I WAS ALSO AN ALTAR SERVER. I was pretty good at it- I was the only kid in the parish who didn’t pretend to get high whenever they were serving with the incense, so that was always my job at the masses where it was used.
Until I almost killed the bishop.
Then, for some reason, they didn’t let me serve anymore…
you WHAT
Ok, so once I was an altar server at a confirmation, which is a sacrament that REQUIRES a bishop. Since I was the only altar server who wasn’t a total jackass with the incense in that i didn’t pretend to be high, they had me in charge of it. That meant I had to light it. But the lighting process was… difficult. See, we had this really, really shitty thurible. If you’ve never heard that word before, a thurible is a metal ball with holes in it, and it’s on a chain- you put the incense in there and a charcoal briquette and then you swing it back and forth to get air flow. But our thurible didn’t have enough air holes that you could gently rock it back and forth. I was taught to light the thing by swinging it. Hard. So I took it out into the vestibule before people got there and I’m swinging it like some kind of feral gibbon because this incense won’t fucking light. I wasn’t paying attention to what’s behind me- I’m trying to light this incense in a corner by myself, away from where people should be. What I didn’t realize is that the bishop was coming up to say hello, until it was too late. There was a THUNK and a THUD and I turn around because oh my god I’ve hit somebody. The bishop’s behind me. His head is split open and there’s blood everywhere. He’s kind of standing there in shock, and that’s when the deacon comes out. He sees me standing there, he sees the bishop, who’s found a seat, and he just goes “I’ll call your father.”
Now at the time, my old man was the only craniofacial surgeon within about ninety miles, so the deacon calls him while I’m panicking. "Doc, there’s been an accident,” he says, and my dad, as he tells it, knew I was the source of the disaster. (I mean, this wasn’t even a decade after I’d set the altar at a different church on fire- I do not have a good track record with sacraments.)
So we get the bishop carted away and it turns out that he’s lost a LOT of blood and has a concussion because he took a ten-pound metal ball to the face. So he can’t serve Mass, but this is a Big Problem. My tiny town has four Catholic parishes, plus a fifth Catholic church that doesn’t really have a parish body but does have a priest. Catholicism is HUGE where I grew up. They couldn’t just cancel confirmation. Fortunately, my town is- well, was, he’s dead now- home to the previous bishop, who was in his 80s and retired. Deacon called him up and explained what had happened and he came in and did the Mass.
The kicker? I still had to serve. They didn’t have anyone else available. So I just sort of stood there, traumatized by what I’d done, holding the weapon and listening to the retired bishop talking about how to be a good Catholic. Pretty sure step one is don’t hit bishops in the face with a ball of metal.
I was reading this whole thing with an image of a small jingle bell / conker sized ball in mind and was thinking “Well that can’t be that bad right?” then 10 pound ball was mentioned so I googled
thurible
…
Bad very bad and GIANT ball thing. Haha
This is a really fancy thurible!
These are a little more average.
Here’s the pope with one, to give you an idea of scale!
Okay, but does anyone else want to know about the time you set a church on fire?
It wasn’t the whole church, just the altar!
The 250 year old antique altar that the town’s founders had brought over from Germany. Here’s a picture of it!
Really, this one was my mother’s fault. Also, it was really just the altar cloth if I’m being honest- the altar itself just got some light scorching.
So for a little background, the town I’m from has a bunch of Catholic churches. The biggest and oldest of these I think technically predates the town’s incorporation, and this is the church that this story takes place at. Now, when I was a wee bab, there were three elementary schools in town. One was the parochial school I’d been asked to leave in pre-school (long story involving sea turtle sex), one was parochial across town (I went there for middle school), and the other was public. I went to the public one. At this time, the public school kids would get trotted out of class a few times a week for religious ed (this upset me so much because the kids whose parents opted out got to have free reading time), but this wasn’t at the parish from the first story.
The reason that this is important is that the classes at the two parochial schools were small- maybe twenty kids in the grade. But at the public school, there were more than a hundred, and about half of those had parents who had them do religious ed through the school (as opposed to at their home parish). So there were probably fifty, maybe sixty kids in my class, and my last name falls halfway through the alphabet. This is important because that meant there were about twenty-five kids who went ahead of me. Remember that.
The time I set the altar on fire was really my mother’s fault. I’ve always been clumsy, and to this day I still struggle walking in heels. I mean really struggle, I basically hobble. I was seven years old and gearing up for my First Reconciliation. If you’re not Catholic, what this means is that I was getting ready to tell my sins to a priest for the first time so that he could absolve me of them. Catholics- good ones- are expected to do this at least twice a year. The Church says that the Age of Reason- when you’re able to be responsible for your actions- is seven, and so at that age we were to do our First Reconciliation. The ceremony was simple. One by one, we would go into the confessional, carrying an unlit candle. We would whisper our sins to the priest, we’d be absolved, and then we’d come out of the confessional where a server would light our candle. We’d carry the candle up to the altar and kneel down with it, placing it with the others. The candle flames represented the light of our newly-cleansed souls, see- it was all very symbolic and beautiful in the dimly-lit church.
And then my mom decided I had to do it in heels.
They were my first pair of high heels; white patent leather kitten heels with little bows on the strap. I hated them. They were dainty and darling, everything I was not- and they required grace. (I’ve never had that- both in the physical and spiritual sense.) Mom was so enamored with these shoes. She had me practice walking in them the week before the sacrament. Time after time, I’d take a few wobbly steps and trip and fall. I told her I couldn’t do it. I told her I shouldn’t do it, that I’d fall. She said I’d be fine, and that I just needed to keep practicing.
Sunday rolled around and we went to the church, me fretting the entire time about these godawful shoes. It wasn’t actually a Mass- there was no homily, no consecration, just a prayer service and then the lengthy confession. I don’t remember what sins I confessed, I just remember going in there and worrying about the shoes. I also remember my candle- it was white with gold cherubs on it. I left the confessional booth, wobbling on those heels. My candle was lit, and I carefully proceeded to the altar. The first challenge was the steps leading up to where the altar was, three of them- I wobbled, but things were ok. All I had to do was cross a few feet of floor, kneel on the marble plinth, and put down my candle. I crossed the floor, putting a hand out to balance myself-
And that’s when the heel of my shoe got caught in a grate.
Down I went, falling face-first into the altar. The altar cloth pulled forward, and I knocked over all the candles. The altar cloth fell atop them, half-anchored to the altar itself by the weight of the Missal atop it.
The thing about altar cloths (and vestments, and church stuff in general): the stuff that actually gets used in the Mass is expensive. A lavabo- the cloth used to dry the hands of the priest after he’s rinsed them in holy water before consecrating the Host- runs in the 30-40 dollar range if it’s a real linen one from a good, Catholic-owned company, and of course it has to be real linen because Catholics believe that Christ Himself is present in the Eucharist. To present Him with a cotton blend or (shudder) polyester would be insulting- or at least that’s how some parishes see it. It varies, of course- but this was (still is) the grandest church in town. And that’s just the hand towels. This is actually prescribed in the Secretariat for the Liturgy, “These linens should be beautiful and finely made, though mere lavishness and ostentation must be avoided.”
So sometimes, you cut costs where you can.
Sometimes, you think you can get away with a lightly-woven polyester blend dressed up with a little glittery Lurex for your altar cloth.
You think that it’ll be fine, that it’s just the white cloth under the colored runner, that if you’re paying nearly a grand for each of your priest’s chasubles (the poncho things) and dalmatics (the short-sleeved embroidered robes), that your church can afford to save money somewhere.
And normally, things are fine.
Normally, nobody even notices the white altar cloth.
Normally, you don’t have the human disaster that is me carrying fire while wearing heels.
The cloth caught fire because it landed on twenty-plus candles and I don’t remember a whole lot of what happened next. I remember attempting to roll away from the smoky inferno I’d created. My parents must have collected me and hustled me out of the church- I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I do remember my mom saying “go go go!” and my dad throwing me over his shoulder and getting me into our minivan. There wasn’t any permanent structural damage, but to this day there’s still a scorch mark on that altar. It wasn’t seriously damaged, and it’s been cleaned up some, but it’s there if you look.
The next year, when it was time for First Holy Communion, it was suggested that it would be better for everyone if I received this sacrament at my home parish, not at the big parish with the rest of the public school kids. Of course, that was a disaster, too… Like I said. I’m not good at sacraments.
Tell us about the communion, we want to knoooow.
This one’s actually very simple!
I went into anaphylactic shock upon drinking the wine. Turns out I was allergic to either the alcohol itself or the sulfites in it. Whoops.
And no-one’s asking about the sea turtle sex??
I posted it on a separate post, but I might as well tell it here, no?
Preschool was a weird time for me. I was one of those horribly precocious children- I’d taught myself to read before I was three- and so while my classmates were learning their ABCs, I was reading chapter books I’d brought from home. It was honestly a total waste of time, and I acted out a lot because I was bored as hell. It was really more like day care, but understaffed- for the entire three and four year old class, there was only one teacher. Her name was Sister Ida and she would play us songs on the guitar and sing. But this wasn’t enough to mollify me; I had been SO EXCITED about school because that’s where you get to learn. The kids in books all went to school- my mom says that the summer before I started preschool, I’d get out of bed and wake her up in the middle of the night asking if it was time to go to school. But then school turned out to be an utter disappointment. A lot of preschool is really about socialization; learning to share, learning to get along with other kids, learning not to be pushy- but I would shut down around other kids because I just wanted to read books. I’d throw a fit when my books were taken away, so Sister Ida just let me read. What else could she do? My parents didn’t want to move me up a grade because I was bad enough at talking to children my own age and they really didn’t think I’d thrive with kids older than me. I wasn’t more mature emotionally than my age cohort- I was just academically quicker, and that was a recipe for disaster if they’d bumped me up.
My parents could never get stuff done with me around, because I was always asking a million questions, so they turned to that old standby, the electronic babysitter. If I was out of books to read, I could turn on the TV; my mom just left the one in the living room tuned to the Discovery Channel. This was old school Discovery Channel, not the reality show network it is today, which meant that I was watching animal documentaries all the time. One day, I saw a documentary about sea turtles. Specifically it was a program about the miracle of sea turtle birth- how they have so many eggs and how they don’t all make it to the sea. There was a segment on how the sea turtles find mates and how the males hang onto the females for up to twenty-four hours and how mating is violent but then she has all those eggs… I thought it was amazing. It seemed like some kind of magic trick- insert magic wand, presto change-o, baby sea turtles. I decided that I would take this in for show and tell- I would demonstrate (drumroll, please) mating.
I had these little plastic turtles that I put in my schoolbag. Show and tell came around and when it was my turn, I stood up in front of the class and said “I’m going to show you how sea turtles mate!”
Sister Ida was not fast enough to stop me. I started talking about how the sea turtles entered a mating bond and stacked the plastic turtles on top of each other and then talked about how the eggs came out of the female’s cloaca. It was upsetting to the other children because I was using big words they didn’t know and it was upsetting to the nun because I was teaching three year olds about sex. When I started talking about how the male enters the cloaca and stays there for as long as a day and how the female sea turtle tries to bite him because his claws hurt, well… they’re just lucky I didn’t have visual aids beyond those two plastic turtles because male sea turtle genitals are enormous and horrifying.
This all led to a conference with my parents where the principal explained that 1.) I wasn’t learning anything; 2.) that my boredom was actually diminishing my burgeoning social skills; 3.) and that I was introducing material that wasn’t grade appropriate to kids who didn’t understand and generally being disruptive to the whole class. Really, it was the best thing for me- the principal thought that I’d be better off at the public school where they actually had resources beyond a singing nun with a guitar. So when it was time for kindergarten, that’s where I went.
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