Writing Down the Bones - Week Two

"Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee."

9:57p.m.

I have a million and one things to confess. I remember my first confession. Learning the complicated procedure for doing it, entering that dark box, sliding open the window, "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned, this is my first confession," and trying to drum up something. I sat on the roof outside my brother's window and looked at the stars even though I knew I wasn't supposed to. I called my brother a jerk. I had hateful feelings towards my brother. I stole a cookie right before dinner.

I don't think I ever made a second confession. I never memorized the Hail Mary, although I probably should have had it down after doing my first penance. Maybe it was two cookies. Maybe I hit my brother.

I have three children lost in three different ways. And I miss them all equally.

I still get crushes on cute boys, and I miss being able to do something about it, not because I can't but because I'm married and I shouldn't.

This is harder than I thought, because I feel like I should confess some big thing but there isn't any big thing. Of course there IS, but it's mine. I haven't murdered anybody, but I've wanted to.

I don't write as much as I should. Writing keeps me sane. Maybe I want to be crazy. Maybe there's moments when I think it would be pleasant to live in a mental institution, although I'd miss the alcohol.

The dark booth calls to me, though, when I do attend church. Weddings. Christenings. The last Christening I attended was the one for my goddaughter. We went to mass first, but the church itself was under construction, so mass was held in the school gym. There was no confessional there. The baptism itself was held in some other random little room, probably for small funeral masses. No confessional there, either. But Jesus hung suspended over the basketball hoop, and I spent that hour wondering why a cage had not been built around him, like the cages around the clocks, protected against errant middle-schooler basketballs. Maybe basketballs miraculously don't hit Jesus, I don't know.

I find it funny that the word confession immediately made me think of the confessional. There's lots of things to say that have nothing to do with those dim musty booths. In movies, I always get a little jolt when there's a scene in a booth. Something about the way the screen casts shadows across the faces of the confessor and the absolver. No one can absolve me of my sins but me. Asking someone to assign me a series of prayers to say makes no sense. I suppose it gives rest and assurance to some. If I'm wrong about Jesus and God, then I would hope they'll take me anyway, forgive me for being wrong.

What the hell is going on here?

I have some random confessions.

I hate cleaning. Hate it with a passion. Despise it. Put it off as long as possible. I am a procrastinator of the nth degree. I am a professional procrastinator. I can put things off so long, they do themselves.

I love the ocean. That is where I feel peace. Whenever I get to Florida, I drop my bags at the door and march straight across the condo to the sliding glass doors, fling back the curtains, slide open the door and step out, all in one long step, not pausing for a moment, just keep walking until I've gone through the gate around the pool, down the steps to the sand, to the edge of the water, and there I am reunited with my soul. I confess I lived in the same place as my soul.

10:07 p.m.

Very cool, VB. You are one courageous woman. But you pay the price.

03:18

Lisa S., wherever you are, I have a confession. Sure we were friends at home when we were younger, playing house with you and me as Mommy and Daddy and my little sister as our daughter and our little brothers as the dogs, and sure we walked to school together sometimes, and I was never mean to you and I never let my friends in junior high or high school make fun of you without telling them that you were okay... but I never told you about the one thing I remember most about you.

I wasn't as clique-ey as most of our high school, but you just weren't cool enough -- always wearing the wrong kinds of clothes that your mother got from Sears, always leaving when we decided on getting drunk or high, always following rules and doing your homework on time. You lectured me often about how I was @!$%#ing up, how I was so smart and so un-focused, how I really needed to grow up before I wound up hurting myself, like in one of the five cars I totaled in my my first two years of driving. You were right.

I know you were focused. Schoolwork, honor society, yearbook, student council -- I was on all those things, too-- in name only. While you were inside at chorus rehearsal, or cropping photos for the school paper, or typing the poems for the literary journal, I was out in the woods with David B. and Danny H. and Marci H. getting high before second period. While you were out practicing with the field hockey team, I was watching Luke and Laura and their problems with the weather control machine.

But, I still thought of you, and I still do, especially because of one spring afternoon when I'd cut out of school just to hang out in my room and listen to nothing -- no teachers, no friends, no parents, no music. I practiced juggling my attention from sound to sound: from the birds chirping for their babies, to the wind in the woods, to the faraway sound of cheers on the football field, to car with radios blasting passing on the highway, and then I heard something strange and lovely which caused all those sounds to cascade away as the juggler stumbled.

I don't know much about opera -- the only one I've ever seen performed was the one whose name I don't remember in which you were part of the chorus at Lincoln Center when your Indiana college performed there sometime in freshman or sophomore year. So, I'll never know what it was you were singing, but it didn't matter. I thrilled to the sound of you walking home from school, singing the opera you'd been practicing, your clear soprano voice radiating much farther than you suspected, so that you and I shared that moment alone, apart.

Thirty years later, I can still hear that beautiful, lonely sound.

03:29 -- a minute over, sort of... maybe not, since I didn't look at the second hand? And did I cheat if I corrected two spelling errors before I posted?

13:28

why should I write on confessions? not being a Christian, I've never been to church so my understanding of a confession is totally different to what the majority here understand by the term. Oh, i rememebr, I;ll confess to my father through this column. Like the time when I was about 7 and was rude to my mother. and when he slapped me softly on the cheek. and how I thought of rubbiung a slice of lemon to make the wound swell up. and the look on his place when I confronted him later with a very swollen cheek red and raw. he thought he had overdone it. I never told him that I had smeard some lime to make it red and raw. To this day, he must feel guilty when in actual fact, I had turned in a moment at that time into an actor. Suffuice to say that I never got the same treatmet again. managed to get away with murder. not literally, you hear. just as a metaphor. I know I;m doing all sorts of stupid things here with punctutatuion and grammar and spell check. but isn't that the whoel point oif this exercsie. just write as it arrives in your mind. no processing. unlike processesd cheese.

talking about cheese, that red cheek at 7 taught me a few lessons. the effect of doing something nasty to make someone else feel guilty. The guilt actually stays with you for a far longer time. Perhaps time to own up to that and say "sorry, dad, I confess that I was seeking attention for my sins, it really was not your doing. Hope I have turend a better person for it." There, that says it all.

What else? I think the whole point of confession in a Christian sense is good if it can be turned into more of a public arena. Like what we are doing here. It takes a whole lot guts to do it in the open that in a private audience with the ... whoever.

Oops. my time's up

13:38

9:30

shoot. I'm later. I'm sorry. I must confess - I was busy yesterday and didn't see the new topic until this morning. confession huh?

As a minister, I see confession as a religious movement - It is both a liturgical movement that happens in the context of worship and I movement of the soul. The prayer of confession happens in our worship services after we have gathered (the call to worship) and before we receive the Word (the sermon). This is not a random placement of one more prayer in the service...no....it is very specifically placed to allow us to let go of that which is dark in order to fully hear the light of the Word. Without acknowledging our 'sin' first, we bring extra baggage to the sermon. The Prayer of Confession often follows a very generic pattern - oh, we're sorry God for not being everything you want us to be, we are sorry that we don't do what you tell us to do. When writing a prayer of confession, it is difficult to write one that will be specific but not too specific. If a minister has a person in the congregation who has committed adultury (for example) - it would be inappropriate to ask the whole congregation to 'confess' - I am sorry for cheating on my spouse. However, it might be okay to say - we have sinned God, we know that you have been faithful to the convenant but we occasionally fall short of your intentions.

Personally, I like to write prayers of confession that are themeatically related to the Word for the day, the scripture, the sermon, the hymns...

9:40

confession means to tell your sins
and hope for forgiveness
which means you'd better be sorry

for when you made love to your boyfriend
even though it was terrific
you'd better be sorry

and when you told a lie to a friend
because her new haircut really was atrocious
how dare you lie to her like that?
ask God to forgive the lying heart

black and white the pages of the Bible black and white the issues, they are not
black and white the garments of the priest
I am not Catholic, I have no right

my parents were born-again, meaning born more than once
born into church so they could escape where they were really born
poor in Brooklyn

they taught me the fear of God, of hell, the fear that fuels confession
and though I do not confess
I fear still...

So like, what if I want to use mine for my entry in LVS, huh? ::laughs:: I can post it here and then maybe edit it

the first time i went to confession was in the second grade. catholic school. church every friday morning at 7am, huge, dark and cavernous, felt miles and miles underground. my small-for-my-age frame could almost feel the tons and tons of earth above me. really it was on a streetcorner in medium-town wisconsin. the confessional itself, confessionals really, three of them, along the wall to my left when i entered the scary cavechurch, they were like person-sized shoeboxes. i imagine the elaborately carved wooden grilles we talked through doubled as airholes so we wouldn't suffocate to death.

i never did anything bad back then. i was terrified of just about everything, and also a big fan of order, cleanliness, and everything else that didn't make any sense for a secondgrader to be concerned with. went to sleep when i was told, ate my all my food, took my baths, etc etc. so i just made stuff up when sitting in that spooky shoebox. i stole a cookie or i didn't eat all my vegetables, hid them under my napkin instead, or i pulled my sister's hair. what was i supposed to do? i couldn't just sit there and say nothing. i tried that and got some bizarre talking-to from a nun about how we're all sinners and in order to be forgiven we had to confess these sins, i didn't really understand it, mostly because i was thinking of going home and watching Transformers, mostly because i'd already decided this sinner stuff was boring and therefore probably more for grownups than for me.

dad took me out of catholic school the next year. i'd have to visit the shoebox a few more times throughout my teens, a couple times in my early 20s. visiting grandma, who was in many ways more pious than the pope, rest her soul, always involved a trip to Holy Name. she was aware of my poor catholic attendance record, her reasoning for sending me straight to the shoeboxes after the service. i did the same routine, made up a little laundry list of mostly harmless sins. of course i had plenty of real sins to confess by the time i hit say, 16-17, but by then i had it pretty much figured out i'd be going to hell in this dear old catholic version of the universe, so what's the point, why not have a little fun with it, and try to keep the hail marys to a minimum?

(fiction, 3:48-3:58pm. i confess to spellchecking.)

You certainly hit a need with this topic, Sbutki.

Scott - You are on a high! I'll have ten of whatever you're on:-)

My goodness you are all such amazing writers. I find it astounding that there are places in this world and on this Internet that harbor people going through these beautiful exercises. I applaud all of your efforts and willingness to share the vulnerable.

Confessions- in police work I have had the chance to try and get confessions out of many different types of people. Professionals, working class Joes, drunks, druggies, and everything in between. I remember a particular confession that was one of the easiest that I ever got. It was a hot and muggy night in Laurel, MD. I was trying to catch up on paperwork so it must have been a Sunday. I parked my cruiser in the parking lot of the roller rink, turned on my iPod, opened the laptop, took out my motes and started typing. There was some kind of rock music playing, probably Rollins Band since I was on a huge Rollins kick at that time. Combine that with the police radio and the radio scanner I had in the car and it made for a noisy space to work. I think I was on the second or third paragraph of a DUI report when I overheard on the scanner, a call for the fire department. It was the alarm at a thrift store that happened to be right across the street from where I was sitting. I didn't see anything, and got on the radio and said that the fire department could hold while I checked. I put my notes away and pulled out of the lot and was about to cross the street when a car sped out from behind the thrift store and onto the street with no headlights on. It saw me and the chase was on. I hit my emergency lights and siren and asked for help as I followed the car onto a side street and watched as three of the occupants jumped out and ran into the dark. A fourth gave up at the scene, so I handcuffed him and put him in my car. After a check of the area by the canine officer, I went back to my car, read the guy his rights and asked him only one question- "What happened?" This guy spilled the beans faster than anyone I had ever interviewed before or since. He sang like a bird for 20 solid minutes, giving up information on two of the other three. He claimed not to know the third, and I let that one go. It ended up with us finding the floor safe from the car in the trunk, and warrants for the others for burglary, theft and a few other charges.