Thursday, October 05, 2006
(11:39 PM) | Brad:
Friday Morning Confessional
When I was a child, I used to confess sins prior to committing them. I knew what I wanted to do, say, steal Boxer Smurf from Hill's Department Store, and I knew that what I wanted to do was wrong, that I would in fact burn in hell, or at least suffer the gothic wrath of a southern mother unafraid to toe the line between corporal punishment and child abuse; but I assumed that a little preemptive penance would help me bear the brunt of whatever punishment might be meted out, be it divine or maternal. At some point, I began confessing my sins, in flagantre. I could be, you might say, something of a buzz kill. "This is so wrong, this is so wrong," for instance, is not normally something you want to say while lighting a bottle rocket you and two friends have every intention of aiming at a Spanish teacher's car. It has a tendency to dampen the mood, if not the wick that's being lit. That is to say, confessing a wrong never stopped me from finishing what I'd started. (The same goes for "I don't even know you, and I will leave the hotel immediately after we're finished, so why am I letting you blow me!")Of course, at some point I finally got things right temporally. I learned to confess things after the fact. Were I smarter, or simply more morally attuned, I suppose I might've learned this much earlier in life. After all, when I was six or seven, I once woke up my brother and recounted a litany of things most foul I'd done in my life -- from burning a raccoon (not to death, just w/ a lighter), to burning his homework (also with a lighter), to blaming him for burning a potato in the microwave to the point of it exploding and leaving the remains for somebody else to clean up. When I realized he was not listening, I woke up my parents and confessed even more things that weighed heavily on my adolescent soul, such as showing my willy to the girl next door in exchange for her letting me play with her pet rabbit, who incidentally either died or ran/hopped away (depending on who you asked) one week later. When my parents also told me to shut up and go to bed, though, I realized nobody was at all burdened by my sins, and that as such their full weight was never removed, but only momentarily shifted like a heavy bag of groceries or a fat baby. This inability to unburden myself of the guilt, or if not the guilt, the shame, or if not the same, the responsibility, ultimately explains the initial attraction to atonement theology. And yet I also credit this realization as the root of remembrance & memory never being a strong suit, thus damning me to average standardized test scores and eternal perdition.
But if sin is like a sickness, maybe there's hope still! For now there is a precision to my memory when it comes to being ill. Would that I could recall and my confess my sins as well as I recollect the effect of going ten days in Belgium without crapping. What would happen to my faith, that which never fully returned when I lost my sacrificial savior, if I could identify my moral culpability with the clarity of my memory of being interviewed by a perky-breasted security guard at the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, while ten-day-old shit poisoned me nearly to the point of organ failure, of my sweating and mumbling, "Oh God, I can't do this," of being rushed through the metal detector with my B-cupped interrogator yelling directions to the bathroom down the stairs and to the right, of my inability even to make it halfway to the stairs before vomitting into the side of an ashtray-trashcan whose ashtray component could not be removed and was filled with the butts of the security staff's cigarettes, and of standing up and discovering at least 100 people staring at me from the other side of the glass partition that separated the cleared-for-boarding and yet-to-be-cleared-for-boarding? Would this memory itself, then, become as though a religious allegory, and perhaps even turned into a aesthetically-suspect big-budget film that itself ends up being forgotten? Or would it simply give me something more specific to confess, thus meeting the Kotsko-given criteria for Friday Confessional?
Though you cannot carry my own confessional burden, you can at least make this Confessional that which we know & love. The comment box awaits ....
