Alter

“Do you speak Spanish?” Father O’Brien asked.

“No,” I whispered.

Guitar strings cued the first eight counts of the opening hymn. The parishioners stood.

“I thought you could,” Father whispered back, his Irish accent thick.

“No,” I repeated.

“But it’s a Spanish mass,” Father said.

It was time to line up. I didn’t move. I was already where I needed to be standing.

“But I’m not Spanish,” I said.

“It’s a Mexican mass,” he insisted.

“I’m not Mexican, Father Mike.”

The first altar server moved into position, the second beside me. Both white teenage boys. Neither of them were asked if they could speak Spanish.

I turned my head and looked at Father Mike, “Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, that’s why I’m with him!” He gestured to the Mexican priest standing beside him. He was the first non-white priest I had ever seen.

“I have to ring the altar bells before communion and I don’t know when to ring them during the Spanish mass. Could you tell me when?” I asked the new priest. He didn’t answer. The procession was beginning. My anxiety rose.

The blessing of the Eucharist would take a little longer than usual. Normally, the altar bells reminded the faithful of transfiguration. That evening, these sound cues reminded them of the miscast ten year old who should have known how to speak Spanish at the 6:30 PM Sunday Spanish mass.

Ringing of the bells at communion was the most important job a third altar server had. My hand death-gripped around the handle of the bells. If I took even one gulp of air, my direct line to bilingual Spanish-speaking Jesus would be interrupted. I really needed for bilingual Spanish-speaking Jesus to pull through and let me know when to ring these bells because if he didn’t, the boxed wine would not turn into His blood and the dry paper wafer would not turn into a piece of His forearm. I, and I alone in a small Mississippi town, had the ultimate power of fucking up a 2000 year old holy tradition of food magic.

I rang the bell seven times. It’s only supposed to be rung twice.

I was never invited back to do a Spanish mass. I did, however, become a popular choice for funerals.

In 2020, I turned 35. I hadn’t participated in a Catholic mass since my best friend’s wedding in 2017, and we all screwed that one up. In fact, I stopped going to mass in 2008 when one Sunday an archbishop in Lexington, Kentucky said in his homily that if we thought George Carlin was funny that we were going to hell. Carlin had died a few days earlier. The week before, the same archbiship subtlely announced in his homily about abortion that if we were voting for Obama we were going to hell. Being pro-choice myself, I felt uncomfortable taking a free donut after mass. My first niece was also born on that day.

Either way, the Catholic Church and God had spoken through this archbishop their universe to Rome to Southern agenda will and it looked like I was going to hell. Why bother going to mass? And the donut was unremarkable.

The shadows of Father Mike’s presumptions haven’t gone away in my 35 years of existence. No matter what institution I find myself in, the micro aggressions, biases, assumptions, and flat-out violence finds itself infiltrating my mental well-being. I haven’t been able to fix it, no matter how many bells I’ve rung, whistles I’ve blown, and bullets I’ve dodged.

I want to start exploring an alternative narration to the norm of what is experienced in PWI and give another truth, as my truth is so often questioned. And if you’re reading this and happen to be another Asian woman, you might be questioning your reality right now. I don’t have to get into it. You already know.

My apologies that my entries will not be originally written in Spanish, though it is a lovely language.