So I was at the First Communion of my little niece, E.
The Church is clever--it decided long ago that a great way to appeal to all the little girls in the universe was to invest them for the ceremony with fancy white dresses and flowers and veils.
E. not only looked lovely, but was decidedly on top of all things ceremonial, carrying the holy cruets up to the priest and kneeling at the right place and popping up again on time. She is one of the those girls who likes to make an extremely pious face over her little tented hands. No one out holies a little girl when they are feeling holy.
The boys are served a little less well, as the immortal sacrament as practiced in American today requires them to wear little blue blazers and kahkis, plus boring shoes that make a really loud sound when you kick the pew in front of you. Which, if you are a boy, you do. For a church that comes up with embroidered stoles and snowy albs and special hats and all sorts of awesome outfits for our priests, you'd think they'd have something a little more kickin' for the little boy communicants.
As as the way of our people, we sang terribly: mostly just the women, in off-key reedy voices, while the men's eyes glazed over and little thought bubbles labelled "lawn" and "Red Sox game" appeared over their heads. Even that half-hearted effort broke down whenever the poor choir guy tried to introduce one of those new-fangled unfamiliar hymns with the friendly modern words, which just made everyone go mutinously silent. Look, if we're going to sing at all, we want it to have proper lyrics like "triune Godhead" and "O most holy Trinity, Three in One and One in Three." If we wanted easy, we'd be Unitarians.
One of the little girls in white got to mount up the high wooden altar thingy and do the Reading, which naturally was about the Last Supper and the post-Resurrection Supper and other holy bread times. I really admired the terrific relish with which she pronounced THIS . . . is the BLOOD of Christ! You could tell she was feeling the opportunity to lay down the word from up on high in her floaty white dress.
One of the things that surprised me was that I totally teared up at one point. It had something to do with a ceremony of growing up for a kid who I met the weekend she was born, and partly to do with it taking place in one of my Dad's favorite churches (him being the sort of guy who had favorite churches, and strong opinions about ugly ones), and partly to do with once having been a little girl in that white dress (my veil blew away and someone rescued it from the church hedge, a trauma and restoration I remember to this day).
Or maybe it was the pollen!
And then we piled into our caravans and long we traveled unto a dwelling place in Brighton where we celebrated the traditions of our forefathers and foremothers with steak, beer, and cake. Well, the grownups anyway: the communicant had equivalent sugary beverages and tried really, really hard to keep her dress nice.
