I’m really enjoying talking with this priest who works with my son’s preschool – a good guy, a smart guy, the kind of guy who makes Christianity seem DOABLE – when, suddenly, it occurs to me that this is a man who believes he can forgive sin, that forgiving sin is, in fact, in his job description. So I stop the conversation because, no shit, I could use a little bit of that:
“Excuse me, Tom, but let me ask a question: Can you Episcopal guys take away my sin the same way the Catholic guys can?”
I wish I had said it better than that, but I probably said it worse.
Tom laughed – Father Tom laughed, rather – and said, “Sure. You want to do it now?”
He built up to the sacrament by saying that I could just as well do this myself, but that he understood why I would want someone else to do it. And then scooted his chair closer, leaned forward to hold my hands, and he blessed me.
I don’t even really remember the words so much as the fact that he was holding my hands and he seemed completely earnest. When it was done – it lasted, maybe, a minute – I didn’t feel much until I felt A LOT. I took a sharp, deep breath before I realized that my chest seemed looser, my capacity to breathe much bigger, and there was this mysterious vacuum at the center of my being like, well, BEING FORGIVEN.
I started writing about the experience to my friends who, I have to imagine, responded with “whatever, Dan,” but mostly I was writing to them not out of concern for their souls so much as an attempt to relieve the weirdness I felt at the experience. Was it possible that human beings like my friend Tom were given this power by God? What seemed more likely was that I was so desirous of a general forgiveness that I created the effect that I was pretending to be the object of. But that idea was almost as unsatisfying as the first. If I was so suggestible that a priest, with the wave of his hand, could make my anxiety over my behavior go away, what the hell else could he do to me? Actually, that was the freakout on both fronts: I felt vulnerable at the same time that I felt, well, HAPPY.
After dropping off my son a few weeks later, I took a detour by Tom’s office, and he was packing his briefcase for some preacherly duty, so I said, “You got a few minutes to cleanse my soul?” I’m sure that at some point I may see myself to be as obnoxious as the friend who asks for free medical advice from a doctor or free massages from a masseuse, but I’m not TOO worried about that. Although it’s hard for me to imagine that a guy like Father Tom is overwhelmed at the moment with requests for absolution. I’ve also noticed that, even in the church of my childhood, once the world-wide leader in absolution, the schedule for “the Sacrament of Reconciliation” is often buried near the bottom of the bulletin, and you know that’s always a good time to find an empty chapel. Psychoanalysis seems to have supplanted that ritual pretty effectively, and most people I know – even the regular churchgoers – are skeptical of the idea that they are, in fact, guilty of anything.
I’m with them on that, of course. I’m not looking to go back to the time when I could work up a guilt trip over the falling of a rain drop. Still, there’s one pertinent principle that I think is applicable here: IF THE CURE WORKS, THEN YOU’VE PROBABLY GOT THE DISEASE.