I do not have the time nor the willingness to relive 14 years of Catholic school to write this but I can’t stop thinking about this one extract from the deluxe transcripts, the one for Desecrated Host. I know they’re not strictly canon, but we get some of Jon’s Thoughts On Religion here which keep rattling around in my brain. They’re mostly funny, calling crucifixes judgemental or saying he isn’t a fan of incense, but there’s one that sticks out. It’s when Father Burroughs is talking about how Father Singh listed all of his sins from childhood, and Jon comments that “Hm. Young sins can cut the deepest.”
Which! First of all! Wild thing to write down in your little blue biro on what is supposed to be a work document! But that feels like it has layers, intention or meaning behind it because no one just says that off the cuff. From both canon and the transcript notes he seems more jaded with religion now, or at least Christianity, but I can’t help but think of a young Jon, 8 years old and feeling like he has blood on his hands that somehow no one else can see. Like he’s gotten away with murder and it weighs so heavily on him he wishes he’d be caught, just to let up on the pressure of knowing at every moment that that should’ve been him. Sure, he hated that bully, but he didn’t want him dead and is this his fault? Did he wish somewhere deep down for this, a sick and twisted thing coming true that he’d desperately take back? In the books he read when the villain was vanquished the hero celebrated, but he just feels this terrifying ache in his chest, and wonders if this is just what happens to people who surround him.
So he sits at the back of the church when his grandmother takes him on Sundays, and silently begs forgiveness. It’s not even that he’s thinking about some higher power fear of justice from above. He’d take that if it absolved him of something, repentance and atonement. He just wants to stop feeling like he did something wrong.