Confirmation It is Palm Sunday and I am twelve, a soprano in the choir at St. John's Episcopal Church in Great Bend, Kansas. It is the day of my confirmation. I am wearing a white dress and a small silver cross under my heavy choir robe. Outside the long watery-green church windows, the April sun is warm on the spirea bushes with their little flowers. Kneeling between my friends Joanna and Margaret at the altar rail, I feel the bishop's hands pressing down hard on the top of my head, sending the Holy Ghost into me, and I close my eyes to shut out the church, to catch the moment of transformation when the Spirit of God will move into my mind with me. The bishop moves on to Joanna, and I open my eyes again. Later, as I return to the altar rail to take my first communion, I feel shyly grown up. I have never tasted wine before. Unconfirmed children are not given communion; nor are they to go behind the altar rail, into the place of Mysteries. I look up at the gold cross on the altar, and I feel a change in myself after all: I feel I am no longer a child, but a young woman in a new white dress, so accepted by God and the community I kneel among that I may now, if I like, walk up to and touch the altar. The new taste of wine in my mouth, I return happily to my choir pew. After church my mother and father solemnly give me a prayer book with my name on it, my long, adult name: Jacqueline. Grownups who paid little attention to me before come up to me and hug me. I shyly shake hands with the smiling, white-haired bishop. At home I hang up my white dress and put on my jeans. I set my palm cross on the table by my bed. We have a celebration dinner of fried chicken, and my little sisters, who were very impressed and bashful with me while I wore my confirmation dress, are quite disrespectful of my new adult status by dinner time. After the dishes are washed, I go upstairs to my bedroom. I sit on my pink bedspread and hold my palm cross. A summery warm breeze flutters in the curtains of the open window over my bed, and tangles gently in my fine hair. I want something. I turn the cross over in my hand. I want to be alone today, to think about all that has happened to me. Across the road from our house is a wide Kansas wheatfield, stretching off to a scalloped horizon. I walk deep into the waist high green wheatfield until my house is far away. The April sun is warm on my shirt. I trample down a place just big enough for me and lie down, hidden away from everyone but God. God has always been my protector. When I was afraid in the darkness, I would raise my arm and open my hand and ask God to hold it because I was scared. When I was three I had heard tires on the rain wet pavement outside my window, and had thought the humming sound was a choir of God's angels, sent by Him to sing to me. Now as I lie looking up at the great Kansas blue sky with its rushing white clouds, I feel at last the change the morning has made in me: I am longing for more than God's protection; I want to know Him. Hidden as I am in the wheat, I feel the world has gone away, and only God and I remain. I can see God personified in the blue sky above me, and surely, surely God is seeing me: perhaps He is drifting gently over me in the form of a cloud. I shyly hold up my arm, as I have done so often in childhood. Here I am, God, I whisper, and the green wheat rustles around me in the breeze. There is nothing more to say. The afternoon drifts by, while I lie hidden from every human on the planet, looking up into God, Who looks down into me. I feel His delight in me. I hold out my small brown hand and see it as God might, and I delight in myself. The clouds dance across the wide Kansas sky. |
