THE LINE BETWEEN GOOD AND BAD was always clear in my childhood. My parents, their friends, priests, and nuns were good. Burglars, safecrackers, car thieves, and villain wrestlers were bad. However, I also knew that it was possible for someone to change columns or even to straddle the good and bad sides. I’d seen that things weren’t always black and white.
An older altar boy had sworn to me that he’d seen a priest and a nun kiss one day in church. He was returning his vestments and the Sanctus bells to the vestry, a sort of locker room for altar boys, when he noticed a priest and a nun holding hands off to the side of the altar. Something about the way they were standing unsettled him and he froze in place, watching. He said they looked around and then the priest leaned in and kissed the nun on the cheek. Now, this was not something you see every day. The boy was not only shocked but terrified, and his hands started to shake. And since he was still holding the Sanctus bells they began ringing, the sound echoing throughout the church. The bells are supposed to focus the attention of the church on the supernatural event taking place at the altar, not on the dirty one taking place off to the side of it.
The ecclesiastics broke apart from each other like two boxers hearing the bell at the end of a round. They quickly left the church from opposite doors. The altar boy stood like a mannequin, his eyes fixed on the vibration of the bells in his hand. He left the robes and bells right there in a pew and retired from religious life. And since the boy who told us this was older and had smokes, for us younger kids that was all the confirmation needed to make this story true.
It was in this confusing world of sinners dressed as saints that I prepared for the sacrament of First Holy Confession. When Catholics confess their sins, they do so to a priest. Personally, I didn’t see the point of a middleman. Nuns were always reminding us that God is all around us. If I sinned and wanted God to forgive me, why couldn’t I just ask him? If I had his direct line, why did I need to place my call through an operator? In my mind, confession was just a way for them to keep tabs on you. It was a sucker’s game and I was having none of it.
We received a lot of special instruction in how to properly bare our souls. Sister Cecilia would come in and tell us why it was so important for young children to confess their sins. “Do you like to play games, children?”
“Yes.” All hands agreed that children enjoyed games.
“Do you like the hockey, children?” We did. I was beginning to see a pattern. “There are rules in hockey. If you break the rules in hockey then you are sent to the penalty box. The people in the penalty box do not get to join in the happiness that all the other players of the hockey are experiencing. And because they have broken the rules, they are no longer liked and nobody wants to play with them anymore. Isn’t that sad, boys and girls?”
Clearly she’d never seen a game, given that fighters were among the most loved players in hockey and some of them spent more time in the box than they did on the ice. “Catholicism is like hockey,” she said, really going for it, “and sinners break the rules. Sin puts you in God’s penalty box.” Did she mean hell? Players are only in the penalty box for, like, five minutes. I thought hell was for eternity. If hell was only a five-minute stint, then it might actually be worth it.
“Sin is what happens when we break God’s rules. But sin is not just the bad things we do. It’s also the good things that we should do that we don’t do. You don’t have to do anything at all to sin. You can sin in your own head just by thinking about sinning!”
“Don’t think about boobs. Don’t think about boobs. Don’t think about boobs,” I thought. Then I thought about boobs.
“Sin happens,” she continued, “when we choose to do what we want to do instead of what God wants us to do.”
So, to recap: sin happens when we do something, when we fail to do something, or even if we just think about doing something. My body was a perpetual sin machine during my every living moment. I’d had no idea. Wait! Was ignorance another sin? I hadn’t known I’d been sinning this much. I’d come to school an innocent child. I would leave feeling like a Nazi.
A few hands shot up. “What was the worst sin?”
Murder.
“What happened to people who sin and don’t go to confession?”
They either go to hell or spend hundreds of years in limbo, a kind of waiting room for heaven without any magazines.
“What happens to people who aren’t Catholic when they die?”
They go to hell.
Now, that last one struck me as funny. She was saying that if you weren’t a Catholic you were going to go to hell. I raised my hand. “Sister? What about Chinese people? Do they go to hell?”
“If they are not Catholic, then, unfortunately, they do,” she said, dooming not only them but the vast majority of all human life. I thought of Yim Kee, who ran the Chinese takeout by our school. He seemed like a nice enough fella. Was he really going to go to hell for eternity? Occasionally he’d kick everyone out of his store if it was full of groups of kids splitting one order of fries six ways, but did he really deserve to burn in hell just because he wasn’t a Catholic? Come to think of it, he may very well have been a Catholic. I’d just assumed he wasn’t because he was Chinese, which was racist. Chalk up one more sin for Mark.
I needed a follow-up. “But, Sister, what about all them youngsters we see on TV dying in Africa? Will they go to hell?”
“If they have not accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts, then they, too, will suffer the hellfire.” Man, she really wasn’t big on multiculturalism. I couldn’t see her working at the United Nations anytime soon.
“But, Sister,” I continued, “those babies I see on the news with flies on ’em. They weren’t so lucky as us to be born in Newfoundland where you got no choice but to be Catholic. It doesn’t seem fair that they got to go to hell just cuz nobody made them go to Catholic school.”
“I want to make one thing very clear,” she said in a voice that made it very clear that question period was over. “Everyone on earth is given at least one chance in life to become a Catholic. Every. Single. Person. If they choose not to take that chance, then that is their own fault.”
That seemed like bullshit to me. We’d been seeing more and more images of starving children in Africa. Their distended bellies and skinny arms were a shocking sight for any child. I couldn’t imagine priests shuffling around on their hands and knees asking these dying children if they wanted to become a Catholic. And if priests were there anyway, shouldn’t they be asking the kids if they wanted some water? And if they said no, or were too weak to answer at all, then what would happen? Would the door-to-door baptism salesman just say “Sucks to be you” and crawl on to the next kid, or would he try to sell them on it? I just didn’t believe Sister Cecilia, which had to be a sin, also. But there was no way I was going to confess that one.
That day at recess, the other kids and I couldn’t wait to talk about confession. “What are you going to confess?” my friend Jamie asked me. I had no idea. I couldn’t think of anything good. I hadn’t really done that much. I swore a couple of times. I lied whenever I felt the possibility of discomfort. So, clearly, I would lie about lying when the time came.
The other kids were in the same boat. We didn’t feel we had anything worth confessing. First confession was a big deal. Our parents would be buying us new clothes. Relatives and family friends would be there. There was going to be a special Mass. We really needed to bring it in the sin department.
“If we don’t confess something good, they might think we’re holding out on them,” a kid named Frankie put in. He had a point. If I were a priest and some kid got in the confessional and said he’d “swore twice,” I’d definitely think he was a liar. “You’re not telling me something,” I’d allege. “What did you do? Stick a butter knife in a cat to see what it might feel like to kill a man? Confess!”
“Maybe we should make some up,” I ventured. “Like, if we come up with something we all did and we all confessed it. Then when we each went up to the priest, he’d think we were all being honest because he’d have already heard the story.” The lads thought about this, and I could see enough heads nodding to know I had a majority. “Good,” I said, taking the lead. “It has to be bad enough to seem like something we’re ashamed of, but not so bad that we’ll get in trouble.”
A kid in the back named Gerry was first with a suggestion. “My neighbour’s cat went missing. Nobody could find it. Then I was delivering newspapers and I saw it. It got run over and I found it in a ditch. Its eye was pushed out and it went all purple. I didn’t tell anybody I found it. And I poked it with a stick. We could say we all did that.” The entire gang was silent, waiting a few moments to let the awkwardness air out. No. We were not going to say that we all rode our pedal bikes out to a ditch to poke at a dead cat, ya weirdo.
“We could say we stole something at the store,” Jamie offered up after enough time had passed to respectfully mourn the death of the last suggestion. “Like maybe we all stole something.” This was a brilliant idea.
“We could say we had a gang,” I added excitedly. “And to get into it you had to steal something.” The trick was to keep our stories straight. We’d all have to pick something unique that we’d confess to stealing. Surely the store owner would notice six bags of ketchup chips or something suddenly disappearing from his shelves.
“You steal a Pepsi,” I said, delegating pretend tasks. “You steal a bag of chips. You steal a pack of gum. You steal a comic book. You steal a can of Vienna Sausages. And I’ll steal a Dinky car.” I’d saved the biggest imaginary prize for myself. I felt that if I pretended to steal the most expensive item, I’d gain the most respect in the priest’s eyes when I confessed. He would witness me changing my ways and from then on, whenever he saw me, he’d think, “That’s the boy who gave up a profitable life of crime to follow the teachings of Christ.”
We all agreed on the plan, and recess was almost over when Fox spoke up from the outskirts of the group. “It’s sin ye wants, is it?” We’d been so caught up in pretending to be bad that we hadn’t noticed the legitimately bad kid listening in. “Follow me and I’ll show ye bad.” None of us quite knew what to do at this point. Yes, we wanted to appear to be bad, but we didn’t actually want to be. However, we were too good to survive saying no to a bad kid. He’d reached out, offering us a safe passage into the land of the naughty. If we were to refuse it then we’d surely be, at best, beaten up or, at worst, ignored. Fox slowly walked away, and one by one we reluctantly followed.
We came to the chain-link fence that lined the perimeter of the school. Fox stood close to the playground’s edge and we all gathered around. “Now,” he began, holding court, “if any of ye tells a teacher what I showed you I swear to God I’ll kick ya in the nuts.” This seemed fair. Anyone who takes their chances siding with the teachers against Fox, or his brothers, was clearly an idiot who deserved what he got. “You,” he said, pointing to Gerry, “flip that rock over.”
A large purple rock lay on the ground by Fox’s foot. Gerry knelt and flipped it. A hundred bugs, shocked by the sunlight, dissipated into the surrounding mud. Their absence revealed a damp, mouldy piece of paper. “There,” Fox said. “Bet ye never saw that before.”
We leaned in to look at the crumpled sheet. I’d seen paper before. I’d seen lots of paper: white paper, yellow paper, paper towels, newsprint. I’d seen dry paper and, believe it or not, I’d seen wet paper. I had no intention of insulting Fox, though. “Cool,” I said, overselling it. “That’s so bad!” We all stood in a semicircle looking down at the least interesting thing we’d seen all day.
“What is it?” a voice rang out from the back of the group. We all cringed. It didn’t matter what it was. What mattered was that Fox thought we knew what it was.
“Never seen a naked woman before?” Fox asked. I thought it was a pretty safe bet that none of us had. That said, we were also fairly confident that the balled-up piece of paper on the ground was not a naked woman. “My brother tore this page out of a skin mag belonged to my father,” Fox bragged. His family heirloom clearly meant a lot to him. “Luh,” he invited, bending down to pick up the 80s version of the Internet.
He smoothed out the page on his thigh and held it up for us to see. The colours had faded and the paper was so wet that it had become almost transparent. He pointed to the page. “See? Nipple.” We’d come together because we were too innocent for confession and now we stood together on the school playground coveting our neighbour’s wife. Fox wasn’t kidding when he said he’d give us a sin worth confessing.
There was something exotic and forbidden about the image. We were too young to get aroused by the sight, but the sheer sinfulness of it sent tingles through my growing body.
“Are women’s nipples green?” one of the lads asked. We all cocked our heads to the side as we studied the picture. It was indeed a green nipple. In fact, the entire breast was green and blue at the edges.
“No, ya nimrod!” Fox shouted, pulling the page away from the sweaty hands of us amateur biologists. “It’s just faded from being under the rock. It’s supposed to be pink.”
Veiled pornography played a big part in my youth. Years later, cable TV would bring the Movie Channel. Late at night, “films” like Porky’s would give many a Canadian boy his first peek behind the curtain. We never had the Movie Channel, but if you held the TV knob just right, between channels 12 and 13, for just a moment you could sometimes get a scrambled image from an adult movie. For a split second you’d see a naked woman, and then the image would distort. Her head would contort as she warped into a discoloured mix of static and electronic sex. Her breast would elongate before becoming entirely misshapen and then she’d disappear forever into the households of people with much younger parents who appreciated the higher channels.
“You need to take better care of it,” I suggested, the tingling sensations working their way up into my gut, then into my heart, and finally to my head, where they were causing a ringing in my ears. “It’ll just fall apart under the rock. What if it rains? What about winter?”
We all suddenly became aware of the importance of art preservation. This fine-art photograph needed to be protected from the harmful degradation caused by UV light. It should be kept in an acid-free environment. In fact, we should have been handling it with white gloves. The orange Cheezies dust and oils stored on our grease-stained fingers were causing further deterioration at this very minute.
The bell rang, marking the end of recess, and most of the boys ran back to line up lest they be caught with what, after careful study, might be recognized as pornography. “You can have it,” Fox said, walking back toward school. “It’s ruined now anyway.” I was left alone with the green-skinned object of my desire. The right thing to do would be to hide it back under the rock and never return. But wasn’t there something in the Bible about “he who cast the first stone”? I shouldn’t be doing anything stone-related at all this close to my first confession. I jammed it deep into a pocket of my corduroys. The last of the children were re-entering school as I followed them in. I’d needed something to confess, and now I had a whole pocketful of sin.
I returned to my seat with hellfire burning in my pocket. My face was a brilliant shade of crimson. No way could I tell a priest what I’d done. I was having trouble admitting it to myself. The other boys gave me a knowing glance. I dared not look back. I couldn’t risk being sent to the office. What if they searched my pockets? Do they do that sort of thing? Why not? They do everything else!
“Put your coats back on, children,” Sister told us, donning her raglan. “We are going to take a walk next door to the church so we can have a little confession practice.” Fox and the boys shot me a concerned look. None of us knew what would happen to someone if they walked into a church with pornography in their pocket. Surely they’d have a heart attack or their pants would catch fire or something. Fox caught up with me as I made the short death march to the church. The other classes in our grade and their respective nuns met up with us and we formed up behind our mother ducks.
“Just ditch it,” he advised. And what if Sister saw me? Littering on school grounds was a capital offence. Littering on church grounds was an even bigger one. Getting caught littering porn in a church parking lot would not end well.
“I can’t,” I whimpered. I wasn’t kidding. My hand gripped the wrinkled page in my right pocket, but I was incapable of pulling that hand out of the pocket. I was too scared.
“You’re cracked going in there with that,” he warned. “What if someone tells?” Who the hell would tell on me? We’d all looked at it together. But I’d been the last one in after recess. And once one person told on me, everyone else would have no choice but to rat me out, too. They’d all back each other up because to do otherwise would be to implicate themselves. Fox could easily say that I’d been the one to bring it to school. It was in my pocket, after all. Was Fox warning me that someone might tell or was he threatening me that he would tell? I couldn’t tell.
“Mark! Fox! Stop talking,” Sister barked like a warden at two prisoners discussing their escape plan as they dump secret-tunnel dirt from their pant legs. We were to make this journey, like all journeys, in silence.
“Just drop it in the confessional where it’s dark,” Fox whispered, falling back in line with the other soldiers. That was brilliant. The dark solitude of the confessional was the perfect place to unload one’s pornography. I passed a statue of the Virgin Mary, her sad expression seeming to say “Please don’t look at my nipples.”
We entered the church and made our way to the front pews. “No talking. Settle, boys and girls!” the nuns kept shouting as they tried to match the volume of a class of children filing into church pews, shushing each other. I looked up at the statue of our crucified Lord that hung over the altar. His nipples were grey.
An elderly priest by the name of Father Davis stepped onto the altar. He had kind eyes and hair as grey as Jesus’s nipples. “Your first confession is a wonderful opportunity,” he began. “It is a wonderful time to examine your conscience.” He was speaking to all of us, but he might as well have been looking directly into my soul. “Do you love God more than anyone else?” Well, to be perfectly honest, I do have some rather strong feelings for the lady in my pocket. “Are you pure in your thoughts and heart?” That would be a no, sir. “Did you take anything that did not belong to you?” No! The page of porn was a gift from Fox! Score one for the good guys. Come to think of it, Fox did steal it from his father and I was fully aware of that. So, technically, I was an accessory to a crime. “Are you good at church?” He said this as I found myself wondering if I could get the page out of my pocket and jammed into the Catholic Book of Worship in my pew. “Do you take care of your things?” Oh, yes, Father. I planned to take care of my things the second I was inside that confessional.
“These are all things to keep in mind as you examine your conscience and think of your sins,” he said. “When you make your confession you will come up to the altar and sit down next to me.” What? We were confessing on the altar? What about the confessionals? What a waste of a perfectly good confessional.
“What about the confessional, Father?” I shouted out. “Won’t we be confessing in it?”
“No questions of Father,” Sister squawked, as if she were a presidential press secretary.
“That’s fine,” he said, taking the question. The look on Sister’s face made me certain that she’d get me back for this embarrassment. Then I wondered for a moment if nuns had nipples at all, and if so, for what purpose. “Your parents and the entire congregation will be watching. They will want to see you as you make your reconciliation. You and I will have a little chat in front of everyone, but most importantly, in front of God.” So much for ditching the porn in the cone of silence. “Why don’t you come up here and we can demonstrate.” Father Davis was now unwittingly inviting me to bring porn onto the altar.
“No thank you, Father,” I said. The page was burning my thigh and I felt for sure I’d burst into flames the second I placed one sneaker onto that altar. The vippp-vippp-vippp of my cords as I’d walked into the church already sounded a bit like someone rubbing two sticks together to start a fire.
“Mark Critch,” Sister commanded, “stand up, please.” I shimmied my way down the pew. Every one of the boys who’d been at the excavation pulled himself as far away from me as he could get. They didn’t want to be rubbing knees with me when I spontaneously combusted. I realized then that some of them would undoubtedly confess to having impure thoughts about a green woman. One or two might even blab that I’d brought porn onto the altar. Let’s say you had a few bad sins and the priest gave you five Acts of Contrition, three Our Fathers, and two Hail Marys. Surely they’d try to knock a few prayers off their sentence by offering themselves up as informants. Who knows what the priest said during confession?
“Look, Gary,” he might say, “I know you’re a good kid. So you swore a couple of times. Big deal. But it’s an offence. You could be sentenced to a whole rosary if you get a bad lawyer. Why not help me out? You let me know what else is going on and I could knock that down to one Hail Mary. Wouldn’t that be nice? I know you have hockey practice today. Shame to miss it.”
My right foot landed on the altar and for a moment I expected the floor to give way below me, sending me tumbling into hell. But the blue carpet held. I was so nervous I had to press my hand onto my knee to get the other foot up onto the altar. I slowly made my way forward, quivering corduroy dancing round me as I went. Father Davis sat on an orange plastic chair. The burning sensation had stretched from my pocket to my thigh to my groin, and now my entire midsection was aflame. I sat my broiling bottom down onto the chair across from the old priest and looked anywhere but into his eyes.
“Now, on the night of your first confession, Mark, you would make the sign of the cross and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.’” He stared at me in silence. Was he waiting for me to tell him? How did I get up here? Why me? Surely he knew. Maybe the nuns had looked out the window and seen us exhume the green-breasted lady. Salt water dripped from my upper lip and I realized that I was sweating. The faces of the saints stared down at me from the stained-glass windows and the sun shone through them, giving their nipples a brilliant amber colour. “Mark?” I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to spill. I wanted to confess.
“Just say that,” the priest urged. “Say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.’”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.” I was about to get it off my chest, and then my soul would be as white as the sheets in the Tide commercial.
“Then Mark would confess his sins,” Father Davis said, killing my vibe. “He might say, ‘I hit my brother,’ or ‘I was disrespectful at school,’ or something of that nature.”
Or he might stand on the altar of his church, reach into his pocket, and remove a picture of a green-skinned naked woman and say, “I am Mark, the child pornographer. Not a person who deals in pornographic images of children, mind you. I mean child pornographer like a child who deals in pornography. Normal adult stuff, not kid stuff. But I guess as a kid it would make more sense if I had a page of kid stuff. But that would be worse somehow.”
Perhaps it was better to leave things as they were.
“Remember to be honest with God.” Not on your life! I couldn’t even be honest with myself and not make it worse! “And tell God you are sorry. Say, ‘I am sorry for these and all my sins.’ Then I will give you an act of penance. You will say an Act of Contrition and you will be absolved of all your sins. That’s not so bad now, is it?”
No. It wasn’t that bad. In fact, it seemed a hell of a lot easier than having to tell the truth. I sat back down in the pew and the burning in my pants subsided. On the way back to school, I fell behind and hid the page under a different rock, one that neither Fox nor any of the other boys would find. Or me. I never found that rock again, and boy did I ever look.
The big night came and Mom and Dad brought me to the church. Mom could barely contain her pride and excitement as she prepared to throw another log onto the old Catholic fire. Never one to miss out on any gossip, she peppered me for spoilers.
“WhatAreYouGonnaTellThePriestNowMark? You’reNotGoingToTellHimAnythingTooBadNowAreYa? WhyDon’tYouJustSayYouNeverDidYourHomeworkOneTime? OrYouCouldSayYouForgotToTakeOutTheGarbage. SomethingSmall. WhatAreYouGoingToSayMark? Don’tSayNothingAboutMe,Now.”
I wasn’t planning to say much at all. I didn’t want a big conversation, just a casual pop-in and a chat. Father Davis was a busy man. I wouldn’t want to take up too much of his time. I sat in my pew, watching the children. They were all dressed up, but not as nicely as we would be for our First Holy Communion. There was nothing to eat here. You always dress up more for a fancy dinner.
Watching someone confess is a wonderful opportunity to feel superior. Some children were finished in a jiffy. Others were up there so long that you began to wonder what the hell they must have been saying. The way to tell who the real sinners were was to see how long they knelt and prayed after confession. Some kids stayed down just long enough for two Hail Marys, tops. Others were kneeling so long you wondered if they’d fallen asleep. I clocked each kid and determined it was best to stay kneeling for a count of forty-five seconds, no matter what penance I was given.
Fox made his way up to the altar. “This might take a while,” I thought. He and Father chatted for what seemed like half an episode of Happy Days. Then Father Davis leaned into him inquisitively. Fox nodded and muttered something back. Then he turned around and pointed toward the pews. He seemed to be singling out a couple of the boys. I could have sworn he pointed directly at me. Could he be ratting us out? He got up and made his way back with a big smile on his face. He knelt and I counted. Thirty seconds. The Judas!
When my turn came, I walked down the aisle toward redemption. I took my place across from the priest in the same chair as last time. Only this time, every nun, parent, sibling—even the odd homeless guy—was watching. I was facing away from the congregation, but there was a section of pews to my left. The families there were eyeballing me as if I were John McEnroe and this was Wimbledon, their heads darting left and right as they followed the action.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.” His eyes were no longer smiling; it was as if he were observing my heartbeat through my flesh. I looked to my left at the moms and dads leaning forward in their pews to see just how bad a boy I was.
“Do you have anything to confess?” “Oh I don’t know,” I thought, “do you? For instance, were you using the sacrament of confession to get the dirt on people before they even sat down?” Even my mother wouldn’t do that, and she lived to gossip.
“Not really,” I said. We’d been spending weeks coming up with things to confess. I’d even formed a playground search party to look for something specific. I’d thought of all sorts of things, and all of them were sins because they were lies.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” the priest said, forcing a smile. “It will be just between you and God.” Yeah. Me, God, Father Davis, the section to my left, and Fox. No wonder they wouldn’t let me confess in the confessional. There wouldn’t have been enough room.
“I guess there is something, Father,” I began gingerly.
“Yes, my boy,” he whispered, causing a woman to lean so far forward in her seat that she nearly tipped over the front of the pew. “What is it?”
“I kicked the cat.” I don’t know where this came from. I just wanted to say something that would seem bad enough to get him off my case but that wasn’t too “sinny.”
“Why would you kick the cat?” he asked, puzzled. “Did it bite you?”
“No, Father. I just wanted to see how far I could kick it.” This never happened. Even I was surprised when I said it. And the second I did, I realized that kicking a cat was not only a bad thing to do, it was a strange thing to do.
“Where is the cat now?”
“It’s alive.” Now I was protesting too much. No one had accused me of killing the cat. If I was trying to convince him I hadn’t, then surely I had.
“I should hope so.” A look of genuine concern flashed over his face. It was not a look I’d seen when I was studying the confessions of the other boys. “Was the cat hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feigning ignorance. “I haven’t seen it since.” I thought this was a perfect answer. The cat’s disappearance would mean that he couldn’t question me any further. But the look on his face made me realize that my answer did, sort of, sound like I’d killed the cat and hidden the body.
“Well…” He paused and closed his eyes, contemplating the appropriate penance for the murder of a cat. “Is that it?” he asked, hoping it was.
“I think…” I was trying to read him to see if he knew about my page of lost green lust. “Is it?”
“Is it” was probably the strangest answer I could have given. I turned around and looked at the congregation. My mother was standing in the pew, straining for a better look. She waved at me to come back. I was taking longer than the others and she feared I was telling the priest every family secret.
“It is,” I said firmly, locking in my answer.
“All God’s creatures are his creation. No matter what we feel inside we mustn’t—” he was flummoxed. “Animals have feelings, too. We must never take out our frustrations on them or on any children smaller than us…or on anyone at all. Do you understand?” I nodded. I tried to look normal and I gave him my widest smile, which creeped him out even more. “Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Now join me in the Act of Contrition.”
I said my Act of Contrition and I meant it.
Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for offending you and I detest all my sins because of your just punishments, but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are so good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of your Grace to sin no more and to avoid even the near-occasion of sin. Amen.
I would avoid sinning with all my might, but I would find that sometimes sin comes looking for you whether you like it or not. Later, I found out that Fox had just been pointing out his many siblings scattered around the church.
“My soul is as white as that priest’s collar now,” he bragged, and my heart sank a little. Fox was a much worse behaved boy than I was, but he’d confessed honestly and now he could start over as innocent as a baby. Well, as innocent as a baby who had been given a chance to become a Catholic and accepted it.
I had lied. I hadn’t confessed a single one of my sins, and if I were to be hit by a bus at that very moment I’d go straight to hell. I felt so bad I could have kicked a cat, and if I had I would have had a free pass because I’d already confessed to it. But I didn’t. I saw the importance of confession then because I felt the loss of not having done it. I was envious of Fox’s bright white soul and wondered what shade my dirtied one was. I imagined it looking like pictures of a smoker’s lungs we’d seen in school. I had sinned. I had lusted. I had lied. I had done everything a good Catholic shouldn’t do. I’d barely had my First Holy Communion and already I was overflowing with guilt. When it came to being a Catholic, I was a child prodigy.