May God Keep You

I am terrified to write today. I keep adjusting the table I'm on. Angling my body and moving my sunglasses and hiding the smoothie I brought into the coffee shop I'm in so someone doesn't interrupt me.

My great grandmother gifted me a treasure box (too small to call a chest) that lives on the dresser Ty and I share. I received this relic in the spring of 1998 after my First Communion, my second (slightly more voluntary) indoctrination ceremony into the Roman Catholic Faith. The third, Confirmation, I never had the opportunity to complete. A first communion happens at the age of 6 or 7 but Confirmation is a time in young adulthood (usually 12-14) when an individual voluntarily studies the Bible and confirms their decision to live as a Catholic. I had come out around my 13th birthday and had entered into Confirmation classes hoping to solidify my faith, to find some kind of respite in it, some kind of unconditional love I didn't have (or couldn't see) at that time. I asked a lot of questions, some to challenge but most as a means to ultimately understand. I sometimes wear the fact that I was dismissed from these classes for asking too many questions, as a badge of courage, an instance I spoke out against and in defiance of and an intolerable and oppressive institution. The reality is, and whether any human actually holds this power is something I still use to temper the sting, I was rejected. Maybe not by God, but as directly as I was I told I could be.

Inside the treasure box were two things: a note written in 1994, congratulating me on my first communion; and a necklace that is around my neck as I write this, of Saint Christopher-- the Patron Saint of safety in travel and protection.

The charm and pendant are exquisite and the depiction is one I find uncharacteristic of the Vatican brand. A hunky (first thought I had but couldn't name when I'd received it) St. Christopher has baby Jesus on his shoulder emerging from the Ocean tide with a walking stick and a, dare I say, fabulously draped cloak and garment.

Skinny, bleeding Jesuses on crosses -- to scale and larger -- are what I have experienced most in Roman Catholic Churches. Also prevelant, are the stations of the cross, sequentially hung, embossed, carved, sculpted, fresco'd and, in the really wealthy churches (how?) stained glass. I'm sure several are in gold. Whatever the medium, averting your eyes from skinny (basically naked) JC, you'll find the same version of him being whipped, tortured, in the closest thing they could get to surround sound.

Aesthetic and marketing qualms aside, The RC Brand does (albeit less effectively than other, more functional, organized religions) give us humans an arena to connect with source and at 6 years old with, as Catholics believed the literal body and blood of skinny JC in my tum, Source put Nana's hand on my back.

Nana, especially at the end of her life, had devolved into a discontent, not dissimilar from the morophine addicted Old Maid in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Mrs. Dubose. Despite Nana's crotchety snaps at my Mother and Grandmother, they still allowed Nana and I to enjoy one another. I don't know if I've created a memory around a picture of us together or what but I maintain that we did just that -- enjoyed one another.

The picture I hold of the two of us, theoretically responsible for this memory, was taken of me, almost 2 and her 80 years my senior; sometime between that picture and her death later that year, she wrote this note :

"To Adam, My Great Grandson

Happy Holy Communion, God Bless and keep you

with lots of love.

Great Nana,

X

June 1994"

My mother and grandmother were in tears as I read it aloud. It didn't fully register then but holding the note now it's difficult to create a channel wide enough to allow all in generates in me to move through.

From what I can tell, there is a comma after my name, a period after my title (Great Grandson) The words Holy. Communion. Each sentences of their own, with the final comma nestled between the month and year she wrote it in, June, 1994.

Language is, often, all I have and hers in this note cauterizes, even now, the wound my given faith created.

Without a comma, this sentence reads :

"God bless and keep you with lots of love."