39

I sauntered through the main doors of the church, yapping on the phone to Joe about what to do with a box of clutter he’d just uncovered in the corner of the garage. I kept talking until I was inches away from the door. I shrugged off my coat and folded it over my arm, feeling pricks of icy water on the coat fabric. A surprise cold front had blown over the city the day before, and I’d ducked under a light sleet to get from the back of the parking lot to the inside of the building.

As soon as I entered the church, I paused in silent wonder. I still hadn’t gotten used to the beauty of this place. Saint William had needed to build a bigger church to accommodate the mushrooming crowds, and this one opened only four months ago. This new building was immediately hailed by Catholics and non-Catholics alike as one of the most beautiful churches in Texas. Twelve-foot-tall oak doors guarded the sacred space, and inside a long barrel dome stretched high above the pews, hundreds of hand-painted gold stars shone over the deep blue background. At the front, behind the marble altar, was a stand-alone cherrywood wall with four alcoves for statues of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each man was posed to appear lost in thought, holding scrolls and writing instruments. The crucifix stood guard between Mark and Luke. A sweeping replica of the Italian Renaissance masterpiece the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament rose up behind the four men, covering the entire wall behind the altar.

In contrast to the cold, dead night outside, the church bustled with life. Hundreds of people stood in front of ten confessional booths, the lines wrapping through the pews, tracing the walls, and spilling out into the narthex. Women in designer coats stood next to construction workers wearing mud-caked boots; teens with hands jammed into their blue jean pockets leaned against walls next to elderly folks in wheelchairs; Indian ladies resplendent in richly colored saris bounced babies on their hips next to white guys wearing ID badges from local high-tech companies. To see the crowd was to be reminded that the word catholic means “universal”.

The inside of the church was laid out like a cross, and I made my way to the southern wing, to the left of the altar. There I found what I was looking for: a paper with the name of our pastor, Father Joel McNeil, printed in bold black letters. Though his line was one of the longest, it’s where I wanted to be. He was a quiet, studious man who was as humble as he was intelligent. His homilies had consistently impressed both Joe and me with their insight, and “like Father Joel said on Sunday. . .” had become a recurring statement at our dinner table.

His makeshift confessional was set up behind an accordion-style wooden divider. A one-hundred-year-old work of stained glass loomed on the wall above, its colors muted by the night sky. I watched one person after another disappear behind the dividers. When they popped out the other side, most were dabbing their eyes with Kleenex.

I pretty much knew what this would be like: I’d confessed my sins a bunch of times in my head. Confession would be just like that, only with a priest acting as a stand-in for God. If anything, I worried that it would seem redundant to what I’d already done privately.

Now the makeshift wall swallowed the lady in front of me. I heard the murmuring of her voice, then the soothing tones of Father Joel’s. About five minutes later, she emerged out the other side. My turn.

The confessional consisted of two plastic chairs and a small table stacked with a Bible, the Catechism, and printouts of various prayers. I bounced into the empty chair and greeted Father Joel. He was about forty-five years old, with dark brown hair framing a kind, gentle face. He looked right at me and greeted me in the name of Christ. Then he nodded and prompted me to begin.

“Oh—heh—okay.” I forced a laugh. I picked up my confession booklet from the pocket of my purse, but couldn’t find the introduction statement. “Okay, sorry, hang on,” I mumbled. My fingers raced to find the right page. Here we go. Loudly and clearly, I began: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—”

The sound of my own voice startled me. The spoken words were real and heavy. They carried a gravitas that my silent thoughts did not. Disoriented, I started over. “Bless me, Father, for I have—sinned. This is my first confession.”

Father Joel nodded and waited.

But where could I possibly begin?

I searched my memory for every offense against love I’d ever committed. I held up the life I had lived and compared it to the life of Christ, and I started talking about whatever came to mind. There were the times I’d lied, of course, moments I hadn’t thought about in years. There was the unchecked vanity, the cowardice that kept me silent when I should have taken a stand. And, wow, all the petty vandalism of my youth—I had forgotten about that until now.

My words were horrible things, which oozed out of my mouth like sludge. I paused for a breath and noticed that I’d begun trembling. There was no way I could stop talking now. It was as if I’d inserted a lance into a festering wound, and it was finally draining.

I fought against waves of emotion, fearing that if I gave in to tears, I would end up sobbing too hard to get it all out. It was surreal to hear my innermost thoughts put into words, to articulate things I had never said before and would never need to say again.

Father Joel simply listened as I poured it all out. He seemed neither offended nor surprised. He just listened. Finally, I began to feel a lightness within me, when there wasn’t much left to say. But there was one thing. One last thing I had not brought up.

“Is that all?” Father Joel asked gently.

It wasn’t. Now I had to confess the fact that, on countless occasions, I’d made fun of Jesus Christ himself. The image of that moment on my childhood friend’s bed when I’d stretched out my arms and cocked my head to the side burned in my memory. I started to describe the moment to Father Joel, but was stopped by a hot swelling in my throat. How do you say something like that? I thought of the crucifix at the front of the church, depicting the man who volunteered to undergo a long death of unthinkable torture for people like me. I had so little compassion that, even when I hadn’t believed Jesus was divine, I still couldn’t muster up a crumb of sympathy for a poor carpenter who was unjustly sent to the worst kind of death. My cries broke into a long sob.

Father Joel leaned forward and handed me a Kleenex. He remained still and relaxed, as if we had all the time in the world. I wiped tears from my eyes with a trembling hand and managed to stammer out the rest of my confession between gasps. Then I looked up at him with a puffy, red face, making eye contact for the first time since we began. I waited to hear what he had to say to someone like me.

His face contained nothing but compassion. “My child, you are forgiven,” he said. “The Lord forgives you.”

I’d forgotten that this was part of the equation. “Really?” I knew it was true theologically, but it didn’t seem real.

“Of course. God loves you, and he forgives you.”

In a daze, I read the Act of Contrition. Then I bowed my head, and Father Joel lifted his hand, and he carefully, purposefully, made the sign of the cross over me. “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

The whispered word “Amen” passed over my lips, as if someone had said it for me.

I left the confessional, a Kleenex pressed to my eyes, and slid into a nearby pew. I wasn’t sure what just happened; the only thing I knew was that my life would never be the same again. Never could I have imagined the power of speaking the words of my sins, going through the process of assigning words to my deeds, articulating them for another human to hear. And never, ever could I have imagined what it would do for my soul to hear the words, My child, you are forgiven.

* * *

I arrived home to a quiet house. Joe had already put the kids to bed; their cribs were the only furniture assembled in the house. I peeked into our new bedroom and saw Joe asleep in his clothes on the mattress, a drill and box cutter lying beside him on the floor.

I crept back downstairs and into the living room, all the walls blank with possibilities. I kept my coat on and stepped out to the back porch. All around me, the world was quiet and shadowy.

I remembered a time in my life when I avoided going outside at night. For years after my existential crisis at The Creek, the darkness of night seemed too real, too familiar, as if it had all leaked out of my soul and shrouded the world around me. Even later, when I regained some balance, standing outside alone at eleven o’clock at night would have involved fighting back an avalanche of thoughts that would have buried me if they’d come. Out of habit I waited for all those familiar sensations of restlessness and fear and discontent to bubble near the surface this time, too. But everything was still.

There on the back porch of my suburban house, for the first time in my life, I was aware without any question that I was in the presence of God. I had been looking for him so long, but my sins were like a black smoke that fills the air and blots out the sun, obscuring it so completely that you sometimes wonder if it still exists. Now, the smoke had been blown away. The air was clear. And, finally, I could see.