To the wall
Wednesday, 31st December, 2003, was the date on which I was received by the Catholic Church, after fifty years of loafing and deliberation. I wrote, and as usual discarded, a verse memoir of the event under the title “Half Moon,” having not shown it to my priest, Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, for fear he might approve. It was a day for shedding things, and in particular, I shed my last claim to “secularity,” for I was no longer on my own. I had stayed up all the previous night, trying to condense fifty years of sin and error into a few moments of Confession before limping to the Holy Family chapel, to have this lifted off.
It was the end of many months of preparation, under good Father Jonathan’s direction. Millions, actually many billions, had come this way, towards Heaven’s Gate in Jerusalem Wall. In each soul, there was a secret story of spiritual advance. In my over-literal imagination, I pictured the Damascus Gate, up the road from which I had been staying at Cairo House, on a winter’s day when it had been snowing, thirty-two years before; and my bare feet had been covered by only flip-flops, and two plastic bags against the snow. Yes, this is how I prepared for things, at that age and frequently since.
For it is the seventh day of Christmas, the eve of the Octave of the Nativity: … Puer natus est nobis. … And a Son is given to us: whose government is upon His shoulder. … And we have been inducted into this Christian city.