First Confession Part 1

     On Saturday mornings, when I was in second grade and seven years old, I got in the car with my Mom, and we rode to Hamburg, the town next to North Boston. She let me off at the corner of Main Street and Pine – and then she drove away! On that corner is St. Peter and St. Paul Catholic Church which includes a two story school building. It was there that the public school kids received religious instruction in preparation for our First Holy Communion which would be the next May. The class was led by a nun – I do not remember her name now – she was a non-stereotypically-stern-yet-not-so-particularly-nurturing nun who I realize now was probably merely the person who got the short straw and had to teach Saturday class that year. She's the one who told us we each had a soul – an invisible organ in our bodies in the shape of a pie with a piece taken out that would get more and more impure with each sin that we committed. We were required to memorize catechism, prayers, and the 10 Commandments.

First Communion Day - the one on the right is me

     Before we could take First Holy Communion, we would have to make our souls pure again – after all, they had seven years' worth of sins upon them. And we had to prepare for our First Holy Confession! About a week before First Communion, each of us would have to go into the confessional and tell the priest all of the sins we had committed up to that point in our lives. Then we would be required to ask for forgiveness, say the Act of Contrition, and then do the penance that the priest might ask, usually a few Hail Marys. After that, our souls would be clean again and ready for Communion – that is, if we did not sin again in between confession and Communion.

     So the nun told us to be getting a list ready of all of our sins so we could report them to the priest. Well, I thought all sins were encompassed in the the Ten Commandments. If you disobeyed one of the Commandments, that was a sin. And of the list of 10, for a kid like me, 7 of the sins could be crossed off right away: I did not worship false gods, and Dad took us to church every Sunday; I did not steal, murder, adulterate, or covet spouses or things. And that just left 3 sins: lying, disobeying one's parents, and saying the Lord's name in vain.

     Let me tell you, I was totally stressed over the lying and disobeying – not that I was someone who lied or disobeyed on a daily basis – but, you know, over the course of 7 years, things did start to add up. And I was worried that God wanted an accurate count – and I did not have an exact figure. How could my soul get pure again if I could not confess the precise number of times I had committed each sin? I mean, I know God would know the exact number – was I really required to get the count right? I was beginning to panic – after all, if my confession was not perfect, then my soul would not be pure and taking Communion with a soiled soul would be another sin and I would have to go to confession again before going to Communion again and how could I ask my parents to take me to confession without them asking what I had done wrong, and oh my gosh!

     I have come to realize, lo these many years later, that the only sin being committed here is by the adults who force seven-year-olds to go through all of this in the first place!

     It was around this time that I heard my Dad telling other relatives the story of my trying to light a match on the beach in Evangola when I was two years old and when I couldn't get it lit I yelled “Jesus Christ”! Oh no! I had said the Lord's name in vain? I did not remember this! Was I expected to confess to sins I could not remember? I decided to add to my confession that I said the Lord's name in vain one tim     But what if I had said it more than once? God knew, but I sure didn't.

     I desperately wanted to ask someone about all this – did God want me to give an exact number of times the sins were committed ? But asking the nun or my parents or any other adult would have just invited them to demand that I elaborate on the specifics of the sins rather than answering my question. And I was afraid to ask fellow classmates how they were going to handle the situation because they might answer that they themselves had never ever lied or disobeyed! And that would be even more humiliating for me. 

     So I stressed in silence, and hoped that God would be okay with “ballpark” figures for how many times I had committed each sin in my seven years of existence.

6 20150106 first confession part 1