First Communion

Today we celebrated the First Communion of 37 children in the parish. To my surprise, our expected presider failed to show up due to illness. As a little bonus, he sent a confrere as a replacement who is one of my absolute most favourite people in the world. As this priest has never said Mass in our church before, I basically took over and set everything up for him. Our associate just sat drinking his tea in the house and didn't even bother to check to see if everything was okay so it was a good thing I was there.

I filled our replacement presider in that we had First Communions today and told him what to expect. Something I didn't tip him off to expect was when one of the First Communicants goosestepped up to receive his First Holy Communion, while another one simultaneously ran out to throw up. I don't think the two events were related.

In between Masses, the presider asked if there was another washroom as there was a line at the one in the church. I told him no, but I offered to let him into the house to use one of ours -- I explained we have one for visitors and one for priests. (Totally not making that up). Much to my amusement, he declined for fear he would run into the associate.

The second First Communion was also amusing in its own way, but since I wasn't solely responsible for it, the pressure was off a bit. The kids were really cute and mostly well behaved and we didn't have any little Hitlers going up to Communion so that was a bonus. Someone asked me why we had split up the two groups into two Masses instead of doing them all at one. I contemplated uniting the two for a moment, but when I saw the standing room capacity crowd at the latter Mass, I realized why the celebrations had been split up long ago, and that's the way they will stay for next year as long as I'm in charge.