First Communion

‘I miss God’ – Jeanette Winterson

Going to church was like being initiated into a great mystery. Mum took me to the Sunday morning service every week. Halfway through the priest took the children across the road to his house. We sat on a thick, brown-orange carpet and I ran my hands through it and pretended I was sitting on the back of a giant dog. If we sat well, Father Michael gave us fizzy cherry drinks that were so pink they made some of the children wheeze and need their inhalers. He told us stories from the Bible in silly voices. My favourites were Noah and Moses and all the Saints. I liked the outlandish and surprising things they did, like parting the red sea and having animals as friends instead of people.

Tuesday evening was the study group for First Communion. I had a gold book that I read while the back of my legs stuck sweatily to the green plastic chairs. The room smelt like candle flames. We learnt about the apostles and read the catechism as Jesus looked on contemplatively from his cross. I wrote answers to the questions in the gold book in my best neat writing so that they could see if I was ready to receive the sacrament and the Holy Eucharist. At home, mum spent the evenings sewing me a white dress with tiny fans embroidered on it, and her friend gave me a necklace with a neon picture of the Virgin Mary holding a lamb.

First Confession was a serious matter. There were no good stories or gold books - only the Act of Contrition prayer which was heavy with long words and hard to remember. We lined up outside the confession box, preparing our worst three sins to confess to Almighty God. Inside it was dark and quiet and smelled like frankincense. I wasn’t supposed to know who was on the other side of the partition, but I could see Father Michael’s blonde-ginger beard through the holes in the grille.

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. This is my first confession.

I am sorry for all these sins and all the sins I can’t remember.

Thanks be to God.

My penance for my first confession was twelve Hail Marys. That was fine because I had a rosary that my granny had brought me from Lourdes, and for several weeks I had been saying one Hail Mary for each of the fifty nine beads every night. They were dark red and shiny like cherries or fat drops of blood. When I finished I put it under my pillow and thanked God for my family and asked him to look after all the dead people I knew of who were in heaven (so far just my Granny’s friend Muriel).

Then I slept. In my dreams the devil tried to tempt me into evil like he did in Deuteronomy but I warded him off with my rosary and a recitation of Our Father. I knew I was safe: I was under the protection of God.

My dad didn’t come to my First Communion. He stayed at home and his friends came round and listened to Fleetwood Mac and drank whiskey. When I asked him why he wasn’t coming he looked at me carefully and said that God didn’t exist. His friends nodded seriously but didn’t look up from their glasses. I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that God was something you might choose to believe in or not: like the grass growing or the clouds forming, He just was.

When I got home there was a book waiting for me on my bed by a man called Nietzsche. The cover showed a figure standing triumphantly on a rock. I sat in my embroidered white dress and read the first chapter. Nietzsche thought that God was dead, which seemed strange, because Father Michael said that God was everlasting and omnipotent.

I tried to read more but it confused me. I wondered what it must be like for my dad and his friends to have no one to talk to at night or recite long prayers to; no one to watch over their dead friends or protect them from the devil in their dreams. I thought about how empty, how terrifyingly non-sensical, the world would be without God.

That night I prayed for Nietzsche, and slipped the cherry-blood rosary in to my dad’s dressing-gown pocket. I left the book on the nightstand where my mum might see it too, just in case.