Last night I did something I haven’t done for a very long time, and went to Confession. It was less due to a devout urge to confess, and more due to an intense desire not to upset my sister by not attending. I could see that my mother was considerably surprised by my presence which she clearly hadn’t expected, but part of me actually welcomed the opportunity to attend, because it gets me out of an increasingly difficult dilemma with which I have been wrestling; whether or not to go to communion on Sundays.

I have still been attending Mass every Sunday for the sake of keeping the peace, but when it has come to the most solemn part of the ceremony I have begun to get increasingly embarrassed. The first week I was present after the Terrible Happenings of January, it seemed rather self explanatory that I wasn’t going to receive the Sacrament. And I didn’t receive it the next week, or the next week either, and this seemed fair enough. But as in excess of two months have gone by, I have felt more and more conspicuous by remaining in my bench and my sister, who is temporarily back home from Germany, gave me a very funny look indeed last weekend. Going to Confession means at least that I can go to Communion with a clear conscience over Easter and thus avoid hostile stares.

The reason from choosing last night was that it was our parish penitential service. The penitential service is an evening when a large group of priests, collected from various other parishes in the diocese, descend upon the church en masse and for a couple of busy hours proceed to hold Confession in every spare nook and cranny of the church. The idea is that this is more efficient than our two poor parish priests having to hear the confessions of everyone over the course of the next couple of weeks, it being technically obligatory to make your confession at Easter.

To my mind, what would be far more efficient is an illegal practice known as General Absolution which is given against the wishes of the Archbishop in the tiny parish where my grandparents used to go to church. General Absolution is when the congregation attend a service to pray and reflect on their sins, then at the end the priest says a prayer and absolves everyone of everything in one fell swoop, without the need for individual confessions. The idea was, I believe, developed in Africa where the geographical size of parishes means that providing individual confession for everyone who requires it is a physical impossibility, but it has been taken up enthusiastically by numerous parishes in the Western world which are staffed by a single priest who does not feel he has the time or energy to hear everybody’s sins. Why the Vatican is so opposed to it I am not entirely sure. Personally I think it is an excellent invention which removes the horrible embarrassment of our current system but still allows some time for reflection on our actions.

Our penitential service is, alas, always more conventional. After a couple of readings and a protracted examination of conscience, the visiting priests retire to their various parts of the church whilst long and not always good natured queues form in from of them. We are lucky enough to have three confessional boxes which afford proper privacy. One priest set up shop in the alcove where we normally house the crib at Christmas, another sought sanctuary in the Blessed Sacrament chapel and a third sat in the Sacristy. The two my family were in agreement that there was no way we were going to go to positioned themselves at either end of the altar, in full view of the entire congregation and in places where you would have to talk very quietly indeed in order not to be heard. Personally I wouldn’t have minded confessing to any of the others but my mother is of the generation which refuses to confess face to face, and so we joined the enormous queue to use one of the confessionals.

Personally I can only recall two occasions in my life where I have not confessed face to face. The first was when I was just seven years old, my second ever confession in fact, in an old fashioned church called English Martyrs in a nearby suburb of Birmingham where I used to take swimming lessons. I opened the door and found myself in a pitch black box with a little kneeler positioned in front of an iron grill. I started talking to myself in a rather timid fashion and was halfway through my confession before the priest realised I was there. The second time was in more recent years when for some inexplicable reason my family were attending Mass at the Oratory, a very beautiful church only a stone’s throw away from where I used to go to school. The confessional box at the Oratory was a strange contraption made out of wood, and the priest who inhabited it was very seriously deaf. In order for him to hear a word you said you pretty much had to yell your sins through the grill at him, the obvious effect being that the rest of the church could then hear them too Not an experience I am keen to repeat.

To me, face to face confession seems entirely natural; when I was at primary school we used to have impromptu confessions in the most bizarre of places. The library, the headmaster’s office, once the boys’ toilets. That’s not to say I don’t find it entirely nervewracking. At our church you have the option; the boxes are in effect little rooms, big enough to accommodate a screen to kneel behind if you so wish and a chair in full view of the priest if you prefer otherwise. I’ve often been tempted to seek refuge behind the screen like my mother, but in a way it seems like a terrible cop out.

In any case, queuing for Confession is never a pleasant business. Looking at the small children, seven year olds brought by their parents for their first confession, I felt a great amount of sympathy for them for the terrible ordeal they were about to go through. I used to be a shaking incoherent wreck as a small child when I was forced into a room to tell a scary looking man all the naughty things I’d done wrong. Indeed, even as my turn approached last night I began to feel the familiar rush of adrenaline and slight nausea which accompanies any of my attempts to confess. The queue seemed endless and there is only so long it is possible or desirable to spend reflecting on your sins. Once you’ve had long enough to figure out what they all were, add them up and recite them a few times in the best order, any further time spent dwelling on them is depressing, and if you’re anything near as nervous as me, repeating them too many times is counter productive and you soon begin to forget one here and there. Luckily the time can be spend surreptitiously watching the people who have the balls to go on the altar, seeing which of them the priest spends longer with than others, and speculating as to their possible misdemenours.

When it finally got to my turn last night I was disappointed to find it was Father George. Father George is actually one of the priests in our parish and he’s fast developing a reputation for being extremely morbid. Almost all of his sermons feature a mention of death and the afterlife, and the speech he gave two weeks ago after the gospel of Lazurus caused several people to leave the church, unable to stomach his detailed account of what a corpse which had been rotting for several days in the Holy Land would look like

I began to confess and got as far as it being over a year since my last confession when Father interrupted me to say he didn’t think I had closed the door properly. It was true that it wasn’t entirely closed, but no one else I’d seen whilst waiting outside had managed to achieve this so I hadn’t paid too much attention to it. I stood up, attempted to close it more adequately this time, and we started again at the beginning

My sins consisted briefly of four things: failure to attend Mass, use of foul language, extensive lying and sleeping with my boyfriend. I confessed them in that order, which I judged to be an order of increasing seriousness from the priest’s point of view. I was hoping that the rather conveyor belt nature of this confessional process would mean the priest had neither the time nor the inclination to lecture me. In that respect I was correct, but I hadn’t bargained on the fact that he was going to question me.

“How many times have you missed Mass?”

I had no idea I don’t miss Mass very often, certainly not once a month, perhaps once every two months, so I gambled on an answer of six times in twelve months which I didn’t think sounded too bad. The priest didn’t comment but moved onto the next question.

“And your boyfriend? You mention sleeping with him, was this an isolated incident?”

I confessed that it was not, and wondered if he was going to refuse to absolve me.

“How many times would you say you had slept with your boyfriend?”

Eek Now I really have no idea about that one, and so found myself in the truly bizarre position of sitting in a confessional box and trying to recall in something approaching chronological order all the great shags I had had over the last twelve months. This had the potential to become a rather distracting train of thought, and also one fraught with difficulty since I couldn’t decide whether three times in one day counts as one general occasion or three separate ones. I took an executive decision to give this up as a bad job and went with the suitably vague response of once a month. Whilst this makes it sound a bit too much like a scheduled occurence, it is probably true that once most months I manage to fit an overnight stop into my schedule.

The priest grunted in a disapproving way and asked me to confirm that i wished the situation were otherwise. I nodded in what I hoped was a suitably penitent manner, and that was it I was absolved and dismissed with the surprisingly small penance of saying one Our Father, five Hail Marys and a Glory Be.

All in all it could have been a lot worse and I’m happy to have survived it relatively unscathed I now have the rest of the long Easter services to, erm, look forward to, in an attempt to maintain relations with my sister.

Tags: Confession, sins

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