Every school day at St. Sebastian Catholic Middle School began the same way: at 7:45 in the morning, four hundred and twelve students filed into the Church of St. Sebastian the Martyr, which connected to the school through a covered walkway that smelled permanently of old stone and candle smoke. Morning Mass was not optional. It was, as the student handbook stated in bold font, “a cornerstone of the St. Sebastian experience.”
Most students had opinions about this cornerstone.
Sixth graders, new to the routine, sat wide-eyed in the front pews, unsure whether it was appropriate to whisper. It was not. They learned this quickly. Seventh graders had developed a complex economy around Mass: who sat next to whom, which spots near the pillars offered the best angles for passing notes, whether it was possible to finish last night’s vocabulary homework during the homily without being seen by Mrs. Kowalczyk, who had eyes, it was widely believed, in the back of her head and possibly in the stained-glass windows.
The eighth graders had arrived at a kind of peace with it. They had attended seven hundred and thirty Masses, give or take, and something had settled in them that they could not quite name. When Father Benicio read the Gospel, they recognized the cadence without necessarily listening to the words. When the organ creaked to life for the opening hymn, their mouths moved automatically.
Father Benicio himself was seventy-two, with a homily style that wandered cheerfully between the scripture reading, a story about his childhood in Guadalajara, and whatever was happening in the news. Some mornings the connection was obvious. Other mornings, it was a matter of faith that a connection existed at all. The students, on the whole, found him endearing. He remembered every eighth grader’s name by October.
On a Wednesday in late January, during the offertory, something small happened that no one talked about afterward but several people thought about for a long time. A seventh grader named Tomás, who had been having a difficult week for reasons he hadn’t shared with anyone, sat in his usual spot near the third pillar. He wasn’t praying so much as existing quietly in the pew. The light came through the rose window at just the right angle and landed, briefly, on his hands folded in his lap.
He didn’t suddenly feel better. But he felt, for a moment, held. Like the morning had made a small space for him.
The bell rang at 8:20. Four hundred and twelve students rose, shuffled back through the stone-and-candle walkway, and went to first period. The cornerstone, as it turned out, held weight in more ways than one.