For kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, my parents sent me to a one-room school called Mary Ridge that was run by two Benedictine sisters. They were attached to a much larger military boarding school run by their order. My memory is that Mary Ridge School was in Antioch, Virginia, close to the line with Haymarket. The school was in an imposing mansion settled on spacious grounds.
My parents told me years later that the property had belonged to someone in the mob who on being arrested had donated the place to the sisters. Roman Catholics were rare in Northern Virginia in those days, and I think the little school collected all the local Catholic families.Mary Ridge was a beautiful old house with lots of nooks and crannies for kids to explore.
Sister Antoinette was in charge. I have no idea how old she was. She was mature but not obviously old to a child. She was large, full of energy, and in complete control of the school. Yet she was at the same time immensely kind and loving. Sister Louise was quiet and extremely gentle and always had a piece of sewing in her hands.
There were perhaps 20 or 30 children in the school. Officially we were in grades, but we were often taught all together, and if you finished your work you were supposed to know enough to find one of the younger children to help. The sisters taught us the alphabet, and then the word God, and then how to spell our names. This was when I discovered that my name was not Lee but Leander. Sister Antoinette taught me how to spell both. Once we could spell God and our names, the sisters taught us a sentence: “God loves [in my case] Lee.”
The sisters gave us a very simple catechism that had a picture of God the Father smiling on one page and then on the next page a picture of a child doing something bad, I think hitting another child. Turn the next page and God is frowning. On the next page was a picture of the crucifix and then turn the page again and God is smiling. This strikes me as very crude and theologically wrong now. The Son does not change the mind of the Father and they are not opposed to each other in the work of salvation. Nevertheless, it is true that Jesus has taken our sin upon himself and that because of his sacrifice sins are forgiven. Jesus stands between us and the just and natural consequences of our actions. He is God himself, come to rescue us and give us a new life with God and with each other, which begins now and which the grave cannot hold.
He brings this forgiveness and new life at great cost, at the cost of a whole life of rejection and suffering that ends in a final confrontation with evil on the cross. As crude as the sisters’ presentation was, I got the message that God loves us and that Jesus went to the cross that we might live. As “O Come, All Ye Faithful” says, “Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?” I fell in love with Jesus and with anything to do with our religion. I loved to learn the prayers and to hear the Bible stories that the sisters taught us.
In due course, the sisters prepared us for First Confession and First Holy Communion. We learned the difference between venial and mortal sins. In order to teach this, the sisters used a felt board. On the felt board there were two white milk jugs that represented the purity of a soul in a state of grace. It was explained that when we committed a venial sin, like eating meat on Friday, it darkened our soul. Little black dots would be superimposed on one of the milk jugs. When you committed a mortal sin, like lying or stealing or hitting your brother, the white milk changed to black. Venial sins could be absolved by the general confession in the Mass, but mortal sins required the absolution of the confessional.
We were taught to do an examination of conscience using the Ten Commandments. I remember being told that sharing a bad report about another student, even if it were true, was only permissible if made to a competent authority in order to prevent an evil and that anything else was a sin against the commandment against false witness. Nursing anger in your heart was a sin against the commandment against murder. Adultery was mysterious, even after it was delicately explained to us. I was overjoyed that there was a way to return from sin to a state of grace.
I remember very well my First Confession. I believe the priest was Fr. Vega, who was the only priest for miles around and who originally came from Holland. I vaguely remember his going-away party held at Mary Ridge. I think I must have been about 6 or 7 years old. I remember the genuine warmth and love of the people toward him, and their sadness at his leaving, and the weary, kind, and tender face of the priest that was lit from within.
I had three sins that I clearly understood were mortal sins. I confessed all these sins and was indeed most heartily sorry for them. The priest gave me a penance of five Hail Marys and one Our Father and I walked out of the confessional, which was really a prie-dieu with a screen attached, light as feather. I was freed of a burden that was weighing me down. I very much wanted to maintain this “state of grace” and was motivated to avoid “the occasion of sin.” My milk bottle was white now, and I wanted to keep it that way. Of course, I was not always successful in that quest, and it was a source of hope that one could go to confession regularly. I think the genuine moral struggle of children and their deep desire to be better than they are is often overlooked.
The sisters also prepared us for our First Communion. I don’t remember much about this, although I am sure that they would have taken us through the Baltimore Catechism. A catechism is an outline of the Christian faith in a question-and-answer format. Question 869 in the Baltimore Catechism asks, “What does the word Eucharist strictly mean?” The answer is, “The word Eucharist strictly means pleasing, and this Sacrament is so called because it renders us most pleasing to God by the grace it imparts, and it gives us the best means of thanking Him for all His blessings.” Question 870 asks, “What is the Holy Eucharist?” The answer is, “The Holy Eucharist is the Sacrament which contains the body and blood, soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.” It was clear to me that in Holy Communion Christ gave Himself to me and filled me with light.”
What I remember most about our instruction was the mock Communion we went through. We practiced kneeling at the altar and receiving the consecrated bread, although for the practice it was carefully explained to us that this was the bread that would become the body of Christ but was unconsecrated so that we could learn how to take Communion. In those pre-Vatican II days, Communion was received kneeling on the tongue. We were carefully instructed about how to open our mouths and stick out our tongues to receive the host.
The sisters helped us understand how holy and sacred it was to receive the body of Christ and how we needed to fast before Communion. We were to receive only fluids after midnight the night before. We were encouraged to have some orange juice before Mass. We were told that after receiving we should return to our pews and remain kneeling and keep the host on our tongues until it dissolved. After Communion, we should pray for the people and things that were especially on our hearts. The feeling of this instruction was of being ushered into the greatest of privileges and of having a foothold in the adult world by being trusted with the sacred.
First Communion was a big deal and the run up was full of exciting preparations. All the boys had to get blue pants and white shirts and black ties. The girls got white dresses and veils and gloves. The boys got a black missal and a black set of rosary beads, and the girls got a white missal and white rosary beads.
The missals were important. The Mass was in Latin, which is a very beautiful and musical language. Those who grew up with the Latin Mass justly miss its beauty and profound sense of transcendence. Our missals had the Latin of the Mass on one page and the English on the facing page. There were pictures of what the priest was doing at every stage of the Mass so that you could easily follow along.
We were instructed that it was our duty to follow the Mass in the missal to the best of our ability. When I was growing up and subsequently, I heard the criticism by Protestants and others that the people had no idea what the priest was saying. At age 6 I knew perfectly well every word of the English and knew without looking many of the Latin words, simply from repeated reading along in the missal. I don’t think I was unusual. My missal was precious and important. I don’t still have the one I received at my First Communion, but I do still have the one that I used a little later when I was an altar boy.
One of the great wonders of my Frist Communion was the appearance of my uncle, Fr. Edgar Martin, S.J., to celebrate the Mass for us. My mother’s brother was a missionary in the Philippines who returned to the U.S. very infrequently. He was in the country and agreed to celebrate the Mass for our First Communion.
Fr. Edgar had been captured by the Japanese during their invasion of the Philippines and held captive in a resort called Los Banos, the baths. He was liberated by American paratroopers as the Japanese were preparing to kill all the prisoners in order to eliminate the witnesses to their war crimes. When I went through discernment in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine many years later, one of the priests on the examining committee had also been a missionary in the Philippines and had been held at Los Banos. He said that my uncle organized the Jesuits to scavenge for food and do the cooking and that my uncle helped keep the rest of the prisoners alive. I remember him as a burly man with an air of kindness and sadness about him. He may not have been very keen on celebrating our First Communion Mass, which was held in the Chapel on the Vint Hill army post. My mother said that at the sermon time, when he was encouraged by the nuns to say something to us he said, “You are all very nice children.”
Receiving Communion as a child, I felt clean and pure and peaceful afterward. One of the things I remember about my Frist Communion was how alive I felt afterward. We went back to the school where the sisters cooked us a breakfast and we broke our fast. I had always hated the look of scrambled eggs and had never tried them. Sister Lucille encouraged me to have some of the eggs that she made for us, and they tasted amazing. Things looked and tasted differently. The world was transformed and luminous.
My parents had organized a celebration at our house for relatives and friends. I rode to our home from the school in the back of a car with Fr. Edgar. He was notorious for smoking the finest Filipino cigars. He was smoking one as we rode home, and he took the cigar ring off his cigar and put it on my finger. Many years later, when I was studying how Family Systems Theory applied to the church, one of the teachers said someone in the family usually picked you to be the one in the family to take on this role. I thought of this moment, and my intuition at the time that something far more precious than a paper ring had been given to me and that I had been entrusted with something sacred. I felt a special bond with my uncle.
Shortly after my First Communion, Sister Antoinette asked me to be the altar boy for the weekly Mass at the school. This took place in a very crowded room, which had probably been a parlor in the old house. The altar took up most of the room, with only space for one row of chairs along and around the walls on three sides. The part of being an altar boy that I remember the most is holding the paten, a gold plate with a wooden handle on one end, under each person who received the host. The purpose of the paten was to catch any crumbs of the host that might fall. It took some skill to keep up with the priest and place the paten properly.
There was a clearing in the woods near my house when I was a little boy to which I would creep with a mixture of fear, wonder and longing. There was a little open space in the woods and a large oak tree had been uprooted by a strong wind and fallen over. Here the sun shone through the tree leaves in a particular way and there was this great sense of beauty and fearsome presence. I crept up to this place time and time again. I had to overcome my fear in order to satisfy my longing. I was afraid not because I thought there was something bad there but because I was aware of the presence of supernatural goodness. There was a light there that was more than the natural light of the sun filtering through the trees. I would say now that in that place I encountered the glory of God I did not have those words as a little boy. I saw the same light gathered about the altar in the little chapel at Mary Ridge School.
Shortly before I was to leave Mary Ridge, Sister Antoinette took me aside and showed me the brochure for the military boarding school that the sisters ran. She said that I should talk to my parents about sending me there so that I could continue my Catholic education, because she believed that I had a vocation to the priesthood. I remember being frightened by the idea of living away from my parents and by what I imagined the school might be like, and being struck to the core by sister telling me that I had a vocation. The words went into me in a way that is hard to explain. They went in and they went home, and I recognized them as truth. It confused and frightened me, and yet there was something deep and precious in that moment. I could not see how this would be. I was supposed to grow up and get married and have children.
I think that I have an ability to discern the vocation of Holy Orders in others. As a result of my experiences, I am cautious about how and when and even if I share that perception. I think that sister told me the truth but that it came too soon.
The Very Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding, dean of the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, is entering his fourth decade as a priest of the Episcopal Church.