A First Confession

Our parents were religious. Catholic. Regular church goers. Sundays, holy days and holidays. By default we attended too. My brother became an altar boy. Several years later I became one too. (My siblings had paper rounds, at the appropriate age so did I. My siblings had Saturday jobs in the local library, at the appropriate age so did I. You get the picture.)

I’m not sure how devout my parents were or what religion meant to them. I never had that conversation. It never meant anything to me. I remember attending as an altar server at the funeral of a young boy from my school (Sacred Heart junior school, sited adjacent to our local Catholic church). I didn’t know the boy, who as I recall had been in a year below mine. The ceremony was obviously a solemn occasion. I didn’t have any thoughts. I didn’t think about what religion or God had done for the life of this now passed away 8 year old boy.

At some point as a young Catholic boy or girl you get to make your first confession. This entails entering a darkened booth and confessing your sins to a priest who sits in an adjacent booth, listens and then proscribes you a penance and absolves you from your sins. Or at least that would seem to be the gist of it. I’m not sure at what age this first confession (first of many, first of a lifetime for the devout) takes place but in my head I place it at about 9 or 10 years old.

What I don’t recall is how this ritual was explained to us as children. I know that when the day for first confession arrived I was sat in my place in the queue (inappropriate term, perhaps?) of fellow children, on a pew near the back of the church where the confessional booth was located. I didn’t know what I was supposed to confess. I didn't know how I was supposed to frame that confession. I didn't know anything. And the closer it came to my turn, the more I began to panic. It wasn’t a fear of confessing (although I’m not sure what I had to confess to back then), it was a fear of the unknown. Of not knowing what to say. I was like a trained actor being asked to improvise. Where was the script?

I never made that confession. At some point I lost my nerve. I did what many a child might do when everything overwhelms them. I started crying. I was removed from the ‘queue’. I was taken home, or perhaps my parents were summoned to take me home. Home was a safe space. I knew my place there. As it happened we had recently acquired a gaming system – those very early consoles you plugged into the back of the TV and enabled you to play a ridiculously primitive simulation of table tennis. Tim had won it in a tournament held at the Cliffs Pavillion. It was a marvel of its time.

So in consolation for my failed confession, there I was sat in the living room playing Pong or whatever it was called and not thinking about God or confession. I’m not sure how I continued as or came to be that altar boy. I understand why I attended church every Sunday, holy day and holiday, because it was what we did as a family and it was expected of us. I never gained a faith or learnt any lessons from the bible passages and sermons I was subjected to for over a decade of my young life. The hymns were often turgid and I couldn’t carry a tune. The priests were a mix of the dour and the charismatic. The whole thing seems like a fever dream at this far remove.

The world is astounding. I find spirituality in the rivers and the woods and the hills and the wide open spaces. It’s in the tide as it rises and ebbs away. It’s in the warmth the sun offers on a summer’s day. Or the wind making noise as it rushes through the trees. It's everywhere - the ducks, the swans, a blackbird digging through fallen leaves to build a nest. But I never sensed it within the claustrophobic and dimly lit environs of the church, where all that natural magic had been deliberately shut out and replaced with so many impenetrable rituals.

So no confession for me, at least not until now.

Here it is, finally, fifty years too late.