Tag: Holy Communion

Cul de sac

Why do we tip our hats to a priest and why do we call him Father? 

He is like Christ and how do I know, Holy Orders made him so….

The words to a childhood song spring to my memory as I vacuum the floors and wipe down benches. There was a series of such songs I learned as a child, all related to the sacraments. From birth to death. 

Extremeunction [anointing of the sick] gives us sorrow and joy

Helping all of us to enter into heaven.

Yes, to fortify and help us get to heaven, 

Extremeunction takes away all of our pain. 

I’m hazy on the words here. 

The easiest to remember: 

For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, 

In sickness and in health until death do us part. 

We take this vow in marriage and God gives us grace 

to meet all obligations, trials, and duties we must face.

 What God hath joined together, let no man tear asunder. 

This sacrament is permanent and cannot be undone. 

God gives us the grace for what life has in store 

And grace to love each other more and more.

There was a song for Communion, for confession, baptism, and the rest, all designed to teach little children the importance of these sacred rites. 

I thought such words might lead me somewhere, instead they drag me into a cul de sac of memory that goes nowhere. Like the cul de sac of religion, it has a circular feel.

Holy Communion Day

You go in at one point and come out on the other side of the road from where you began. 

Guilt like a dead fish

My mother takes Nulax for her bowels. She keeps the Nulax on top of her fridge. A rectangular lump of compacted dried fruit that tastes like jam but is barely chewable.

‘I cannot think you need to take it,’ my mother says to me.
‘You are young. Your bowels are good. But mine, mine are stuck.’

Years later a kinesiologist looks into my eyes. His bright light beams and blinds me. ‘You have an excellent immune system,’ he says, ‘ but your bowels are sluggish.’

My mother again, I think. She always manages to get in somehow, inside my system. She slows me down.

How can I purge myself of this woman of the slow bowels and the turgid constitution?

There was a time when I was about fourteen when I decided to join the ranks of all those women who sat around at morning tea and talked about what went into their bodies and what they might do about getting it out.

My grandmother died of cancer, not of the bowel, as you might imagine, but of the stomach. Something got inside her, too, something she could never be rid of.

All the Nulax in the world could not relieve her of her guilt.

Guilt sat in her gut like a dead fish. It stank out her insides and eventually ate away at them until she died.

At seven I was formally introduced to the concept of guilt when I made my first Holy Communion.

And then when I was fourteen I, too, decided I needed to do something with it.

Each day I chewed a wad from the Nulax pack. The fig seeds stuck between my teeth. The apricot pith coated my tongue.

I chewed to moisten, but to swallow the stuff was like swallowing a cow.

I could not get rid of my guilt.