Growing Up Catholic

I was raised Catholic and believed that spiritual life was obeying God’s Laws as taught to me by the priests and nuns at St. Benedict’s Church. My parents and the other adults in my neighborhood did not say much about their beliefs. I assumed that they believed the same things that the nuns and the priests did. For me, Catholicism was a world of performance; attending Mass on Sundays, confessing my sins every other week, praying to God in front of the crucifix in my home every night before bed, doing my chores without complaining, playing with abandon at appropriate times, and trying my best not to do something sinful or shameful. In other words, I was a typical, post-war, Catholic kid.

In the second grade, I became very excited when the nuns and priests described what it would be like to receive Communion for the first time. They told me that Jesus would come into my heart in a special way and that I would be changed forever by the blessed sacrament. They explained to me that the wafer (which they called a "host") was transformed into Jesus’ actual body and blood during the Consecration portion of the Mass. As a result, when I swallowed the host I would absorb these into my body and become like Jesus. I imagined that Jesus would appear beside me, like I had seen on holy cards, or become evident inside of me somehow so that I would be able to talk with him and confide in him. I hoped that he would show me how to do miracles, so I could help people the way that he did. I was thrilled that I was going to be with Jesus the way all adult Catholics were. I couldn’t wait.

When the First Communion Day arrived, all of us boys wore sport coats and ties, while the girls all wore fancy white dresses. Since I had never worn a sport coat before, I felt proud and grown up on my special day. I do not remember much about the Mass that day, but I do remember that when the wafer was placed on my tongue, I did not experience anything out of the ordinary. It tasted stale, with little flavor or substance, hardly what I expected for God’s entry into my body. I returned to my place in the pew, kneeled with my eyes closed as I had been taught to do, and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened as the wafer became soft in my mouth. Nothing happened when I swallowed it. Nothing happened as I knelt there praying for Jesus to come into my heart as my body digested the wafer in my stomach.

I eventually opened my eyes and looked around at my classmates to see what was happening for them. They were all kneeling with their eyes closed, just like I had been, so I couldn’t tell what they were experiencing. I wondered if Jesus had entered their hearts. I closed my eyes again and wondered if I had done something wrong. After Mass was over, I was afraid to ask any of the other kids what they experienced. I guess I really didn’t want to know what happened for them just in case they did experience something which I hadn’t. I must have been afraid that I was too sinful to receive Jesus while all the other kids had wonderful experiences. I didn’t say anything about my experience to anyone. When my aunt asked me if I felt holy, I numbly answered that I did. However, deep inside I pondered what it meant that I experienced nothing extraordinary after receiving Jesus into my heart for the first time. In the depths of my heart, I slowly hatched a new hope that the experience of Jesus took time to develop and I would experience him more directly as I received communion over time.

It took me many years to fully understand the conflict of values with which this experience confronted me. I had expected to experience Jesus as an actual presence in my consciousness and as a force in my reality. The nuns and priests had not exactly said that I would experience Jesus that way. They had promised only that I would receive the blessed wafer which was transformed into Jesus’ body and blood during the celebration of the Mass. They told me stories about how the saints experienced Jesus and described the way God was a force in their lives. They never actually said that they themselves experienced God or Jesus in that way, but I assumed that all adult Catholics did, especially the nuns and priests who had dedicated their lives to serving God. I thought they were telling me that only the Saints followed God's guidance and teachings with all their heart while most people compromised God's guidance with the demands of their worldly life. I thought that everyone experienced God in their heart directly but not everyone had the strength of character to follow God's guidance all the time. That is why I expected to experience Jesus personally and powerfully through ingesting that blessed wafer. After all, they told me that once the wafer was blessed during Mass it was magically transformed into Jesus' body and blood.

My initial disappointment that I didn’t experience Jesus in a personal or powerful way led me to work hard to become a better person, confess my sins, and receive communion as often as I could, hoping that this bungled opportunity could be salvaged. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that the experience I had expected during my First Communion would take place at my Confirmation when I committed myself to the Catholic Church once and for all. It didn’t. Was I missing something? Did I misunderstand? Was I bad?

I have come to the conclusion that my disappointment resulted from confusing medieval Catholic teachings, which I was learning in religion class and in Church, with twentieth-century reality, which I was learning in other classes and through my interactions with my social environment. I didn’t know that when the nuns talked about Jesus ascending into heaven by lifting slowly upward and disappearing into the clouds, they didn’t mean he was floating upward into space as I imagined. They were talking about heaven as a spiritual realm that existed outside of time and space, but the imagery that they used was medieval. The idea of heaven being the same realm that contains the sun, moon, and stars goes back to the time before Copernicus and Galileo convinced humanity that the earth orbits the sun and that planets and stars are spheres floating in space beyond the earth. As far as the Greeks and Romans understood, the stars and planets were gods watching over the earth from their lofty heights physically above the highest mountains. The nuns’ description of Jesus’ ascension into heaven didn’t take my modern world view into account. As a result, they conjured up images in me that were confusing to me because the images in my mind didn't distinguish spiritual allegory from scientific facts.

My First Communion experience makes perfect sense now that I understand the two different ways of perceiving and describing the world that overlapped in my mind back then. I wanted to experience God as a powerful, spiritual presence in my modern world of space, time and matter. Since my teachers were not distinguishing between spiritual reality and physical reality, I expected to experience Jesus as a real presence and a powerful force in my physical reality. Since I didn't, I responded in the way I was taught. I blamed myself for the failure and concluded that I must be defective, unworthy, sinful, or stupid.