The Age of Reason

The age of reason was six, we were told, my first grade classmates and I.  With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace.  Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t fair.  Now, through confession and the Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.

            While far away in Moscow, Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, and in New York City, Charlie Parker lay dying, painstaking preparations drilled us in our catechism as if we were a flock of talking parrots and set us to commit to memory the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and mea culpa, the Confiteor, the confession of faith.

            We were told the Mysteries.  Ah, the Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the Pope.  And somehow I began to acquire the elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell.  All this before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because we didn’t believe in ghosts.

            The fat country priest, whenever he’d visit in his black cassock, like a widow’s dress, a row of small black buttons down the front, had a slightly crazed look that made me instinctively distrust both him and his discourse about the humble, the meek, the pure of heart, the merciful, the peacemakers, and so forth.  And he’d grit his teeth and pinch my little boy cheeks until they hurt, leaving red welts that wouldn’t go away for the rest of the afternoon.

            I remember with lysergic clarity that it was a chilly but sunny early Easter morning.  It must have been the spring following the French capitulation at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu; around the time of the Hungarian uprising.  I shivered in my grey flannel short pants and blue blazer with the brass buttons and the large white bow, as I came face to face for the first time with my failure of faith and its implications for the possibility of my eternal damnation, having exercised my six-year-old reason.

            The tiny red-brick country church was fragrant with sweet incense.  Dust motes and smoke defined the rainbow sunbeams that pierced the stained glass images.  In one, the carpenter Joseph, hacked away at a plank with a chisel, the hammer in his right hand poised to give it another blow, the floor around his sandals littered with curly wood shavings.  In another, staff in hand, Saint Christopher, in the water up to his knees, looked astonished at the progressively increasing burden of the Child on his shoulder.

            Under the direction of the music teacher in the loft at the back, older children resolved Ave Maria, ponderously but in a most emotionally satisfying way, from the dominant to the tonic, despite the random discordant squawking of accompaniment from the wheezing pump organ.  Easter must have fallen early that year since the springtime was not yet far enough advanced for flowers, although bouquets of greenery graced the embroidered white altar cloth among the six tall candles that signified High Mass.

            I revelled in the certainty that my soul was pure, like the diagram pinned to the wall in our Catholic, country classroom that showed a shape like the squat, square milk bottles we drank from at lunchtime and which were contained somewhere within the human abdomen, white.  There were none of the small black marks that indicated venial sins as depicted on the milk bottle in another diagram, indicating that should one die in this condition, it meant serving time in Purgatory, and certainly not the solid black of yet another that showed God, who could see everything with an x-ray vision akin to Superman’s, a mortal sin, which would send you straight off to Hell.

            After all, there had been a sort of renew or reset function, a circuit breaker for evil, active in the form of Confession and Absolution and a three Hail Mary penance the afternoon before for my reported transgressions.  There had been three: envy, falsehood and theft.  First, envy of a school chum because he had a baseball glove, and not just any baseball glove but a real first baseman’s trapper with a deep pocket, with leather thongs strapping it together.  A baseball glove that gave off a sweet saddle soap smell, the perfume of which I could imagine him inhaling as he waited to receive the toss that would render my base hit an “out”, the ball hitting the leather with a very satisfying thwack.

            Next, I confessed a small lie; that yes, I had carried a bucket of fresh water out to the chicken coop; a sin which in retrospect, has seemed to increase in gravity as I’ve grown older, since it implies the possibility of the additional sin of cruelty to animals, although at the time, that issue didn’t figure in the equation.

            And finally, theft; the nickel I’d snitched out of the loose change on top of my parents’ dressing table, in an afternoon stillness broken only by the ticking of a wind-up alarm clock, to buy a soda pop.  It was ginger beer in an old fashioned brown bottle with an orange label, from the ice box at the gas station at the crossroads, and it cost five cents.

            The bells were rung, the golden chalice raised, the genuflection performed, transubstantiation achieved.  We were to receive the host on our tongues and not to chew, but wait for it to dissolve, for chewing would be disrespectful, said the nuns, once the bread and wine had become the flesh and blood.

            To my relief the priest alone drank the blood on our collective behalf, a shot of rough, cheap, sweet, Italian blanco at nine o’clock in the morning, a cross to bear if there ever was one.  Shuffling in a pious line to the altar rail, we were each doled out a little, round, dry, white wafer that bore no resemblance of any kind to what I conceived bread, or for that matter, flesh to be, despite that for some reason it called to mind the little white bread triangles with the crusts cut off, containing cucumbers, that my aunt prepared at festive occasions and which were thought to be representative of the type of food that grand and gracious people ate.

            In this environment of hackneyed spiritual serenity, with the quick brutality of an unexpected electric shock, catechism combined with age-of-reason logic to lead me to an utterly terrifying conclusion.  Nausea quickly overwhelmed me and I violently vomited the divine flesh onto black-bound prayer books with gilded page edges, down the front of my double-breasted blue blazer with the brass buttons, and over the white lace communion veil of the girl in the pew ahead of me, trying all the while desperately to resolve the contradiction of transubstantiation cannibalism that had engulfed my imagination with such graphic realism.  To this day, the slightest whiff of burning frankincense, a tree resin of all things, the commerce in which has sustained the rural subsistence economy of parts of Oman and Yemen for over two millennia, causes me to repress an involuntary gag.