I Am Said I (Huruma)

June 10, 2012 The feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus (Corpus Christi) brings back memories from a distant past of processions and first Holy Communions and innocence. When Sister Frances was preparing us for our first Communion she said that our souls would be shining bright when we received Jesus and when the day arrived it was this brightness that I was looking out for. I watched the children ahead of me kneeling at the altar rails and I looked at the soles of their shoes to see the brightness shine there, not knowing the difference between soul and sole!  Of course there was no brightness to be seen but I adjusted to this by saying to myself that there must be something else, another soul. And when my turn to kneel came I closed my eyes, put out my tongue, received Jesus and saw the brightness at the back of my eyelids. It's been normal ever since for me to experience the brightness that comes with Holy Communion. Sally Read expresses it well for me ...

You get what you ask for but not when you expect or in the way that you imagine.  A young-ish black haired man in a tracksuit ran down the platform and just managed to get on the train before the doors closed and it pulled away. He sat opposite me, one seat further down, and he was clearly in distress about something. I prayed for him silently and wondered to God if there was anything I could do for him. There wasn't! But I'm always wondering. Later, at 10.00 p.m. on that pleasant night in May when I had it in mind to go the bed early, the door bell rang. We don't usually answer  at this hour but when it rang I opened the door on instinct. A slim fair-haired man was swaying back and forth with an unmistakable smell of drink off him. He wasn't badly bruised or anything but he had the look of having been beaten. There was blood above his left eyebrow. His clothes were dirty. "I promise I haven't been drinking" he began, his speech refined, even ...