Forgive me Father for I have sinned…

Even though it was over 40 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. I went back and forth between trying to remember my lines, to thinking of a better excuse for why I couldn’t do it as “I’m pretty sure I’m having a heart attack” wasn’t too believable for an eight year old, and praying that my profusive sweating wasn’t going to be mistaken for soiling my Toughskin Jeans. A door opened and an elderly man walked out of what looked like a wooden box. He stepped out an old woman stepped in (what in the heck could she have to confess, did she burn some oatmeal raisin cookies?!?). My time was running out…

Forgive me father for I have sinned…

It was my first confession, and I wanted to run out of that church as fast and as far as I could. The only problem is that if I did, my dad would ensure that sitting on my bottom was no longer an option so I would be forced to kneel wherever I went. My dad was the pope. Maybe not the real one at the Vatican, but I was convinced that he was secretly the Californian one who lived at my house. He wasn’t Catholic, he was SUPER Catholic. Which meant as a young boy, I was going to be Catholic as well. And as a young boy of non-voting age and non-pope status, it was time for me to make my Sacrament of Reconcilation.

It has been…wait… I mean, this if my first confession.

I had already made my first communion a few years earlier, and I almost cried at that too (looking back, I guess I was a real cry-baby as a kid). At least at that milestone, I wasn’t alone as my whole Catechism class was taking their first communion on the same day. That was part of the problem though as they were all doing it the same way. The way our catechism teacher taught us: you have the priest put the communion wafer in your hand, and then you put it in your mouth. My dad insisted that some of the changes the church made in the past couple of decades were wrong, and that the priest had to put the communion directly in my mouth. It doesn’t sound like much, but to a five year old being asked to be different from his whole class and ignore the instructions from his teacher, I was sure that I was going to die from embarrassment.

The door opened again, and just like that, the old lady was on her way out. There was nobody left to delay me from my pending death sentence. GULP. I slowly stepped in, closed the door, and sat on a small wooden bench facing the door. The room was empty but separating it from an identical closet sized room, was a small window sized curtain. “You may begin when you are ready,” the priest in the adjoining room encouraged.

“I… uh… fought with my brothers.”

“I stole a little plastic army guy at 7-11 and feel really bad about it…”

“And uhhhh…”

The priest tried to help me keep moving, “Anything else?”

“Well…uh… you see I have a brother whose name rhymes with Fat and…” I proceeded to tell him how me and some other brothers spent an afternoon saying nothing but, “Fat Pat, Fat Pat, Fat Pat!” “But” I continued, “both my dad and brother already gave me a whoopin’ so God doesn’t have to punish me for that one!”

“I see,” the priest calmly said from his side of the curtain. “Can you tell me something good you have done?” Oh crud, the priest was playing some sort of Jedi mind trick on me! I couldn’t think of a single good thing I had ever done in my eight years of life. “Uhhh…”

“Have you ever helped your parents with the chores?” he asked.

“I sometimes take out the trash.” I said excitedly.

“Great, have you ever helped your mom with dinner?” I did, I did…all of a sudden I was Tweety Bird. More importantly, I was surviving my first confession. The priest explained that God wasn’t interested in punishing me, but offering me forgiveness for my sins. He reminded me of what I already learned in catechism class, that Jesus died for me so I could go to heaven. Then he told me say three Hail Mary’s and politely kicked me out of his wooden closet.

Do you know what I remember almost as much as the fear walking into that confessional? How good, and how light… yes, light… I felt walking out of it. Every bad thing I had done in my life wasn’t forgotten, but was forgiven.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins

and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9

A lot has happened in the 44 years or so since that first confession. I went from being a forced Catholic, to an agnostic living like an atheist, to someone who chooses to try to (and does a very poor job of) follow Jesus. I no longer believe that I need to confess my sins to a priest, but I should still be confessing them (and if I’m honest, I need to be doing it a lot more often than I do). There’s no time like the present so here goes nothing…

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it’s been over 40 years since my last confession… you might want to get comfortable!