My Second First Communion
Jose Luis Martin Descalzo
I’m 54 now and it’s 46 years since that morning when for the first time I received your Body.
Where is the child that I used to be?
What happened those lips of a lad that opened to receive the Host?
We were all dressed in white, I remember.
We were dressed in dreams and joys as we started out on the continent of your love, and for the first time walked on the solid ground of your Holy Church.
You entered us, you possessed those clean and innocent souls that promised you eternal love and with naïve tongue, told you “We will never sin”
What ever happened those promises?
Whatever happened that white dress and that white soul?
Where did they bury that child we were on the day of our first communion?
Now I return to you tired but with the same hunger as on that day.
I dare not promise you anything but I will tell you that I continue to yearn. I will say with ever greater knowledge that “I am not worthy” but I will also tell you that I haven’t found in the whole world any food like the food I found that morning.
And I will tell you that I come, many of us come, to beg for your body:
because your bread sustains the best there is in my soul,
your bread still builds the strongest bonds between us,
because you are the strength that raises my life and gives meaning to my death, because you are the one who never failed me.
Can you find that child still inside me? Can you resurrect that child I was?
You are an expert in resurrections, you must know how to wipe these wrinkles, these hundred thousand wrinkles that time and sin and pain have embossed on my soul.
Let me receive you today – maybe not with the same innocence- but with the same hunger that I had then – let me
make my second first communion.
