6 Altar Boy
Bless me Father for I have sinned. Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa. Somehow, I could not avoid being so sacrilegious. I have not brought this up before for fear of banishment from being an altar boy or excommunicated as a Catholic. But now I want to own up to when I held the paten plate under people’s chins while the priest placed communion hosts on their tongues. I had to fight the demons in me who saw the wild variation of colors and shapes of their tongues. I had to subdue my laughter. I was so afraid that the priest would see my lack of reverence for the holy sacrament. In actuality, it was my adolescent way of handling what seemed gross.
The paten is held under the chin while the priest places a communion host on the tongue of a parishioner. Free photo by Peter Kwasniewski 2016. http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2016/04/the-omission-that-haunts-church-1.html
As I watched each person come up to kneel at the communion railing, I could see their pious expressions as they sought their spiritual connection. When the priest served the communion wafers, the people would tilt their heads backward and extend their tongues to receive the holy sacrament from his hands. The tongues were unbelievable in variation; all colors of the rainbow and a multitude of shapes: red, orange, green, blue, yellow, purple and variations in-between. Long tongues, fat tongues, short tongues, each with the same mission, receiving this tiny piece of unleavened bread.
One parishioner with a multicolored tongue brings forward a memory. The long skinny tongue was actually green but had red spots all over it. A yellowish scum covered that. When the wafer was placed on the tongue, the tongue surged upward, and the wafer lurched out on to the paten that I held below. Fortunately, the priest reacted quickly and picked up the wafer and again placed it on the person’s tongue. I thought this was hilarious and I bit my tongue for the rest of the communion service to keep from laughing.
After that I managed to keep from laughing by looking only at the chins of the parishioners and avoiding looking slightly upward to the mouth and its tongue. The priest was very patient with me, but when I accidently kicked over the bells that were rung for different parts of the mass, he kind of lost it and I heard about it after the service.
At that time, the church service was performed in Latin and as altar boys we learned responses in that language. I remember many of the phrases, but still do not know the translation. A few years later the mass was converted to English.
These were my Jr. High School years. My mother would take us up to St. John’s church in Loveland, Colorado every Sunday where I was assigned to serve at the 10am mass. People kept asking me if I aspired to be priest. When my dad overheard this, he exclaimed “The hell he is, I want grandchildren!” (Eventually I granted his wish).
Once I was in high school, my life became full of other activities and I stopped serving at the church masses. The scary notion of being a priest was never brought up again. Surprisingly, I stopped being a practicing Catholic and have drifted into other forms of spirituality.
