but she\u2019s 8. Also in preparation, and at Sylvia\u2019s mom\u2019s invitation, I drew a Happy First Communion message on Sylvia\u2019s family\u2019s kitchen chalkboard. This prompted a request from Sylvia\u2019s brother Leo, who will be confirmed next year, that I start now working on a suitably soldier-of-Christ-ish laser missile smackdown-of-evil illustration for his Confirmation chalkboard. I\u2019m on it.<\/p>\n
The First Communion, but not the last<\/b> Come to me, all of you<\/b><\/p>\n The celebration of Sylvia\u2019s First Communion also brought up for me conflicts old and new about access to the Eucharist. At heart I\u2019m with the East in administering all three sacraments of initiation at once to infants, and catechizing by mystagogia<\/i> in the lifetime that follows. My own son\u2019s \u201cfirst Communion\u201d took place when he was 5, and we were part of a small house church of several families and a priest friend. My son was the youngest child present, the only one who hadn\u2019t made his First Communion. After months of hearing the priest speak, in the Eucharistic prayer, about Jesus being at supper with his friends on the night before he died and saying to them, \u201cTake this, and eat,\u201d he burst into tears one night just before the Great Amen. \u201cAm I not his friend?\u201d he wailed. \u201cI love Jesus, too! I want to do what he asked his friends to do.\u201d Our priest friend said he thought that was as good an understanding of the Eucharist as most adults manage, and so admitted my son to Communion then and there. (Irregular! Irregular! I\u2019ll save the comboxers the time. It was all irregular, but it was the 1970s; everybody\u2019s back in the box now.) In later years, when I was an Episcopalian, a friend\u2019s daughter\u2013who had been receiving communion since she was old enough to toddle to the communion rail, as is common in the Episcopal Church\u2013was a first grader in a Catholic school and, at weekly Mass, was prevented from going forward to receive because she hadn\u2019t yet made her First Communion. \u201cIt\u2019s OK,\u201d Hannah told her teacher, \u201cI\u2019m not Catholic, I don\u2019t have to wait.\u201d When informed that in that case she\u2019d be unable ever to receive in a Catholic church, Hannah put her hands on her hips and bellowed in her biggest outdoor voice (daughter of an actress and an opera singer, it\u2019s a very big one): \u201cWell what would Martin Luther King think of that? That\u2019s discrimination! What about Rosa Parks?\u201d She was hustled out of church just short of organizing a protest march of first graders. (Yeah, I know, there\u2019s no right to receive. And Episcopal communion isn\u2019t Communion communion, to Catholics. But ya gotta love the spunk.) At Sylvia\u2019s First Communion Mass, I went forward to receive from an EMHC right behind the crocodile of my friends\u2019 Brian and Donna\u2019s 6 kids ranging in age from 8 to babe-in-arms. When the minister reached out to give a blessing to the little kids, I wondered half seriously\u2013given the recent combox brouhaha\u2013whether I should snatch them away and lecture the minister on liturgical protocol, but it didn\u2019t seem to be such a hideous abuse so I kept quiet. They took their blessings with resignation, but when she tried to bless 8-year-old Blase, who had made his First Communion just a week before, he whispered, \u201cNo, I get Communion!\u201d I backed him up, so I got to be present for a Second Communion, too.<\/p>\n We who mystically represent the cherubim<\/b><\/p>\n First Communion parties get a lot of flack for seeming to jumble the sacred and the secular: the cross-shaped cake, the presents, the groaning tables of food, the adults popping corks or tapping kegs. But you know what? A First Communion party can be as close as we get to the perpetual party in heaven that the Eucharist here on earth embodies. It was for me on Saturday, anyway. There was Ann Marie and Michael\u2019s bountiful hospitality, which makes family out of everyone. There was music\u2013standards and even newly composed works played by a high-school piano prodigy on Michael\u2019s late father\u2019s piano. There was food, and more food, and wine, and more wine. There was the exuberance of being part of a celebration composed largely of young Catholic couples with big families, so kids outnumbered adults, and threaded their sticky, muddy, basketball-dribbling, supersoaker-shooting joy through the night like the Gospel of Life come to life. \u201cThere\u2019s a pink girl following me!\u201d one toddler girl whispered to her mom, but it was just another toddler girl in a pink dress, bent on hugging. There was the kick of being part of a theological conversation with Matthew Levering\u2013and one of his students, Jason, with whom I\u2019ve been Facebook friends since our mutual friend The Hermit introduced us online, but whom I hadn\u2019t met in person until that night when Michael, who knew Jason the same way, invited him and his wife and their kids to be family (is this not the coolest exercise of radical hospitality and example of the Internet as communion of saints?)\u2013that ranged from The Avengers<\/i>\u00a0(under both kinds\u2013comic book and John Steed\/Emma Peel) to Batman to\u00a0Fawlty Towers<\/i> to whether it\u2019s grave matter to swear at drivers making you late for a First Communion Mass (is it less grave because they can\u2019t hear you [er, me], or more grave because you are saying those bad things over and over? \u201cStop it,\u201d Matthew said, \u201cthat way lies scrupulosity\u201d) to Whit Stillman and Woody Allen, with a pitstop in Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/i>. And there was that moon<\/a><\/b>, over it all. As the Orthodox hymn says:<\/p>\n We who mystically represent the cherubim My journal entry is a lot longer than Sylvia\u2019s, but it really comes down to these few takeaways: How blessed we are to be his friends, and one another\u2019s. How good it is to approach his family table, from however long a distance, however improbably. How full of surprises he is, this God of ours\u2013hunting us down like a pink girl who just wants a hug, enticing us with scented fake nails, feeding us with the Bread of Life and the Wine that is always, always better than anything we expected. Holy Communion, Batman!<\/p>\n Images are the author\u2019s own.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I attended my first post-reversion First Communion last Saturday. My friends\u2019 daughter Sylvia wrote and shared with me a terrific journal entry at the end of the day. Favorite observation: \u201cThe Wine was much better than I thought it would be,\u201d which if you think about it is probably what the guests at that wedding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/a>During the Mass I couldn\u2019t help but slide back and forth through time, remembering my own First Communion<\/a><\/b>. So many differences\u2013our very modern, light-filled, and beautiful church instead of my very traditional, dark, but beautiful childhood parish; the children\u2019s choir singing different hymns; the communicants sitting with their families and receiving Communion accompanied by their parents, instead of being roped off in a special section under watchful nunny eyes; receiving in the hand and from the Chalice, of course, which we were not permitted to do in the 1950s; the children dressing the altar, solemnly choreographed (with subtle wrinkle-smoothing followup by the deacon), and bringing up the gifts. But there were similarities, too: the girls in their white dresses and veils, the boys in suits and ties (our pastor laughingly noted that the specialness of the day in our distinctly casual-dress parish could be seen not only in the fact that the children were dressed up, but even more tellingly in that their parents were), the deep sense of a shared tradition that brought family members back to church in a way not even Christmas and Easter can do, the reminder of the enormous Gift that is Christ\u2019s presence with us, in us, not just once in a lifetime but every day if we choose to make him welcome.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n
\nAnd chant the thrice-holy hymn to the Life-giving Trinity,
\nLet us set aside the cares of life
\nThat we may receive the King of all,
\nWho comes invisibly escorted by divine hosts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n