In Sunday school, the student asks the teacher how old he will be in heaven. The teacher tells him to pray for the answer. The student is nine years old and leaves class for the last time.
There’s a sense of something liminal in certain coffeepots. They’re old and systemic in their design and can be found in retirement homes or churches. The beige coffee pot is safe and nostalgic like a grandmother. In it, there’s a desire to be a part of something organised and grounded in history; alternative facts; ancient and sturdy. The contempt for it leaves you to figure it out for yourself – what others haven’t been able to figure out for two thousand years. Contempt turns to hateful curiosity, turns to reverence, turns to temptation. However you feel about it personally, you can’t control how floodgates open and images of mass and Sunday school rummage through your head when smelling the incense.
On November 4th, 1944, the Germans burnt down the church which had been standing in the fishing village for over two centuries. Ironically, the church was a cultural heritage piece. Even more ironic, the soldiers were commanded to burn everything but the churches. A hedonistic gesture: Gott mit uns – not with you. The damaged church bell was placed in the new church during its reconstruction in 1951. The new church was bigger, laden with white concrete from floor to ceiling, and exposed wooden beams.
At fifteen we attended mass again. For science, he said, smoking a stolen cigarette outside the double doors. A mutual reach for each other’s hands as we entered, the only two people under 70. We held hands in solidarity to the fear of re-entering this world; Should crocodiles come swimming. Our first holy communion was a silent baptism. We ate – Kristi legeme for deg – and drank – Kristi blod for deg, the bittersweetness of the wine mixing with the unsaid on my tongue. The priest smiled at us like a lobotomist. He touched his thumb to my forehead, and the pressure of it, the pain, seeped into my frontal lobe. I looked to my friend, but he was staring at golden Mary: a metre-long statue of marble, up in the sky, hovering in the rafters. Nailed stuck to the painted ceiling, between the boats, the ark, the baby Jesus, his eyes – where we came to find God. I wondered if he saw him. He couldn’t meet my eye. The wine left a stain on my brain. Quietly, I excused myself out the double doors, having found nothing but a tipsy red glow in my cheeks – a stain that would follow me for years. My friend stayed behind.