Offering

Sitting rapt in attention as if a thousand cherubims had exploded into song right above the congregation, I distractedly looked at my mother seated next to me as I felt a crackly sum of currency pressed into my hand. If only the attention I was earlier exuding was focused on the religious proceedings before us. I smiled sheepishly and took the bill, waiting for the collection basket’s sojourn towards us happy givers.

Ever since I was little, it would be regular Sunday mass protocol to give the mass offering to the youngest of the lot to drop into the collection basket. I vaguely recall asking my mother why they insisted on doing this, when the money really was coming from them, and not from us. After all, God could distinguish from whom the money came from, etc., etc. “Well,” my mother earnestly explains. She has this habit of explaining religious protocol with childlike simplicity and submission, brows slightly bent, eyes half-closed and focused faraway, hands gesturing with palms facing upward, fingers splayed as if she were literally offering you the gist of religious mysticism.

“It’s so that the blessings go to you.”

Well, who could bring themselves to argue, faced with that kind of reasoning? For an eight-year-old, that argument is selfishly unquestionable, and therefore absolute.

Ever since then, I never took notice of the practice. It was only today when I unconsciously took the money to drop into the basket that I realized how second nature the gesture was. Here I am, all grown up and already earning my own paycheck, and still whenever the collection basket is passed around, my mom still hands me money to give as offering.

Parents never cease to be parents. And children never cease to be children in the eyes of their parents (to their joy and ire). Up until today when my mother knows that I can very well produce my own mass offering moolah, she still hands me the crispy bill, in the hopes that her little offering will reap blessings and blessings for me. How wonderfully innate, this selflessness is. How Peter Pan-nish, the way we never seem to outgrow this parental womb.