It was my husband who first broached the subject of our daughter, Annie, making her First Communion. This touched on the sticky issue of organized religion--a concept our family had all but ignored for years. It's not that we're heathens exactly. Both my husband and I had gone to Catholic school as children, but by the time we were grown and married, we had become the dread "fallen away" Catholics the nuns had warned us about in sixth grade.
After Annie and her younger brother Alex were born, church meant attending Mass twice a year. I remember carrying a howling 3-year-old out of Easter High Mass and cleaning up Cheerios strewn on the pew on Christmas Day--not exactly beatific experiences.
But when Annie turned 7, it was fish or cut bait. If we ever wanted her to know what it meant to be Catholic, we couldn't skip her First Communion. And that was how she and I wound up in the basement of Saint Anthony's Church along with 40 other mothers and their second graders, each signed up for 12 Saturday mornings of instruction.
A wave of nostalgia passed over me the first time I came in and sat on the familiar folding metal chairs. But much had changed--the class was led by a volunteer in a business suit rather than a nun in full Dominican habit. A TV/VCR stood in the corner. The catechism text had changed, too. There was less emphasis on purgatory and plenary indulgences and more on spirituality. Annie, however, was not impressed. None of her friends from public school were Catholic, so she was without her usual coterie. She squirmed, she sighed. It was only when the children were allowed to color the saints in the prayer book that she perked up.
"What did you learn today, Annie?" my husband asked when we got home.
"Uh, forgiveness," Annie said shortly. "Can I go roller-blading now?" And that was that.
Meanwhile, each Saturday I was having piercing flashbacks to my youth.
