I confess, and the world is still a mystery

(St. Francis Xavier church, home of my first confession)

Father Guetzloe ushered five of us into his tiny little room where his gowns and sacred chalice were kept.  We lined up and waited our turn, although I did not know what we were doing.  Perhaps there was instruction that I missed, which was entirely possible since I spent many days in first grade just concentrating on the blinds that covered our giant classroom windows.

I was the lone girl in line that day, as the only other Catholic girl had been out for several weeks, having been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.  When it was my turn to speak to Father Guetzloe, he gently took me by my hand and guided me to his chair.  He sat down and motioned that I should kneel before him.  He prayed a small prayer and asked me to repeat the lines, and then began to speak to me as a father would normally speak to a child.

“How was your week?,” he began.

“Fine.”  I just looked at Father Guetzloe, having given him my stock answer for just about anything.

“But how did your week go?,” he continued.  After receiving another form of my stock answer, he asked the same question again, only with different words.  Clearly, this was like a tennis match, where he would serve and I would volley the ball back in the most banal, safe movement possible.

However as the minutes dragged on, I noticed Father Guetzloe’s body language beginning to change with each pass at he question.  I had already exceeded the time that was given to the boys, and I knew that I had missed the boat somewhere.  So Father Guetzloe asked again.

“Is there something special you want to tell me about your week?”

Thus began a three minutes of explaining my normal routine – sitting in class, leaving school, going to Japanese school, sitting in Japanese class, taking the bus home with my sister, eating dinner, doing homework, watching television and going to sleep.

Father Guetzloe’s expression changed a little, perhaps sensing that I was slowly getting a sense of what he wanted.  Indeed, something did click, and I suddenly understood what he wanted.  Perhaps this was similar to the eagle eye of the nuns that probed to see what bad things we Catholics did during the day, except Father Guetzloe wanted to take the express train to that destination by having me confess my shortcomings.  So when I was asked the question again, I remained silent, looking up at the Father.

That is when I asked myself, “What is sin?”

As a six-year-old whose parents were what I could best describe as Catholics-by-whimsy, I had no idea what sin was.  Lying was an example of a sin, but that would require speaking to others.  I spoke to classmates but never to my parents and rarely to my sister.  In fact, the closest sin I could recall was Sister Eileen’s sin of spanking me for not eating my lunch, when it was clear that the Dick Tracey lunch pail she opened belonged to another classmate.  She punished me by beating the top of my hand with a thick pencil.  I remember telling myself that Sister Eileen should be the one kneeling in front of Father Guetzloe, and not I.

However, I remember the Father’s face.  There was never a moment of frustration or ill will towards another human being in this man’s life.  He could have been frustrated, but he still gently held my hand, his face never doing anything more than offering the friendliest of smiles.  So I did what I could.

I lied to Father Guetzloe to make him happy.

I made up a story of how I copied someone else’s homework, how I stole food from my sister and a whole myriad of other crazy stories that were capable of coming out of my imagination.  By the time I was over, Father Guetzloe might have had the impression that I was the naughtiest little girl on the planet.  He prayed over me in a whisper, then told me to join the others outside to do the Stations of the Cross and say five Hail Marys.

That would be the one and only time we ever had to do a public confession.  We would soon join every other Catholic in this world and go into the little dark box, where we would open our hearts and lay our souls bare for the supposed cavalcade of anonymous priests who were on hand to hear our confession (it was always Father Guetzloe).   However, I never understood the concept of confession.  I did understand, however, that the bigger the story.  The heavenly jackpot, if you will.
Herein lay the jackpot.

Since the Catholic kids were outnumbered by the Buddhists by a large margin, we would be sent off during our class to attend confession.  I taught Kevin, Lamont and a few other Catholic classmates the art of prolonging a return to class by taking five to ten minutes saying each Hail Mary, followed by the slowest Our Father at each Station of the Cross possible.  All told, an individual Catholic student could stay out of class for an hour without fear of punishment, because we were just doing our best to become penitent, humble souls to God.  We knew how to play the part, of course.  We either bent our heads or looked towards the alter, allowing the slow and silent utterance of the Hail Mary.  We were so contrite and genuine, although I remember a moment when Kevin would sneak a peak at me to see just how slow I was moving with the prayers.

We did this for years until we graduated from Morning Star School.  Our new school, Cathedral Intermediate Junior High, belonged to the large and modern Cathedral church on Geary street.  While we still had confession, there were no Stations of the Cross in this church.   Thus, our confession times were confined to Hail Marys, and even those were only given out in ones and twos.  In fact, confession at this church seemed largely odd and strange.  The priests were more interested in psychologically examining each confession, staying away from the standard “…you have sinned…” to a analysis of teenage behavior.  I toned down the whole sin story because of this, which reduced me down to one Hail Mary.

By this time, however, I had begun to appreciate school and was not too sad about returning to class.  I had also grown up a bit and saw little point in playing the game.  I had longed questioned Catholicism and its dogma of praying to Saints, the Pope and confessing to priests.
I would eventually leave the Catholic church when I left the parochial school system in my Sophomore year of high school.

The truth, however, is that you never quite leave the Catholic church, especially if it has been a part of one’s childhood.  For all the questionable practices and bizarre dogma, I found plenty of acceptance in this church.  At least in the San Francisco Catholic church of my youth, I was never told how to vote.  In fact, I was encouraged to make an educated choice.  I was taught Evolution in an environment where curiosity and the pursuit of higher learning was encouraged.  When Helen Reddy and other women made an issue of ERA and feminism, the nuns never held any of us back and told us to submit to men.  In fact, they also encouraged us to pursue our dreams – and little of that had to do with us conforming to an old standard of accepting our role as a housewife.  Best of all, they never taught us to be homophobic, making sure we understood the folly and failure of racism and bigotry.

When South Africa was going through Apartheid, the nuns at our Catholic junior high made a point of bringing in a refugee who explained the political climate and human rights issues in terms that made us want to fight for freedom from this injustice.  Of course, we also knew of Bobby Sands and the fighting  in Northern Ireland as we were all made to feel pro-Green. The nuns also abandoned traditional American history curriculum to push us through intense study of Native American, African American and Mexican American history.  The only thing they ever did slightly bad was like to make jokes about the Lutheran school down the block.  Even then, however, we were told to never mess with those students.

So I am today, a sum of all the things that I learned from Catholic school, very little from my experience as a born again Christian and a great deal from friends and family who are different religions.  I have come to realize that self-confession is good for the soul, because honesty to oneself is important.  Without this, we teeter and totter, smashing into things and ripping off people as if we were soulless and mindless as a bouncing ball.

Also, In all of this instruction and reading of the Bible in my lifetime, there is one great thing I learned from the parade of priests who came through our classrooms at Morning Star in an attempt to teach us the Trinity in the most sleep-inducing ways possible: that there are some things in this world that are a mystery.   This seems like a more credible answer to the unexplainable, rather than accepting the current practice of preachers to give out completely nonsensical, illogical answers to explain life because they feel the need to impress upon others that they have the answer to everything in life.  No one has the answers to everything in life.  In fact, I believe that any answers that seeks to disparage other races or religions is a non-answer, a shameful slap to humanity.

If there is a God or creator out there, and I believe there is one, we should be exploring everything possible to find our own answers.  We should also take it upon ourselves to meet all kinds of people, because the world is filled with so many wonderful individuals with something different and interesting to say and teach.  To meet others for the sole reason of evangelizing or conversion also an insult.  That would be like trying to meet people for the sole purpose of trying to sell something or making children hunt for Easter eggs that were filled with advertisements, which is a horrible thing to do.

Happy Easter!

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