Holy forewarning: This post got a little long. A little deep. A little bit hellish. It’s totally worth it!
My mother, Marlene, was raised in Carroll, IA in a devout Catholic household – the kind of home where Sunday mass wasn’t a suggestion, but a non-negotiable appointment. Rain, flu or teenage rebellion – you went. She attended St. Angelas Academy, an all-girl’s school, staffed exclusively by women of the religious order. In other words, nuns.
One ritual that stuck with Mom, because she told it on more than one occasion, was her spiritual dress rehearsal before going to confession.
Picture a classroom of girls standing beside their desks, hands folded, while Sister Spiritual Auditor guided them through the Ten Commandments. I take that back – they breezed through #7 and #10. Heaven forbid the word “adultery” even escape their lips, nor did they think these prepubescent girls could possibly be lusting after Mr. Henderson, who lived down the street.
Mom said this examination of conscience genuinely terrified her. The class was instructed to stand. While everyone was standing, the nun would have them imagine standing on the edge of a cliff with the raging fires of hell, below. Eyes closed. No desk to grip. Just you, your sins, and the fear of eternal combustion.
The image stuck with her – not as holy inspiration, but as vertigo-induced nightmare fuel. Try standing without holding onto anything with your eyes closed for 5-10 minutes and see if you don’t start to sway.
That was Marlene’s chapter. She grew up fearing God. I wonder why.
Fast forward, to the next generation – mine. It was our turn for our own holy rollercoaster ride with the Sacrament of Penance. Even though the examination of consciousness and the fiery vision wasn’t a part of my confessional routine, the whole concept surrounding confession scared the bejabbers out of me.
I always wondered how other denominations earned their ticket to heaven. They had no spiritual car wash. They didn’t have to walk into a little dimly lit room, kneel, speak through a meshed window, and tell a priest how bad their week was. And we didn’t just have to confess, we reported. We had to list our sins, tally how many times we committed each one, and specify to whom. Really? Does it matter? Is God waiting for my spreadsheet?
Thinking about going to confession again, I can feel the anxiety billowing up as I write this. I’m right there in the pew again.
We’d walk into the church single file, a whole class of freshly scrubbed sinners. The goal was to end up as far down the pew as possible, furthest from the confessional door. The logic? More time to sweat it out and rehearse my lines. Of course, it would have made more sense to just rip off the spiritual Band-aid and get it over with, but we were kids. Logic wasn’t part of our vocabulary.
I was literally sick to my stomach as I stared at the 2 lights above the confessional door. One red and one green. The red light aglow was my temporary salvation. It meant that the room was occupied. Apparently, the weight of a body on the kneeler would trigger the red light to come on, glowing like a “do not disturb” sign from heaven. When the light turned green, it meant the person was done. Time to rotate in. I sat in that pew praying for that red light to remain on…for an eternity and then some.
Green light… damn. It was my turn. It just never felt right that something that caused this much fear was a prerequisite to enter the Pearly Gates.
The first thing we were taught to say inside the confessional was, “Bless me father for I have sinned. My last confession was…” followed by the length of time since we last spilled our spiritual guts.
This was already a problem for me. I’d say, “3 months ago,” like clockwork. So technically, my first sin was lying. In the confessional. During confession. I’d tell myself it was merely a warm-up sin, just preparing myself.
After I had whispered off my list of offenses, the last words to come out of my mouth were, “For these and all my sins, I am sorry.” I could finally breathe again. The priest would take it from there. He would absolve me of my sins, give me a penance, which usually consisted of saying a few Hail Marys, an Our Father, and always, an Act of Contrition. He would then give a little farewell speech that consisted of “Try to do better next time. Now go, and sin no more.” It sounded like an order.
I walked out of church thinking: if I get hit by a Mack truck walking through the parking lot, I’m heaven-bound, baby! But one slip-up? Back to the box I go. A spiritual rinse and repeat.
In the Catholic church there isn’t just sin. There are different classifications of sin. Venial – the baby sins, such things as lying about who stole their fathers pack of cigarettes out of the carton, and the mortal sins – the headline makers…the absolute worst thing you could ever do.
There was just something about hearing the priest say missing mass on Sundays was considered a mortal sin, that had me shaking my head and saying to myself, “Well, that’s one way to boost attendance.” Apparently, failing to haul our sorry behinds out of bed Sunday morning was just as bad as robbing a nun’s purse, setting fire to the hymnal, and giving St. Peter the finger on our way out.
As an adult, I couldn’t help but question some of the teachings we were told not to question. Topics such as purgatory, the empty space your soul would go if you weren’t bad enough to go south, but not good enough to go north. I guess you just hovered about until God felt you’d done enough time.
Limbo? That one messed me up – the idea that babies went there if they died before being baptized? I don’t care how holy your catechism is, there’s no universe where an all-loving God sends an infant to spiritual purgatory because Mom and Dad missed the deadline. Who’s making this stuff up?
And let’s talk free-will. It’s supposedly God’s greatest gift to mankind, your own blank canvas to paint your messy, glorious life. But the rules feel rigged. Use your free will, but choose wrong? Boom! To hell you go. No eraser. It’s like giving a toddler a crayon and punishing them for coloring outside the lines. That’s not love. That’s certainly not free-will. And, in my opinion, it makes a mockery out of God.
Although I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in over twenty years, I maintain a respect for the church. My history runs deep. After all, I was an organist, taught CCD for many years while my kids attended, and was a communion distributor. I wasn’t just in the pew; I was part of the pageantry.
Then came the divorce. Already guilt-laden, I decided to return to Mass, dragging my middle-school aged son with me.
When communion time rolled around, I hesitated. It dawned on me I couldn’t receive. My marriage hadn’t been annulled. I was, by Church standards, unworthy. I whispered to Mark, “You go up when it’s time.” His eyes widened. Great, now I’d added spiritual abandonment to my parenting resume.
Part of me wanted to go up. God knew my heart, right? I told myself He wouldn’t hold it against me. Still, there was this irrational fear that the priest, who didn’t even know me, would somehow snatch the host back before I had a chance to put it in my mouth.
In the car the inevitable question came: “Why didn’t you go up to Communion, Mom?” How do you explain to your child that because you got divorced, your church decided you weren’t welcome at the Table?” All I could picture was his little brain doing the math: “Wow, Mom must’ve done something really, really bad.
I was speechless and I was angry. I couldn’t help but feel when I needed my church the most, it wasn’t there for me. Unless I checked all their boxes and declared my 27-year marriage null and void, communion wasn’t an option. My marriage, though imperfect, was very real and I wasn’t about to say otherwise just to play by their rulebook. That’s not healing, it’s humiliation in a shiny goblet.
So, I made peace with it. Communion wouldn’t be a part of my spiritual journey, And I’m okay with that. Because the God I believe in, doesn’t stamp forms or tally pew attendance.
My God doesn’t sit behind stained glass waiting for us to arrive. He moves in the gentle breeze that sneaks through our window, in the belly laughs shared over completely forgetting why we walked into a room in the first place, and in the quiet ache of love that refuses to quit.
PHEW…that calls for a toast. You stuck with me until the end. Raise your glass high: “May the only confessions we whisper be to girlfriends over margaritas, with no tallies, no mesh screen and no guilt rendered.
If I ever do find myself in purgatory, may it at least have charcuteries decent Wi-Fi, zero nuns with cliffside metaphors and a few of my favorite humans there to keep me company as we wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Cheers!
