Hearing Confession

                                                           Hearing Confession

                                                            by Marco M. Pardi 

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” Mark Twain. Following the Equator: A Journey around the World. 1897

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I was raised in a strict Roman Catholic setting until, nearing sixteen, I decided I had seen behind the curtain enough times to leave the theater.  Those years were memorable for many things, confession being one.

The concept of confession is basically wholesome; it’s the execution of it that often goes awry.  Of course, the ability to confess hinges on a knowledge of the do’s and don’ts.  And it must be said that monastic, then parochial, and a return to monastic schooling left no unknowns to chance. Still, the early years seemed a litany of mundane, everyday sins.  And the matching  penance seemed straight from the playbook: Two Our Father’s, five Hail Mary’s, and ten laps around the church.  Okay, I added the laps just now; I needed a standout performance.

In my “tween” years my brother, two friends and I engaged in BB gun fights.  One Saturday I nailed my brother right in his belt buckle. So, at confession that evening I hit the opening stanzas: “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I shot my brother.” “YOU DID WHAAAATT!?!?” the priest screamed.  I quietly explained our BB gun fight but I knew my audience out in the pews was waiting to see the miscreant, surely shrouded in the opaque blackness of MORTAL SIN. Years later Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder captured the moment with a strut and a “We bad, we bad.”

As I grew older, watching relationships and forming some of my own I found myself on the other side of the equation.  Coming back from years in the military I heard people ask, “How many did you kill?” I always viewed that question as naive and immature.  A person involved in actual combat can truthfully say, “I don’t know.” The reasons are simple: with several people firing at multiple targets it’s often difficult to know which hit was yours, and no one goes around after action to do ballistics tests on corpses.  Furthermore, there is often no way to know if the wounds you inflicted had fatal outcomes later.  Single, one on one encounters are of course different, but they by no means provide a final tally.

But being exposed to what amounted to a request for accounting, or a confession of sorts, opened a realization into the downside of the romanticized “completely open with one another” relationship concept. What may now seem like a well intended compliance with a request for information can be turned into a hammer with which to beat you for the duration of the relationship.  As with unkind words, once something is said it cannot be unsaid.

Even before the lunatic fundamentalist sexual abstinence movement a common question arising in developing relationships was, “How many sex partners have you had?” Among the many, many lies the movement told, and still tells, were such things as, Abortion causes breast cancer. And, When you have sex with someone you have sex with everyone they have ever had sex with.  A normal seventh grader could see through the second one. But the larger issue is why it matters in the first place. I always favored the position that if someone really needs to tell me they will do so without my asking.  In fact, I’m convinced any truly aware person will find information coming to them, desired or not. The issue is not whether one will obtain the information, it is what someone will do with the information. The age in which we now live, wherein information electronically provided can suddenly attain world wide publicity, should provide a stimulus toward caution.

As I moved into the field of what was then called death counseling I sometimes found myself in the role of the confessor, listening to people in their final days “unburden” themselves of secrets they had carried in many cases for decades.  Since it was very clear from the outset that any and all conversation with me was confidential I became a kind of burn box for the things “I’ve just got to get off my chest.” While I never heard anything significantly criminal, and wouldn’t have had the protections of the priest in such a case, I did hear confessions of extra-marital affairs and some activities or decisions I thought at the time were rather petty – reminding me of what those grade school priests must have heard hour after hour. But there was no denying the apparent value the person seemed to experience in disclosing these things to another person. 

Interestingly, the disclosures (I prefer that to confession) were always of things some, or many, would consider negative.  I never heard anyone say, I secretly funded a girl’s school in Saudi Arabia.  As a child I had never had any problem identifying the authority for what was deemed venial sin, mortal sin, cardinal sin, sacrilege, etc.; it was the ever evolving Church and its struggle to remain in complete control of people in the face of culture change.  But so many of the secrets, the “transgressions” being scraped out from their hidden sanctums in everyday people in their last days were windows into the cultural values and mores these people had come to accept as valid.  As an anthropologist, these were far more enlightening than just lists in a textbook chapter.

But in every case I could myself almost feel the grip loosening on the person, the relief at having unburdened, and thus the sincerity of the effort it took to do so. I hope it goes without saying I have never passed any of this information to anyone.  I did not hear of children born who would not know their real parent.  I did not hear anything which would, from disclosure, make the lives of survivors any better. 

This was in sharp contrast to a quite unexpected  experience I had in the early 1980’s.  I left college teaching in 1981, it having served its purpose.  I spent the next two years traveling for various reasons, though I kept a base of operations in the small town hosting the college.  I was in my office at that base one day when a high level administrator from the college walked in with his son.  I did not have to wait long for the reason for his visit.  “Out of the blue” he embarked on what appeared to be a prepared, and previously given, monologue on his drinking history and the many examples of damage he had done to other people, myself included.  I remained silent throughout his presentation and his apologies, sensing my acknowledgement of his contrition was of no importance to him.  On conclusion we wordlessly shook hands and he and his silent son abruptly left.

Having observed A.A. meetings, as I’ve written of earlier, I realized this was one of the famous 12 Steps, though I could not remember which.  As I sat in the office trying to recount the rapid-fire narrative and trying to decipher how it applied to me I was reminded of after-action chatter: “Hey, you got shot.” “Oh?”  I felt I had not been in a position to say, Te absolvo and would not have known exactly to what part of the narrative I should have addressed it. This was not a making of a clean breast of things, it was a pro-forma completion of what must have been an onerous task.

And so I am perhaps overly questioning of the sincerity of the I’m sorrys and the self criticism people only seem to recite, perhaps fishing for contradiction.  And I take offense at the Forget I said that, as if I’m just some tablet to be wiped clean in case of mistake.

I do have things I will take behind Door Number 4, not necessarily because they are too grievous to tell but because they are things a person like me would find too personal to lay on the butcher table of public discourse.  A former colleague, a psychiatrist, told me he frequently burst out laughing at the painful disclosures from his patients.  He was convinced this would help them see the frivolity of those concerns and move on.  I really, really doubted that and wondered how many patients he had damaged and lost in his career.     

Another former colleague, a Catholic priest, said to me, “If you want to know what it’s like to be a priest, dress all in black with a Roman collar and ride public transportation.  It happens almost every time; ‘Father, there’s something I just have to get off my chest.'”

At what point does making a clean breast of it edge over into unloading on someone?  I’m a pretty receptive guy, but I’ve been known to say, We’ve discussed this already, or This is something I don’t need to hear. I hope I haven’t been wrong in that latter response.  At least, not too often.