What I Learned About Faith When My Son With Down Syndrome Received His First Communion

Nathan has been attending Mass with us since he was two weeks old.

For years he would walk up toward the altar with his little arms across his chest to receive a blessing, but we could see the wheels turning in his head each time, looking at the host and wondering when it would be his turn. Finally, last spring, his turn came. Nathan received First Communion along with his peers.

From the beginning, Mr. Andi and I disagreed about Nathan’s participation in First Communion classes – I was for it, he was against it – and Mr. Andi’s argument was that Nathan couldn’t comprehend what he was learning. Kids need to have sufficient knowledge and understanding to receive, but Communion is incredibly abstract and Reconciliation even more so; Nathan doesn’t do well with abstract. 

Mr. Andi’s case was bolstered when, during the first class, Nathan dragged a chair over to the second story window and attempted to climb out (I really do wish I was kidding, but I assure you I am not). I met with the children’s director who assured me that the church was committed to his religious instruction and offered to teach him privately if it came down to it. She recruited a couple of teen girls to take turns attending classes with him as aides, and the journey toward First Communion began.

The first stop, however, was Reconciliation.

Nathan’s verbal skills were (and still are) limited, and Reconciliation has to come before Communion – how could he possibly confess his sins to a priest? 

The Big Day arrived quickly and I went along with him. It was a time-compressed affair, herding a large group of second graders one by one into and out of the confessional. Nathan had a child’s version of the Act of Contrition printed on a piece of paper which he took in with him. He was in and out in record time – barely enough time to read that piece of paper in his hand – and he was so proud of himself and was all smiles when he walked out, but I wondered if Mr. Andi was right. Maybe Nathan should have waited until his understanding was better. Maybe it wasn’t right for him to receive the sacraments yet. If he didn’t have the capability of acknowledging his sins, how could he receive absolution for them?

But it dawned on me: Nathan doesn’t really sin.

Does he do things that are naughty? Yes. Sometimes he’s stubborn. He doesn’t always do what I tell him to do. He bosses his teenage sister around (to her frustration and my amusement). He makes a mess if we leave him alone during bath time. He runs away (though, thankfully, not as often as he used to…). He turns the volume up right after I’ve asked him to turn it down. 

But does he intentionally make poor moral choices? No. Why does he do naughty things? Not because of envy, or gluttony, or greed, or lust, or pride, or sloth, or wrath. He does those things because of his mental and emotional simplicity. That simplicity makes him self-absorbed in the way that an infant who cries when she is hungry is self-absorbed; it’s not a sin, just a way of being that we travel through on the road to maturity and greater understanding of societal norms.

But the mental and emotional simplicity that leads him to be naughty is the same simplicity of grace that makes him a tiny ambassador for Christ in the world.

Around the same time, an incident with Nathan and another child left me cold. I’ll leave out the details to protect the guilty; the essential fact is that an older child sprayed Nathan directly in the face, at close range, with water. I put a stop to it, barely able to contain my fury, but Nathan’s reaction wasn’t at all what I expected. It was clear that he didn’t enjoy it and certainly didn’t think they were playing, but he also wasn’t angry or upset. He simply looked stunned and – literally, not just figuratively – turned the other cheek. Even in the face of an assault, he wasn’t tempted to sin by lashing out.

He doesn’t care about age, race, social status, or gender. It’s immaterial to him if someone is single or divorced, widowed or married, gay or straight. I won’t suggest that he doesn’t notice disability, but if anything it attracts rather than repels him, as evidenced by his slight preference for one twin over another among his friends (she wears leg braces, which we are guessing he gravitates to because his sister wears them, too). He doesn’t hold grudges and he doesn’t pre-judge people.

Nathan simply loves – with boundless enthusiasm and reckless abandon.

He wants everyone to join him in this boundless, reckless love, but if they don’t, he continues to love, anyway.

In Matthew 18, Jesus called a little child to him and told his disciples, “…unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven…” He then went further and told them “the one who makes himself as little as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven.” It’s a clear directive, repeated for emphasis: we are to become like little children.

Two millenia later, Jesus isn’t sitting in a chair in my living room with that little child mentioned in Matthew. Instead, he gave me another point of reference: Nathan is the model. I am to become more like Nathan.

In the end, Mr. Andi and I were convinced that allowing Nathan to receive Communion was the right thing to do. The guidance from the Catechism is that children “have sufficient knowledge and careful preparation so that they understand the mystery of Christ according to their capacity and are able to receive the body of Christ with faith and devotion.”

Nathan isn’t going to be a renowned theologian like St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, but he has faith and devotion and an understanding according to his capacity that may outstrip that of the holiest priest or religious sister.

Thanks be to God.