A Burning Soul

The opalescent light, the fragility of the incorporeal, the longing for what is elusive...

By Mary Gordon

The day of my First Communion was a perfect day. May 19, 1956: the single date I can call up with the assurance that it marks a time in which I was completely happy. On that day I had no doubt that I had mastered everything that was required of me. The rest was in the hands of people whose competence, or more properly, expertise, was beyond question. This would never happen in my life again.

*

The preparations for the great event extended from mid-winter to the height of spring. From the beginning of February to the 18th of May, when each one of us would make his or her First Confession, a large part of each school day was devoted to making us ready to receive the sacrament. And from that time, the first grade classroom, which had been for me a locus of plain dread, became transformed.

My dread had started with my first step over the threshold, when I entered the room, pulled from my
father in a flood of tears (he may have wept as well). I was oppressed, as if my shoes were perpetually wet, by the classrooms’ smells: sour milk, bologna sandwiches steeping, simmering, in tin lunch boxes in the cloakroom whose doors did not provide sufficient barriers to keep the odors from me. And, except for catechism, whose precision I enjoyed, I was bored by the curriculum. I already knew how to read and write; pretending I was on a level with the others enervated me and gave me my first deep lessons in contempt; drawing and mathematics seemed to me ridiculous, beside what I knew to be the point of everything: words.

And there were requirements for a kind of orderliness I considered both unimportant and entirely beyond me. Folding your paper in four to make identical columns separated from each other by a nearly invisible crease. Covering books in brown paper. Keeping books in a particular order in the desk. Other protocols, which did not involve my controlling objects in the physical world, objects that had clearly vowed to fox and vex me, I quite liked. I was very good at sitting in silence with my hands folded perfectly in front of me on the top of the desk. But hanging my hat exactly right on the hook reserved for me in the back cloakroom: this I could not do.

Some time in the month of October, I vomited in class, ruining my penmanship book, whose cover, green with black palmer method letter spelling out “Penmanship” had to be ripped off by Sister Trinitas, who dealt with everything calmly, efficiently, and made me feel, remarkably, no shame. She was a lovely woman, a kind woman, a calm woman, beautifully contained, sheathed, but what the sheath enclosed was not a sword, rather a lily, odorless, white, formal; she seemed quite as much a symbol as a living thing. Her skin was very white, waxen almost, like the texture of a beeswax candle. Her paleness seemed almost sacramental because when you thought of her your mind immediately went to things that in themselves touched on the sacred: blessed candles, Easter lilies, and she was hidden, precious, like the host concealed in the darkness of the tabernacle, whose interior none of the likes of us would ever see.

After I vomited, she took me down to the nurse’s office, and while I looked at the posters of the five basic food groups and allowed my eye to fall on the machine to test our hearing, she and the nurse agreed that I should be sent home. The uncalled for holiday changed everything. After that, my dread diminished incrementally but irregularly, throughout the fall and early winter. I don’t know why: perhaps it was the surprise, almost a shock, that what I had imagined would be an occasion for shaming became a moment of gracious care. But it took the furnace of preparations of my first communion to transform the room into a place of purpose, where everything, in its clear importance, in its obvious essentialness, became delightful. The room turned from the center of dark banishment to a place of light: high windows opened by a pole with a hook at the end which only Sister Trinitas could reach; the rest of us being much too small. Everything I was listening to seemed wholly desirable. There was so much to be learned. It was the kind of learning that had the surplus value of teaching me, or allowing me to know, that I did not need my parents. I could get along without them. I did not need anyone: I belonged to God.

*

There were fifty of us packed into that room in those crowded postwar days. Triumphalist times: Catholic children not sent to Catholic schools risked their immortal souls through contamination, the mere potential of being put in danger by careless parents, sent to public school, into the mixed, non Catholic world, as if they’d been frivolously sent into the plague ward for convenience, because the quarantine was too much trouble, too expensive, too much work.

And so we sat, half a hundred of us, in the weak light of late winter, early spring, our hands folded on the maple desk tops where some wicked child may have carved his name, a desk top we would each polish with a half lemon given to each child on the last day of class, one of the last days of June: but that warmth, that release, was in the future. Now it was March, April, and the light was silvery, still, with a hint of ice menacing it, and we sat, expectant, even in the most disobedient attentive.

There were catechism questions to be memorized, but we had done that sort of thing before: Who is God, God is the Supreme Being, Why did God make me, to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven. So the definitions of the Eucharist: The Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine — were simply an extension of something we had already learned before.

But in addition to the catechism questions, we had to memorize a special prayer, longer than any we had yet learned. Far longer than the Our Father. We were not yet judged ready for the Apostles Creed, although my family, ambitious for my spiritual distinction, had taught it to me. This new prayer we would say in the darkness made by the screen of our hands in front of our closed eyes. We would say it in silence, part of what was called “making a Thanksgiving.” But now, to learn it, we said it aloud, fifty of us crying out with one voice: Look down upon me good and gentle Jesus while before thy face I humbly kneel and with burning soul pray and beseech thee to fix deep within my heart lively sentiments of faith, hope and charity, true contrition for my sins and a firm purpose of amendment. The while I contemplate, with great love and tender pity, the words which David thy prophet said of thee my Jesus: “They have pierced my hands and my feet. They have numbered all my bones.”

*

Never had any words pleased me so much. I would not have put it this way then, but I know now: it was the mix of the physical, the metaphysical and the historical in this prayer that struck a chord of ultimate rightness, ultimate satisfactoriness, of many tones being hit straight on and with full resonance. I have never known who wrote these words, and from what historical period they arose. You will say it is ridiculous to assume that six and seven year olds could have any understanding of these words. But it is not ridiculous. I knew what a burning soul was: I was an ardent girl, any experience of ardor I have had since then is only a recapitulation, a diluted version of what I felt as a child. It was easy for me to believe that my soul was burning because I had a clear image of what my soul might be. It was an oval, the shape that Sister Trinitas had traced with a white chalk line on the board, then filled in with splotches made of red chalk, representing sin, which could be erased — poof, like that — by the sacrament of penance, represented by the eraser. But no, my soul was not a simple oval, it was flame shaped, the flame I could fix with my eye at the top of the candle, and I could feel it burning within me, my desire to love God, to be good, to be good not for the sake of other human beings, and not even for the fear of hell fire, but because not to be good, to sin, would be to betray the love of God, who had died for me. And so I did feel great love; I did feel tender pity: Jesus had suffered unto death on the cross for me, he would have done it if I had been the only person in the world, I knew that as well as I knew the words to the pledge of Allegiance and that I was an American child, and that the communists would kill me for being both Catholic and American if they got a chance. Most thrilling to me were the parts of the prayer that began with “While I call to mind the word which David thy prophet said of thee my Jesus: ‘they have pierced my hands and my feet; they have numbered all my bones.’” My father’s name was David, and I knew I was half Jewish, so to hear the name David was to have my heritage invoked and to underscore what I suspected; my lineage was more ancient, more burnished, deeper-rooted than any of my classmates. And I could feel in my body the words pierce and number, they made my flesh thrum; I could imagine the nails going straight through the tender flesh in the top of my arch. In the shoe stores that sold Buster Brown shoes (the boy, the dog on the inner sole, stepped on every morning brutally by children all over America), you could put your foot in an X-ray machine and see each one of your small bones. I brought this image to mind when I thought of the Roman soldiers, crushing bone after bone, ripping my feet, then when they got to my hands, puncturing then drilling through the tender spot below my knuckles, still dimpled, still babyish, nevertheless able to mimic the pain of the crucified Lord.

With this knowledge, the words I had absorbed into my skin made my body no longer an encumbrance, an irrelevance, but part of the sacrament, a necessary vessel, sacred in itself: My body would contain the host, it would house the body of Christ. In the presence of the host, which we would take inside our mouth and swallow, as we might swallow ordinary food (but everything about this was extraordinary), He would become our guest. We sang this as an idea contained in the hymn we all learned, sitting still in our wooden desks with their empty inkwells (first graders were allowed pencils only) in our stiff serge navy blue uniforms (jumpers and white Dacron blouses for girls, long pants, Dacron shirts, blue clip-on ties for boys),the equality of the ugliness a false promise of future equality, spread out on a larger terrain.

Sister Trinitas would put the silver pitch pipe between her calm lips, and her beautiful white cheeks would swell like a Botticelli Zephyr’s as she blew the note and we prepared (each of our hearts in our mouths, and yet these hearts were high) to learn the hymn. It was called Little White Guest, and we would sing it one day only, only one in our whole lives: the day of our First Communion.

*

We practiced the words many, many times. Hundreds of times it must have been, so I will never forget them. In a way that I cannot with any lines of great English poetry, I can call them to mind in a second:
You have come to my heart dearest Jesus
I’m holding you close to my breast
I am whispering over and over
You are welcome O Little White Guest
And now that you’ve come dearest Jesus
To nestle so close to my breast
I whisper I love you my Jesus
You are welcome O little White Guest.

This is the first time in my life that these words are a part of written rather than sung language. And as I type them and then read them, I see that they are entirely unremarkable: not an outstanding image, not a luminous word. Except for the central conceit: the little white guest. What could be more sentimental? But even now it strikes me, not as sentimental, but as poignant. At the time, although I was one of the children singing the hymn, I was aware of the poignancy of the image of children singing: I was simultaneously singing my heart out and swimming through a reflexive, rushing ocean of self love.

*

One of the most important things to be drilled into our heads, and one of the greatest causes of anxiety, was the pre-Communion fast. In those pre-Vatican II days, one was required to fast from midnight of the night before taking the sacrament. I would, of course, be asleep for most of that time, but I had to be very careful, very very careful, vigilant to the point of death, not to pop something into my mouth on my way past the kitchen to the bathroom. I worried that even brushing my teeth might be a violation of the terms of the fast, but Sister Trinitas assured me it was not, when I raised my hand to ask the question. Did my classmates feel relief that I had voiced an anxiety they might have shared, or did they think I was a freak, ridiculous in my over-scrupulosity?

I knew that the emptiness I would feel that day would be a sacred emptiness, unlike any kind of ordinary hunger. I longed for it; but I feared — I had been warned so often — of the stupidity of my own flesh, its coarseness, its vulnerability to the temptations of the devil. To break the fast would not be sinful, but nonetheless would make the taking of the sacrament impossible. And, like little soldiers, we repeated the command, “Nothing must pass the lips after midnight.” The repetition was meant to fix the idea, not only in our brain, but as if we had inscribed it, like M. in Kafka’s penal colony, onto our flesh, the writing and rewriting, the inscription and re-inscription. Nothing after midnight. Nothing past the lips.

*

The day arrived: May 18th, the day of our First Confession, a day not of light but of darkness, the day of reckoning, one of the Dies Irae, where we must acknowledge our sinfulness, where the red blotches that had marred the souls left perfected at Baptism, would be removed.

What were they thinking of? We were six, seven years old? How could we have sinned?

I was accused of a special sin, but by one accuser only: my mother (from my father, in all our time together, there was not one word of accusation, only the balm of absolute approbation, absolute love). My sin was touching the part of my body that was forbidden, and worse, the inability not to touch it when I had been told that touching it was vile, so vile that it must be kept secret from all the world.

And my mother told me, explicitly, that this was my special sin and that before communion it must be confessed.

I knew that no other child in the church that day had a vileness anywhere approaching mine. This weighed me down — but was I conscious of a kind of Counter-Reformation glamour: the sinner/penitent, penitence possible only because of sin, the old journey to the depths, finished now because I had climbed out of the pit and seen the crucifix: a point on which I could fix my eyes to give me courage to struggle out of the mire of loathsomeness to which my touching had consigned me? But no, that is a wishful looking back. I did not feel glamorous; I felt bad. But I was not a bad child.
I was a very good child. All of us were. We were six years old.

How can we forgive them, why should we forgive them, for teaching us to say, when we had barely learned our ABCs, “Bless me Father for I have sinned...”?

*

The fifty of us were broken up into four lines, one for each confessional. Each confessional had two doors, or velvet curtains, through which the penitent walked, kneeling then in darkness on a hard wooden kneeler, apprehending, but not seeing the screen behind which was a sliding wooden door, behind which Father sat. On the other side of Father would be someone else, some other penitent, somebody one would pretend not to know, pretend not to be trying to hear: in any case, irrelevant. In the sacrament only the essential was allowed: priest, penitent, and of course, hovering above us in a greater darkness: God.

I was lucky that I was put in the line for the young Irish priest who was in our parish only for a year. He had dark curly black hair, a face that was always flushed, a heavy beard that never seemed well-shaved: full, girlish lips, also red, and dark green, sorrowful eyes. He was beautiful, and we all knew it, but it was not something we would have said about a priest.

I opened the wooden door to my side of the confessional and knelt on the hard wooden kneeler. I could smell my own sweat, and residually, the priest’s sweat, different from mine, adult, male. My heart pounded with dread. He slid the screen open. “Bless me father for I have sinned, I committed a sin of impurity with myself.” The words were out in the world: cobalt-colored rings that spun in the air above my head and clanked together as they joined and then transpierced the plastic screen. And then, after that, there was only silence, a silence I found so dreadful I could only imagine the terrible words from the priest that would, any moment fill it up.

Now I can feel only compassion for him. What could he have felt it was right for him to say to a six year old girl who confessed “impurity?” His mortification must have been immense. But was it equal to mine? If I was waiting for some words of enlightenment, none came. Only my penance: three hail Marys. And the injunction to go in peace.

And I did, and I was radiant, walking with my perfectly folded hands to the altar to say my penance. It was as if I had been dipped into a sea of sheerest silver, and walked out into the sunlight, my body brilliant as the sun. Or as if my veins had been shot through with silver light, so that there was nothing in my body that partook of darkness, not the smallest cell. The question must be asked: would that radiance have been possible without the prior sense of defilement? And was it worth it? This source of the ideal of the fire of making that burns off all dross, cuts out all irrelevance, all excess, all that is not crystalline, each tone not exactly true, each carelessness or slippage or smut or smudge, each encroachment on the shining surface of even a speck of matter that has not been shot through.

A dance teacher, trying to show me the proper position for a plie, explained its importance by saying, “you must go down to come up.” We believe that about so much in life, but what would it be like to have grown up with no sense of the necessity for self-abasement? Is contrition possible without self abasement? And is forgiveness possible without contrition? And without the experience of having been forgiven, how would one learn to forgive? And would the world be better without the possibility of radiant purity? Endless forgiveness? Does this require lines of shivering six year olds, believing that they are bad? Then transformed into radiant creatures, ready to take in God? Radiant and ready for what they have been told will be the greatest day of their lives.

*

The night before the great day, my mother and I lay everything out for the morning. My grandmother had made my dress. It was a source of perverse pride, a pride all the more honorable for its pinch of disappointment. I wished I had had a dress whose skirt was magicked with under crinolines, whose amplitude was added to by rows of machine made lace. At the same time, I understood my mother’s contempt for that kind of display: “It’s all right for Italians,” and the superiority of my grandmother’s creation: sprigged organdy with a drop waste: austere, Northern, a hymn to the power, the superiority of restraint.

My mother had written a check, which I brought into school in a crisp white envelope, for my First Communion prayer book, the size of a deck of cards, hard and shiny as if it had been shellacked, the virgin on the cover a vision (also pointing to the superiority of restraint) in silver blue against a dove grey background. On the inside of the cover: a little miracle, cut into the stiff cardboard a recess;
a rectangular grotto for a tiny white plastic cross. The check also paid for my First Communion veil, which was provided, somehow by the nuns, who ordered identical ones for each girl child communicant. Preventing a hideous competitiveness in what should have been an almost sacramental accessory — the veil that mimicked their own, the one that marked them as brides of Christ. A sign of the power of the parish in the larger commercial world: there was a store in our Long Island town that devoted its Maytime display to First Communion pocketbooks and gloves. We bought a pair of see-through white gloves with sprigging that rhymed nicely with the organdy of my dress. And a pocketbook, white patent leather, with handles neither too short nor too long for my hands and wrists, and a satisfying gold clasp that shut itself with a finality as unquestionable as the Creed.

I remember waking up that morning, and the quality of the light, opalescent, heatless, with the fragility of the incorporeal. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, as if even words were too fleshly for that day, and might, somehow, mar the perfect purity I longed to perfectly achieve. A sip of water, then my mother’s unfamiliar attentions to my dressing: I was the child of a working mother and had long ago learned to dress myself. I was afraid to walk up the driveway, afraid to absorb the slightest blemish on my white shoes. So my mother pulled the car out of the driveway, and stopped for my father and me. At my insistence, there was silence in the car, and then a silent escort by my parents to our classroom, from which we would process, in a double line, across the street into the church.

Procession. Processing. The verb pronounced with an accent on the second syllable, indicating movement rather than the first, process indicating a patient slow accomplishment. What is the pleasure of walking in a line, to music, behind others dressed identically to oneself, so obviously
of the same cohort or tribe? Do I have to believe it is a species of militarism, the appeal of the proto fascist in us all?

There is a home movie of me processing into the church. My father jumps out of the sea of onlookers when I pass him. Piously, I lower my eyes and shake my finger at him: there will be no vulgar familial communication on this day. In later life, my appetite for obedience will always be mixed by an equally strong impulse to rebel. But on that day, I am completely obedient, and there is nothing I want to do
that will mark me as different from my colleagues. Jesus is coming to all of us — there is enough of Him to go around. As we are all perfect, there is no need to excel. It is an economy of plenitude in which no one can be left out, therefore no one need stand out.

*

Did I understand, as I was processing with my classmates, that this was the best part of it all? That the minute I crossed the threshold into the church the experience, having properly said to have begun, could rightly be said to have begun being finished? That the moment that the event went from being exterior (outdoors, brilliant), to being interior (inside the church, dim lit, enclosed) it was already over? And what is the connection between that reality and the fact that, indoors, we were less a spectacle? For I know perfectly well that I was aware at all times that we were being carefully watched; both in my imagination of the event, and in my experience of its actuality, I was watching myself being watched: I had a triple identity, I was the child, walking, kneeling, opening her mouth, I was myself watching that child among other identical children, and I was a member of the observing crowd, moved nearly to tears by the unique, the incomparable sight.

But when the church doors closed and the spring sunshine was occluded, and we were in the light reflected off the grey green walls and the barn like beams of the Gothically vaulted ceiling, another kind of door was shut. I had to fix my entire attention on God: the God in the Host on the altar, the God whom I would take into my body, purified by hunger, by contrition, by the sacramental touch. “O Lord I am not worthy,” that prayer, said just before we would receive, Domine non sum dignus in the Latin of the day, drew me like a magnet; my unworthiness, the incomparable unearned riches of the love of God.

There was still the possibility of failure. I was away from food; but I could faint. There were stories of children, always girls, who did, and had to be carried out and missed receiving. I both envied them the glamour of their ride in some man’s arms, and was terrified that another kind of physical weakness — not from my stomach, but from my blood or brain or whatever controlled uprightness, consciousness — would disallow me from the great moment, the moment for which I had prepared for so long. Or I could trip on the way up to the altar, mortifying myself and my parents. Or I could choke on the host, or my teeth could touch it — this, I knew was considered a sacrilege and in the very process of sanctification I could be involved in sin.

But then the moment came. I did not trip or choke; my hands were folded perfectly and the host slipped, like a silver fish into dark water, onto my tongue and down my throat.

After that, the world was banished from my sight, my mind. I lowered my eyes, concentrating them on the floor or the tips of my pointed, folded fingers. It was an agony to keep my eyes open while I was finding my place in the long pew. I longed only for darkness. For the moment I rehearsed: the screen I made of my two hands, the deeper darkness when I shut the blind of my two eyelids. I was alone with God. I said the prayer that I had memorized. I felt the love, the pity, the piercing, the numbering. I thanked God for coming into my soul, and I thanked God for my parents for making me a Catholic — and then I couldn’t think of very much else. I might have thanked God for being an American or for my school and my extended family, but God knew and I knew that it was pro forma. The important things were that I had made my first communion and that I was my parents’ child — God and I knew my gratitude for those was real.

I had taken God in. My task was to experience the experience of having God within me. But trying to fix my mind on God, who was outside, beyond time, did not help my sick dread, the consciousness that it was being used up, this precious substance I had invested in for so long. Every moment was turning each succeeding moment into the Last of My First Communion.

*

After the memory of my first prayers behind the double screen of hands and eyelids, there is no memory: memory stops. There is a nullity, a blank. Did we process out “in an orderly fashion,” or did we become ordinary children again, running to our parents willy-nilly, like anyone at all? Was there some sort of celebration afterwards? I don’t remember one, although I know that it was customary to have a party after first communions. But there are no pictures of a party, only me, my parents and my grandmother sitting on folding chairs in our driveway. My mother was incapable of organizing parties; did my grandmother feel she’d done enough making the dress, and my aunt, who didn’t like me, but who made beautiful cakes — was she acting out her anger at me for existing on this special day? It doesn’t matter. What could cake, sweet drinks, presents mean after what I had experienced. After what I had become?

*

Fifty years before the day of my First Communion, May 19, 1956, it would have been May 19, 1906. The First World War had not happened. Queen Victoria had just died. Henry James was still alive. The automobile had not been invented. The Interpretation of Dreams was six years old, as I was on the day of my first communion.

It seems impossible that an identical number — 50 — denotes an identical number of years — 50. Incomprehensible that the separation between 1906 and 1956 and 1956 and 2006 are the same. It is a strange thing that past-ness does not spread itself out, like cement on a slab to be smoothed over with a trowel creating a perfectly flat surface. If we think of someone now dressing in the style of Marilyn Monroe, if we should see a woman on the streets of New York in 2006 dressed in the halter dress from The Seven Year Itch, we would think it amusing, stylish, but not so anachronistic as to be absurd. But in 1956 if a woman were wearing long skirts, high button shoes, huge picture hats — we would have thought her mad or known her costumed as someone who could not possibly be anything like herself. When I try to think of a movie star who would have been current in 1906, I remember that the concept of movie stars had not yet been invented. Impossible to imagine a world without the idea of a movie star. Without the moving picture, the image making its way through darkness to our porous brains. Was it the movies that divided time into the far past — everything we could not see filmed — and the accessible past, the past we can recapture? — The long dream in the waiting dark, which can be seen and grasped again each time we choose to enter.

How will we know ourselves in fifty years? To whom and how will we be connected?

I know that, whoever I am, something lodged in me, or was lodged on that day. The taste for the invisible. What is felt in the body through charge and temperature, but unseen. A way that I can know myself. My highest self, the truest one, the one that ordinary life must, by its nature, blur and muddy.

*

It is the fiftieth anniversary of my First Communion. What was I then that I am still?

I am no longer a child. I am aware of all the things that are beyond me. Sister Trinitas’ pitch pipe, playing the one right note, is rusted now, or lost, or buried with her — I do not even know if she is still alive. As an adult, I saw her once. Her hair was blonde; she was wearing a black and white hound’s-tooth suit. I would not have recognized her. But always, the tone she started appears, then vanishes, then reappears. And I can see her face, white, beautiful pursing its lips, blowing on the instrument to make the tone.

Her lips on the pitch pipe started it: the longing for the tone. Its elusiveness. To find it is to return to the body of the kneeling child, behind the reddish screen, made by light penetrating the thickness the flesh and blood, blocking, but not entirely, the world.

She is alone and not alone, that child. She is and is not one thing only. She is a kneeling child, alive in a moment of time. But she believes she has taken into her body timelessness. What will become of it, this timelessness? What will become of her? Fifty years. More than half a lifetime. Half a century.

The knowledge that in fifty years she — I — will no longer be a body in the world.

Mary Gordon is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction; if you have never read her work start with her collected stories, which is terrific. She has written in these pages of God, prayers, and September 11.