Unless we carefully reassemble our values, helping a child to prepare for First Holy Communion becomes the sum of catechism lessons learned, trips for procession rehearsals, dress fittings, and last-minute reminders to get cameras ready. All these things are normal and good and in the right scheme of things, but they are not the heart of the matter. Perhaps it is necessary to justify the early reception of First Communion. "After all, do you honestly think they understand what it's all about — at seven?"

Should a child wait until he can understand what he is doing before he receives Holy Communion?

The child really does understand as well at seven as at seventy. The Holy Eucharist is a mystery as profound and unfathomable as the Trinity. One does not understand how Christ can assume the form of bread and wine. One believes. A child must believe, and if it helps to substitute the word understand, then he must understand that the bread looks like bread but is not bread, it is the Body of Christ. The wine looks like wine but is not wine, it is the Blood of Christ. To ask him to understand the mystery of it is asking of him something that even his elders do not understand.

"But how can you be sure they are really reverent enough?"

Before we protest too loudly on this score, we should weigh a child's supposed incapacity for reverence against his purity of heart and mind and soul. The relationship in Communion is a two-way thing. There is not just the child receiving Christ. There is Christ also, wanting to come to the child. "They are My delight." "Suffer them to come unto Me." First Communion at seven is very appropriate.
Reading the lives of the child saints is apt to leave the parents of the average child properly depressed. St. Therese never refused God anything after she was three. Blessed Imelda desired Christ in the Eucharist with such longing He brought it to her Himself, in secret. St. Tarcisius died at the hands of pagan soldiers rather than surrender the Eucharist he was carrying to the early Christians.

We look at our own children, who seem to be taking it all so calmly, and wonder how to stir up in them any of the awareness of these blessed ones. Unless God wills it, we never will. For some mysterious reason, it was His will that these small saints enjoy a conscious intimacy with Him in the Eucharist. But though our own children may not receive the same privileges of grace, they have this in common with the child saints: Christ comes to them as wholly as He did to the saints. What the child saints experienced by divinely cultivated intuition, we must substitute for as best we can with teaching, with illumination, with the feeding of their faith. And all the while there will be sufficient grace.

How do we prepare a child to receive Christ in Holy Communion?

There are a thousand ways for as many children. If there are frustrations that go with teaching catechism class, the most poignant of all must be having to teach children about First Communion en masse. This is a subject that demands long, intimate interludes, with time to ponder and weigh and imagine. Here is one of the times when a mother and a father will stop short and suddenly see what a tremendous thing it is to be a parent. A soul, whose creation waited upon them, is about to receive the Body of the Son of God, Who has waited for this since all eternity.
"Just think, dear, since before the beginning of the world God was thinking about you, and His Son was wanting to come to you in Holy Communion. He always knew what day it would be, what hour, what minute. He will not divide Himself into twenty bits of Jesus, so that the twenty in the First Communion class may receive a piece of Him. There is no such thing as a piece of Him. He will come to you as though there were no one there but you. Where the Holy Eucharist is, in each host, or even each piece of a Host, Jesus is wholly there. He is the same God Who made the heavens and the earth and all things, and Who is surrounded by the angels and the saints in Heaven. He is the same Jesus Who was born in Bethlehem, and the same Jesus Who died on the Cross."

"But Mother — why bread and wine?"

If we have talked to them about the meaning of sacrifice, about the reason for the Mass, this is not hard to explain.
Jesus is the Divine High Priest, because He is God, and He offered Himself in sacrifice for our sins. And Jesus is the King of Peace. It was not an accident that Jesus offered the same things Melchisedech offered. He wanted to remind us that He is also Priest, and King of Peace.
"And isn't it good that it is bread and wine, which are easy to get and easy to prepare on the altar? Suppose it were a lamb, or fruit? That would make it very complicated for priests to offer the Divine Sacrifice. Then there is another thing about the bread and wine. Think of them first as wheat and grapes. Before they can be made into bread and wine, they must be wholly crushed. They suffer a kind of passion all their own in order to become bread and wine, the substances used in the Mass. Our Lord was wholly crushed on the Cross, so He could be the perfect sacrifice for our sins." Children love to know the meaning of the liturgical symbols on the altar and around the church. Understanding about the wheat and wine makes for a momentary meditation every time they see these symbols.

Furthermore, bread is called the staff of life. When men are poor, and have nothing else to eat, they can exist on bread. Our Lord is the staff of our spiritual life. The Holy Eucharist is a Divine bread with which we feed our souls. "Give us this day our daily bread" doesn't mean just the bread on our tables; it asks God the Father also to let us receive His Divine Son daily, if possible, in Holy Communion.

Please call the religious education office to register your child for First Holy Communion.