First Communion | Catholicism And Christianity | The Children At Mass | Spain | God And Vocation | Tomàs’ Gospel

From The Gospel According To Tomàs

On the square: a church with no regular priest. Still, the church was open, that first exploration, and it was clean, loved and well-maintained. Prayerful, you might say. The interior walls new brick. Simple and holy. Two women were making arrangements with the flowers and such like and they looked at me blankly then upon enquiry in Spanish they told me there was to be a Mass on Sunday.

Dogs howling, I went along to that Mass on Sunday, reasonably clean, and wondering what would happen if you let them out, the dogs, assuming I could probably take one with a fist while the other mauled me. A new-ish black-ish T-shirt, and pumps and blue jeans, my favourite rosary threaded through a belt-link and into my jeans pocket. Thinking that in terms of probabilities, they were at something of a fanciful edge of their breeding – in a northern clime. But there were so many people – when you’d expect an old priest and a couple of grannies and me! It turned out it was a First Communion – as I unpacked the scene. A bristling copse of children arranged at the church door – pews ram-packed with family, dressed to the nines, and otherwise admirers, dressed to the nines – while the kids were in sailor-suits, miniature army-wear, braid and epaulettes, little white wedding dresses – for the girls.

All the flashing ipads in the world were there! The priest’s thumb and ring-finger pinched the air and gesticulated heavenward. Love, love, love. Cada uno de vosotros es un pensamiento único en la mente de Dios… (A fine sentiment.) I, having slotted in toward the rear of the church, snuck a look at them over my shoulder. There was an energy about it. A warmth and a solicitude welled beneath the Andalucian and the prickly specificity – gaudy and unfathomable rhythms of deepest Spain. They waited at the foot of the aisle to parade. I caught one boy’s eyes catching mine, as so many of them so often seem to. And smiled – the boy sheepishly, tucked himself in. I smiled – or if not quite that, then I deliberately softened the face that had grown on my old face.

For, at some point along the way, my face hardened, though it seems crazy to think that, with some people, the most casual scrutiny might be perceived as a steely glare. Give, sympathize, protect. (That furtive gaze. The furtive whisper. That – offer. So immediately offered as withdrawn.)

They are funny with it, children, and these yet that. All squishy on the inside, within the tightest-of-tight definitions, ingrained to a ruthless exclusion and little worlds, so urgently pursued on their part. Their outsides in serial-projection of all they get thrown at them.

My instincts, the counsellor explained, are hyper-corrective – predictably symptomatic given the formative experience. Love-instincts healing-to-a-fault. To give, to heal, to throw one’s life away. This is the consequence, this the hamartia, the predictable model, for there is nothing new under the sun, like the counsellor said it was.

So, then, employ relaxed eyes. Smile like a memory-implant – like a real-unreal synthetic fudging issues. Don’t get close. Make like your thoughts are blown like leaves in Christian prayer…

I continue to experience the seeing of a genuinely happy and integrated child as so different – and myself as so deservedly apart. (To speak truth, one basic likelihood is that I am simply jealous.)

They find my eyes. They find my – Tomàs’s eyes. Namaste… (How I longed when I was thirteen-fourteen, fifteen-sixteen. How I longed…) But there is literally nothing there. I was never there – and I have done so much to annihilate everything. They are so small and they are so far away… And it has been such a long time – years, years.