Innocent

It's Sunday.

My mother is handing me a small circle of lace and a couple of bobby pins.  I am meant to pin it to my hair in preparation for attending mass at our church.  She has already started a roast in the oven which is now cooking slowly, and its embedded garlic cloves are aromatic, devilishly tantalizing.

"Why do I have to wear this thing?"  I ask.  "It will just come off.  See?"  I try to pull it off, but her hand stops mine.  I think about how to get sick really fast so I can stay home from church.  Nothing comes to mind.  I am unhappy for a moment, but I smell the roast cooking.  I think that's what heaven must smell like.    

"It's a sign of reverence," says my mother as she helps me pin on the lace.  She's looking around for her rosary and makes sure I have mine.

My sisters are looking for kittens outside in the backyard even though they have their best Sunday clothes on.  I want to see those kittens, too, I think.  I'm not very sure what reverent really is.  I feel exasperated and impatient.  I am beginning to feel my stomach rumble with appetite.

"Boys don't have to.  Why do I?"  I complain.  Boys get to be altar boys; girls don't.  Boys get to ring the bells and do important work at the altar.  Girls get to do nothing at all.  I feel demoted to second class.

The answers are vague to me, unfathomable:  "Because.  I said so.  They were supposed to teach you that in catechism."

She looks at my lace circlet, pats my head, then turns around and calls my sisters in.  I hear them out in back, excited about the new litter of kittens hidden under a bush at the side of the house.  They seem like a litter, too:  Unruly, curious, not ready for going to mass. They are shooed back into the house, then out the front door and into the car.  My brother, an altar boy, is gone already on his bike to get ready for  mass at the church.  I want to ride a bike to church and wear pants.  I don't want to wear a token lace head covering and be reverent.  

We are off to mass finally.  I begin hoping that Father John will make it quick today so we'll be able to go home again and eat a big Sunday dinner and then play outside.  We have "fasted" the night before, eating fish sticks and salad.  Fish sticks!  The words themselves reek with grease and processed seafood.  I think of cat food and the kittens under the bush, hiding with their mother.  I wonder if they're also Catholic, like we are.

"Mom, are cats Catholic?  Why do we have to eat fish on Friday?  Can't we just give it to the cats?"  I was at an age where magic was just as strong as truth.  I want the kittens to go to heaven with me someday and hope they'll be reverent so they can make it.

"It's penance."

"What's penance?" Is penance a kind of magic, I wonder.  It doesn't seem so because of the way she is saying it.  It seems like punishment.  To get to heaven, I have to be reverent and get penance.  There are a lot of rules, mysteries, obstacles.

Little by little I am learning that not much makes very much sense. Getting to heaven is going to be complicated.  It seems like the rules are not really rules, the stories wild confabulations, the standards different for everyone.  The bible stories are wild and disconnected.  Pillars of salt, water turning into wine, walking on water.  God seems like a mean guy a lot of the time, but Jesus is interesting.  He has special powers and likes children.

But, I am stuck on this penance stuff.

"It means you have to give something up for your sins."  It sounds like subtraction, like a math problem.  Now the baffling idea of what my sins might be stops me again.  I don't think I have committed any sins.  I am pretty sure of it actually.  Sins are things like killing people, coveting your neighbor's wife, stealing, taking God's name in vain.

Seems like I have to add coveting to penance and reverence.   The list of big Catholic ideas that are strange and unwieldy for a girl like me is growing.

"What sins?"  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  I stole my sister's stuffed animal.  My sister didn't have a stuffed animal that I wanted.   I remembered the dark reaches of the small confessional where the priest pretending to be God needed to hear me say something, so I made up a story.   He tells me to say three Hail Marys and five Our Fathers.

I don't want to miss out on heaven.  I think about jumping around in white billowing clouds and perfection and gold everywhere.  I want the kittens to jump around up there with me and eat the fish sticks so I don't have to anymore.  I want the roast beef with garlic tucked in its sides and mashed potatoes and gravy and dessert.  

"Eat your fish sticks and then you can have dessert," my mom had said to me last Friday night, hoping bribery would quell my consternation and puzzlement.

"I have to eat fish sticks, but I can have dessert?"

"We give up meat on Fridays as a sign of penance.  It's a way of paying for the sins of the world."

The sins of the whole world?  I'm a kid!  It's an impossibility.  Perversely, it makes me want to go do something wrong, bad, mean, so I can feel my own actual guilt instead of taking on the guilt of all the other people in the world, who are mostly grown-ups anyway.

Mass is long and there is a lot of standing, sitting, standing and then kneeling.  I see my brother up there with three other boys doing the rituals at the right time.  He gets to ring the bells that signal when the host is raised up high and when the priest drinks wine and then blesses the little white communion disks.  Everyone shuffles up in a line for their turn to be given a disk on their tongue.  I get one, and it has no flavor.  I try to make it last a long time in my mouth, but it melts quickly away.  Body of Christ.  I try to think of Jesus, and he is tasteless, like Wonder Bread, and it's very disappointing.

Finally, we're free, set loose into the sunshine and I yank the floppy lace doily off my head and hand it over to my mom, who stuffs it into her purse while she's talking with the other moms and ladies of the church, out on the asphalt in the courtyard.  They're talking a lot, and it seems interminable, pointless.  

I just want food, to go home and eat the savory beef and be free to play and live outside and see little cats playing in the yard.  I want nothing to do with penance and guilt and coveting.  My spirit is filled with the sunshine and fresh blowing breeze, and it blows the feelings of demotion far away.  I am eight years old and my soul is all my own, unscathed by life's coming wounds, still years away.