Jazz Baby for Jesus

I was profoundly affected by the religion of my family of origin even before I was conceived. It fact, I probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for the Pope. When I was old enough to want to know these things I asked my mother how, after three children, I came to be born. She laughed and told me I was a diaphragm baby. Puzzled, I thought I was the product of a birth control failure. No, she assured me, the diaphragm was in her dresser drawer!

My mother was a Catholic by guilt of association with her family - diehard papists one and all. Of all her large family including a twin who became a nun, my mother alone couldn't quite make it mean enough to her to pursue the life of a faithful Catholic. But this didn't mean she wasn't susceptible to the threat of what would happen if you didn't do what the Catholics said you should. Apparently she'd suffer a religious fit every few years or so, and come up pregnant. Going through that ordeal, and the cumulative effect of having one child after another - in her case a total of five - along with an freelance artist husband with a thirst for spirits - was enough to turn her off to life as a conscientious practicing Catholic.

Despite her ambivalence, she did make an effort to at least expose some of us to the Church and her ways. I actually enjoyed going. It was called The Church of the Holy Innocents. I didn't know what the name meant - certainly not that it was named for a bunch of children who got killed because they were Catholics - but it had a nice sound to it. The church was old, with dark colored stained glass windows, and a rich smell leftover from the incense burned in gold censors the priest swung back and forth during high Mass. Nice smells, pretty colors, and ice cream made me like church a lot.

My mother always took me to Baldwins' Pharmacy for ice cream after church. One day I was impatient. I poked my mother in the middle of Mass. "I want my ice cream cone, " I whispered to her." She ignored me. I insisted. "I want my ice cream cone! I want my ice cream cone!" My chant rose in volume to compete with the Gregorian chant intoned by the priest. Then it was louder than the bells the altar boy rang at significant intervals. Soon it was more than my mother could deal with --- she grabbed me by my wrist and yanked me out of the pew. And then, once outside, instead of punishing me, she took around the corner to Baldwin's. That vanilla cone was de-lish!

The day of my First Holy Communion I got to wear what was in my opinion one of the greatest outfits a seven year old girl could put her hands on. Everything was brand new: shiny white patent leather shoes, lace trimmed anklets, white dotted Swiss dress with ruffles on the puffed sleeves (with layers of a stiff netting petticoat underneath), white cotton gloves, and to crown it all off - a white veil just like a bride's. Of course, there were religious accessories to compliment this fabulous attire. A little gold crucifix necklace, white pearly rosary bead and a little white prayer book that had another crucifix embedded in the inside from cover -like a miniature altar right in the book!

There is a photograph taken of me on my way home from Holy Innocents church where I first took this sacrament. Skipping down the sidewalk, snapping my fingers, the skirt of my fancy white dress flying high. I was high on something.

Maybe it was relief. It had been weeks of memorizing the questions and answers in the little kids version of the Baltimore catechism. I still recall the first questions. Q. Who made me? A. God made me? Q. Why did God make me? A. I've blocked this - something about God making us so we could spend eternity with him in heaven pleasing him. We were not, the nuns who instructed us in our after-school classes, to question these answers - just memorize them.

When one us failed to do so, or if we got out step in our rehearsal for the First Holy Communion, the nun in charge - daunting in her black witch costume - would call him or her "baby." As in, " Are you such a baby you can't walk in a straight line?" or, "If you can't get that answer correct, you won't get to make your First Communion, you baby." But while it was fairly accurate - we hadn't been babies so long ago - it was humiliating to be called one.

But I was older now, having attained the age of reason at the ripe old age of seven. I was told I was now responsible for the fact that I was by nature inclined to sin, and that I had to be constantly wiping the stain of sin from my soul so if I was to die unexpectedly I wouldn't get caught like someone in a car accident who'd left the house with dirty underwear. This was far more serious. If there were mortal sins on my soul, say for missing Mass on Sunday or Holy Days of Obligation, or another equally horrible act like murdering someone, I would go straight to hell. The venial sins, little things lies to my parents, missing my morning and evening prayers, driving my mother to buy me ice cream during church, would send me to purgatory for a few hundreds years. But all was forgiven if I went to Confession and spilled the beans about my transgressions.

So, the Friday before our First Holy Communion the twenty or so of us First Communicants went to church. Confession took place in a mysterious wooden box about double the size of a phone booth. It had curtains of purple velvet where the door should have been. Once you got inside you had to kneel down, and the priest, hidden on the other side of an iron grille, would slide a little door open and you could kind of see him sitting with his head leaning into one hand, his elbow resting on a little shelf in front of the grille. You were supposed to start the little conversation: "Bless me, Father for I have sinned, it has been ------- since my last Confession." Of course, this being the first time, we were supposed to say so. Then you were supposed to list your sins.

It was hard to know what to say-but the nuns had given us a list of fall-back sins. Like being mean to your brothers and sisters, or disobeying your elders, stuff like that that you did everyday as a matter of course. You should always have something to confess, the nuns emphasized. Otherwise, it would mean you thought you were perfect and that was the sin of pride. Touché! Those nuns always had a way of turning up right.

At the end of your list of wrongdoings, the priest would give you your penance (we'd had to memorize five or six prayers we were likely to be assigned) and then he'd ask you to make a sincere Act of Contrition. This was another, fairly complicated prayer, that it was easy to screw up, in that there was a part where you actually had to beat your breast (although at seven it was clear this was figuratively speaking all the way) three time saying "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." I wasn't quite sure what it meant but it was pretty dramatic. Especially if you lost track of what you were saying and the priest had to remind you what the right thing to say was. Then you were supposed to go and say your penance, and hope this had constituted what the nuns called a "good" Confession.

One thing this nun drummed into our baby heads about this Communion business - we were not to let the host that was the body and blood of Baby Jesus ever touch our teeth. We could swallow him whole, but if we chewed him there would be trouble. I was more than a little afraid I'd forget and take a bite and have to go to hell for it. That and that we were supposed to walk in a straight line, and whenever we said the name of Jesus, we were to bob our heads. If we didn't do this right, we got called baby. I learned a way around this and that was never to speak the Jesus' name unless I had to, and then you could make your head twitch just right to make it look reverent when all you wanted was for the nuns not to notice you were there. There was other stuff we learned then too - it was after all, the nuns first shot at us - like genuflecting when we entered a pew, or happened to cross the center aisle of the church in front of the altar. But it was, okay not to do it perfectly - as long as confessed it before going to Communion. You absolutely were not supposed to have Communion if you'd sinned-it would offend Jesus or give you indigestion, or something like that.

So I did skip down that sidewalk, feeling mighty good that I'd managed to keep in a straight line and to keep that host from touching my teeth. It was awfully dry, though, and stuck to the roof of my mouth. Eventually it dissolved, but the taste of that first sacramental initiation stayed with me for a very long time.

Copyrighted, NCM Press, 2002