Watching Christmas Mass With My Grandson, The Wee Heathen
Talking Catholicism with the kid
On Christmas Day, I was channel surfing with my nine-year-old grandson and happened upon a televised Catholic Mass already in progress.
What a thrill!
Now, I’ve told this kid millions of stories about my Catholic upbringing. The good, the bad, and the extremely ugly. These discussions usually end with The Boy expressing relief that I wasn’t raising him Catholic.
I felt the compulsion to give him a little peek into what my world was like at his age, so I didn’t change the channel, saying, “ugh, gross, PTSD” as was my usual custom.
“Wanna see what I endured every single Christmas?”
“Sure, Mum-Mum.”(The child is a master at humoring me.)
We tuned in not long before the Consecration (the wine into blood and bread into body bit), and I automatically began reciting all the responses with the TV congregation. No thought was involved. The words still poured out after decades without a single brain neuron firing.
“You remember all that?”
“Sure I do, I heard it thousands of times.”
“Thousands?”
