When we were little, our mother would take us to church. We would sit in the back, quiet, hidden. We never went up the aisle, never took the wafers. I asked her why once. She said it was like a play. The play has many actors, many rituals. But the ending is always the same. We were not the actors. We were the audience.
One day we stopped going. She never mentioned it again. The priest lingers in my mind, encased in a plume of incense, forever young. His hair carefully slicked back. His robes unwrinkled. His eyes occasionally drifting to me in to back, telling me something I can't hear.
I don't believe in heaven and I don't believe in hell. I believe in choices. I believe in moments in time. I believe that the only thing divine we are capable of is forgiveness. Forgiveness for the choices we made.
The people we hurt. The people we lost. The people we found.
Is that what the priest's eyes were saying? No matter what's been done to you, no matter what you yourself have done, you are forgiven. No matter how scared, no matter how lost.
You are forgiven.
The communion wafer, the way it dissolves on the tongue but is never really lost. The Catholics believe there is something divine in the wafer. And that something is in you now.
And you are in it.
-Robbie O'Connell
YOU ARE READING
EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)
Teen FictionTO BE PUBLISHED BY WATTPAD BOOKS DECEMBER '23! Marina's new life in Boston might seem perfect on the surface. She's a student at her dream school, MIT, and she has her family to support and guide her. But when old ghosts lurk in every closet, can a...
