Mar 11 2011
Who made the World?
Reading this makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It reminds me of the days coming up to my First Holy Communion when we had to learn these questins off by heart. It’s well I remember the day when the nun in the Cabra Convent had us all in the one classroom with some of us standing along the wall and around the back of the room. We waited in fear of the Priest who was about to descend on us like the Holy Ghost did on Jesus in the waters of the Jordan River. And in he came blowing his nose into his big white handerkerchief and he huffing and puffing. The nun geneflected to him and thne turning to us little petrified children asked us what we had to say to ‘The Holy Father’. ‘Good morning Father’ is what we had been instructed to say, wheter it was a good day or not. Well I didn’t think it was a good day for us anyway and especially for me as I couldn’t remember anything I’d read out of my Cathecism. The Priest glared down at all us prospective little sinners as his great big beady scanned the classroom for his first victim. On my journey to school that very morning I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I’d be the one selected to answer the first question from the Priest. And so it was that his staring left eye caught me off balance. I stood in frozen terror as he focused in on me and bellowed out ‘Who made the world’? Suddenly I was transfixed in a twilights zone of slow motion. Like some of those dreams I’d often have where I’d run and my feet wouldn’t move an inch. My mouth opened and not a word could I utter. The Priest was bellowing out at me again but I couldn’t hear a thing. The poor nun was red in the face and bursting a gut to give me a good slap across the face to make me answer ‘The Holy Father’. Then it happened…a warm wet sensation ran down my little leg and straight into my white sock and ended up inside my little shoe. From that day on I never forgot who made the world and I never forgot who made me piss myself at six years of age either.