Seminary Boy. John Cornwell

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       14

      AT MY MOTHER’S suggestion I responded to a call from Father Cooney for altar servers. Following an evening’s instruction in the rituals, and several mornings serving Father Cooney’s Mass, I found that I had an inclination for being on the sanctuary. I discovered an unexpected satisfaction in the dance of the rituals and rhythm of the recitations. The murmured words of the Latin echoing to the church rafters, the bell chimes, the devout movements by candlelight in the cool of dawn filled me with wonder. Lighting candles before the statue of the Virgin, reverently making the sign of the Cross with Holy Water on entering and leaving church, carrying rosary beads on my person at all times, genuflecting with reverence, crossing my forehead, lips and heart in the correct manner at the Gospel, calmed and soothed me.

      In retrospect, there was a measure of narcissism. Through all those bad years I had often lost myself in ritualistic play. On the bedroom wall was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with hungry eyes and blood on his hands. I knew the picture had a life of its own because its eyes followed you about the room. I would offer in my play a piece of bread to the Sacred Heart, holding it up to his bearded mouth as if bestowing on Christ himself the gift of the Eucharist. I put an old satin dress of my mother’s around my shoulders. Shaking with excitement, I carried the piece of bread around the room slowly; bobbing up and down, I muttered in pretend Latin over a vase. I jabbered away in a make-believe homily to the four walls. It was as if I was both heroic actor and awestruck audience in a cinema, watching myself on the screen. One day in the midst of these performances I heard a sound: looking towards the crack in the half-open door, I jumped with fright. I saw a sea-grey eye gazing at me, like the eye of God himself. Mum was watching in silence, from the landing. After that my rites became ever more secretive.

      When I first began to serve Mass, my religiosity on the altar, for all its apparent self-discipline, was childishly puffed up. Each morning Father Cooney would open the doors of Saint Augustine’s church at twenty minutes to seven precisely, to greet me waiting on the steps whatever the weather. There I stood sometimes drenched to the skin, sometimes caked in ice and snow, after the two-mile cycle ride from home without breakfast. These were the days when communicants, including children, fasted from midnight the previous day. Father Cooney, I was convinced, was observing me on my knees before and after Mass. I saw myself as he might have seen me: an angelic child surrounded with sacred light; a glowing little saint in a stained-glass window. I bowed profoundly till my forehead touched the carpeted steps of the altar; I beat my breast heavily at the Confiteor; I turned my head low and devoutly towards Father Cooney, as the ritual demanded; I lifted his chasuble at the consecration, while ringing the sanctuary handbell with a vigorous flourish. I did all this with a show of profound reverence, while I basked in what I imagined to be Father Cooney’s approval.

      Father Cooney’s unspoken admiration was as nothing, however, to the sense of power I believed I had begun to exert over my mother, who still lay abed as I let myself out of the house before dawn and who began to speak to me with grudging respect as if for the clerical estate. She had even taken to rewarding me with the cream that collected at the top of the milk bottle, which she normally reserved for herself. ‘You’ll need this,’ she would murmur, as she poured the cream over my porridge when I returned from Mass, to the sullen envy of my siblings and the wordless amusement of my father. This was holy power indeed.