Knight of the Altar

Sister Mary Joseph beamed and spread her arms wide, as if to embrace us newly-fledged altar boys, as if to gather us within a zone of spiritual exclusivity.  “You are knights of the altar,” she declared.   We looked at each other and smiled.  We knew about knights, and they were cool: the stalwart rectitude, the round-table brotherhood, the sword-on-the-shoulders dubbing, the designation “Sir,” the armor, the colorfully draped horses, the lances, the beautiful and soulful-eyed maidens.  And though we knew our only armor would be ankle-length cassocks and crisply white surplices, our only lances the extending taper used to light the altar candles, we nonetheless anticipated cutting a valiant enough figure to wilt the reserve of even the most aloof maidens in our 6^th grade class.

“And you know, boys,” Sister continued, “that the origin of serving as altar boys lay in the Last Supper, when Jesus sent two of his apostles, Peter and John, into Jerusalem to prepare a room in which to hold the Passover feast?”  We were stunned.  Jesus and the apostles?  Us?  To be doing something the trajectory of which arced back over an unimaginable two thousand years of history?  Us?  Baseball-playing, American-Bandstand- watching, cigarette-sneaking, dirty-joke-telling, smelly-sweatsocks-wearing us?   And then Sister told us that as servers, we were acting as acolytes.  We did not know what that word meant, but it sounded important and holy and confirmed for us that, having completed our training, we were no longer ordinary boys.  We were special, marked, singled out.  We had crossed into sacred precincts.  We realized, dimly, that more would be expected of us. 

Certainly, our training had prepared us for those expectations.  We had each been issued a server’s card and had spent months memorizing the Latin responses, from the opening “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem mean” to the closing “Deo gratias.”  We enlisted parents and relatives to quiz us.  We asked the Sisters to quiz us on the playground during recess. We quizzed each other as we passed in the hallway: “Hey, Jerry, `Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.’”  “Dignum et justum est,” I’d reply.  We quizzed each other in the restroom and on the bus ride to and from school.  “Dominus vobiscum.”  “Et cum spiritu tuo.”  And the pronunciation had to be perfect.  “No, dummy, it’s `cone-fee-tay-or,” not “confetti-er.”

But despite all the memorization and persnickety attention to pronunciation, we liked Latin and we yielded ourselves to it.  It was foreign and mysterious—our own secret language of sorts.  It had a poetic rhythm that unfurled like a bolt of silk off the tongue: “ET cum SPIRitu TUo;” “Qui TOLlis PeCAtta MUNdi, MIseREre NObis.”  We especially liked the repetitive  troche of “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” of the Confiteor.  The obligatory breast beating accompanying those clustered words made their cadence palpable.

After memorizing the responses, and after having recited them flawlessly to both the principal and the pastor, we rehearsed the basic moves we would be required to make: how to hold the hands (palms together, fingers pointed), when and how to bow (not too fast, too slow, or too deeply), when and how to genuflect (knee must contact the floor), when and how to ring the bells (twice, with a quick twist of the wrist), when and how to move the priest’s missal from the Epistle side of the altar to the Gospel side.  We practiced how to receive the priest’s biretta at the beginning of mass and how to return it to him at the end, how to turn (never face completely away from the altar), how to present the cruets of water and wine (handles toward the priest), how to pour water over the priest’s fingers (towel over the right wrist, dish in the left, water cruet in the right), how to prepare and hold the censer.  Finally, as the culmination to our training, we spent a week sitting in a small nave to the side of the altar observing experienced altar boys working a morning mass.  We were assigned our first mass the following week

Many of my fellow altar boys stopped serving at the end of eighth grade.  I continued well into high school.  I liked serving mass, liked the spectacle and theatricality of it,  the ritualistic discipline of it, the processional pace of it, the weighty sanctity and solemnity of it, the symbolic resonance of each gesture and movement, small acts that contributed to the larger act of praise and celebration.  I felt that somehow, in some small way, I was a co-priest; that the vital energy of the mass, its reverence and beauty, its very syntax, depended on me, if only slightly.  I was wholly held in the experience of it, the visceral sensibility of it.  I was determined to be perfect.

And, indeed, I did draw attention.  The sisters requested me for the 5 a.m. mass in their convent during Lent, an undertaking made more complicated because I worked without a partner.  The priest often called me to do funerals, for each of which he gave me a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and weddings, for which I received from the groom five or ten dollars.  I was asked to help train new altar boys.  I could do low masses and high masses and requiem masses, Christmas and Easter and Holy Week masses.  I never missed an assignment or obligation, never made a mistake.  My folks were proud.  I was proud of myself.  I was doing something important, something meaning-saturated, and I did it well.

And then, for reasons I still cannot satisfactorily explain, sometime into my junior year in high school my faith wavered, dimmed.  I declined invitations to serve, then removed myself from the active list.  After I graduated, I stopped attending church altogether.  I had fallen away, and have remained so some forty-five years later.  I suspect I began to find, and still find, other means to meet what seems to me the primary purpose of religion: to exceed our nearliness, our almostness, our in-partness.  When I served mass, I felt, intimately, what British writer Jeanette Winterson describes as “a doubtfulness of the solid-seeming world.”   I believed I witnessed, close up, a miracle.  When the priest uttered “Hoc est corpus meum,” that thin wafer of unleavened wheat became the body of Christ.  A transubstantiation had occurred before my eyes, and I was, at that moment, in the presence of something beyond my understanding, something otherwise and beyond that released me from the commonplace weight of my being in the world, something that gestured to an openness transcendent and never sealed.  So I believed.

I have since found, however, that if we look, really look, seemingly ordinary things, things taken for granted, unsecondthoughted, can be, are, quite extraordinary things, things, as Mary Oliver says, that “are something else . . . from what they were,” things that “my body whispers to me” are miraculous.  Small things can become large things, sacramental things, transfiguring things.  Epiphanies can occur daily.  Everything points away from itself ultimately; everything arcs beyond the horizon of available meaning, beyond the tongue of language to articulate: the human brain’s 100 billion tendrilled neurons; knowledgeable hands and tools of any kind; oatmeal bowls, a well-worn chair, and pencil marks on a pantry-door jamb; a student who says, “Oh, now I see;” the deep-blue stillness of a late summer day within which the spirit of autumn hovers; Grandma Jay bowing all day over a kitchen counter making ravioli from-scratch; my mother’s fingers playfully squeezing my upper arm, her right eyebrow arching just before she laughs; my father whistling Perry Como songs while he makes the kitchen table at which, forty-five years later, every day, I eat breakfast.