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Holy Communion
HOLY COMMUNION is a rite-of-passage novel that follows a seven-year-old's first communion preparations and celebration. Throughout the four-day period the boy deals with cruel nuns, sadistic babysitters, his mother's unfortunate accident, a drunken father, plus a pedophile or two, but he finds a way to cope in the midst of so much tragedy -- first by indifference, later by defiance and rebellion. He also discovers that his urban surroundings in New York City give him autonomy, comfort, and satisfaction. HOLY COMMUNION is full of the boy's despair and self-questioning, along with author Mykola Dementiuk's powerful insights into the human condition. Though the primary focus of HOLY COMMUNION is sin, guilt, atonement, and redemption, there is also a subtext which explores the boy's growing awareness of sexuality. We see his faltering attempts at reconciling these urgings and his longings for acceptance with his inherent suspicion of love and contact.
The boy moves through the four days in a state of befuddled uncertainty and ignorance, swept up in the promise of his religious instruction, yet tormented by memories and the contradictory behavior of the adults around him: he is belittled for his chronic bed-wetting; is witness to the rape of his godmother; is battered by his nun teacher, is manipulated into sexual participation
(with adults and other children); is faced with his loving mother's absence and eventual death. In the end, burdened with self-accusations and guilt over what he feels is unforgivable sin and deceit, the boy dares to partake of the communion ceremony and risk the punishment of death he has been led to believe is his due.
HOLY COMMUNION is an exploration of a boy's need to understand and accept the consequences of his thoughts and actions as sin while he struggles to challenge and renounce the authority of that judgment against him. It is this groping through confusion and outrage that he comes to understand the certainty of his innocence and child-humanity, and achieve the "holy communion" of sex and rejection, struggle and survival, loss and hope.
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