Page 79
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
His Mass voice rises like pain dragged through wood and air, frightening adults but entrancing children who feel him reliving Christ's passion as something beyond ordinary life and death.
The sermon is heard less as meaning than as force, a sound thick enough to bend imagination and bodily feeling. Children are singled out as the only ones unafraid, which makes their bond with him feel visionary rather than obedient.
At Mass, Father Lawnigan's 'Dominus fobuscum, oramius' and his long painful sounds pass through the thick wooden doors; adults shut themselves off behind 'an invisible wall', while children like the entranced narrator watch the cry 'circle in a spasm' as he seems to relive Christ's death and to go beyond his own pain before his soul is 'left to the wolves'.
The page treats the priest's voice as raw force rather than doctrine, and the child's fascination is visionary rather than obedient. By imagining that Papa Joe has already passed through death, the narrator makes him a figure of fearless deliverance, the embodiment of the magician's promise.