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.
Dan,
I like this piece. You know, back when… Jill and I would always be on the lookout for that next issue of Indy Men’s. Our first stop was always the TOC to see if you were in there. You wrote one on…. I think it might have been “Letter to a young husband,” or a version of it. That’s when Jill knew she liked you.
I think absolution is a delusion. We can’t get rid of guilt. Guilt is what prevents us from repeating past mistakes. Would you really want to get rid of your guilt?
I think that it’s *wisdom* that prevents us from repeating past mistakes. Guilt helps crack that shell that lets wisdom unfurl and breathe. But at some point, you gotta send guilt on its way. Take the bureaucracy and the robes and the pointy hats out of the equation, and absolution is pretty much admitting, “you know what? I do believe I AM an asshole. But I want to do better.”
Well, I say Joe is right about sending guilt on it’s way. But I still don’t understand how an authority figure can cause someone to feel absolved of guilt. That just doesn’t work for me. It helps if the person I’ve wronged says, “Hey, it’s no big deal. Forget about it”, but ultimately I decide whether or not I’m going to let it go. It’s one thing to talk it over with a friend who can give you good reasons why you should let it go. I can do that. It’s quite another to believe someone has the power to just take away bad thoughts. This is disturbing and seems very wrong to me. I couldn’t give that kind of power to another being. I control my own mind.
Thank you, guys, for creating the first actual “thread” on my website. I really appreciate it.
I hope that you understand when I say that I was trying to write about an EXPERIENCE rather than a theology. The impulse for the essay was the feeling that I got from this encounter. I’m hope I’m not turning it into a systm of understanding, except perhaps to the extent that I’m very fond of feeling clean inside, and I’ll take any means I can find to get to that experience.
And, thanks again for your comments. It makes my day to know that people are actually reading my blog.
Don’t we all have the disease? It’s fallen human nature. We NEED reconciliation, and I think more than that, we need confession. Somehow, I think the desire to write points to that need (and yes, psychotherapy, and the memoire phenomenon do as well). On Sacrament: It’s an outward sign of something supernatural taking place–a cooperation between you and God (with this guy serving as mediator and witness). Of course it feels good, because you just had a SUPERNATURAL experience. You don’t have to put that into words for anyone.
I would, however, urge you to peek in at St John’s Catholic Church down town on any day of the week between 11:30 and 12 noon. The line for the Confessional is always quite long.
Right. The moon, not the finger. Incantations and magic water aside, there’s at least one padre willing to give up the secret: you can do this yourself. Did you know there’s a placebo effect in Rogaine studies? No kidding. You can grow hair just by thinking you can. Well, what ELSE can I do?
That feeling of lightness… walking out of ‘meeting’ having spoken something true. Looking at your wife and having the thought that her poor taste is your greatest fortune. Hearing the doctor say your cancer is gone. Yeah. Feeling clean.
You might like this book.
http://www.randomhouse.com/waterbrook/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781590525128
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