Tripping the switch
Since I started getting serious about reversion during Lent, my struggle with going back to confession got worse as I examined my conscience more. The last time I went was 10 years ago, when I was required to before my confirmation. I’ve been trying to gather up the courage to do it for months now, but always failed. I had an incentive today, though…I’m busy all day tomorrow, attending my first Tridentine Mass this Sunday, and I wanted to do so able to receive communion.
“Joan,” I told myself in the car as I fought the urge to go to the pet store instead, “being an adult means making yourself do things that you don’t want to do, even when only you and God are watching.”
Finding a church with open reconciliation hours I could make it to has been really tricky, since most churches around here only have about half an hour on Saturdays, if any time at all. (Doesn’t anyone in the Northeastern USA confess?) After some digging, I found a chapel that has priest taking confessions all day, from 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM. I went to mass yesterday for the Ascension at the same chapel, to check out the layout and the atmosphere.
It was my first time confessing with a screen separating me and the priest, which I found wonderfully liberating. Apart from the sacrament, I found the priest’s empathy and advice much more useful than that of my last few psychotherapists.
I feel so serene, from both the absolution and the way I framed and categorized the last few years of my life and saw the threads of my various weaknesses that seem to have intertwined and formed a net that I didn’t even realize was there.
Enough serious talk. There was one funny thing–in the reconciliation room, when you kneel down, there’s a doorbell button set in the cushioned bench, so it sets off a bell and the priest knowsthat someone is there. I found this very funny for some reason.
*Ding-dong!* “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
The Catholic Church: Amusing pyromaniacs since A.D. 33
I’m home visiting my parents for easter, and went to the Vigil. It was about two hours long, but there was a huge bowl of fire. My love of the Big Bowl of Fire stems not only from my garden-variety pyromania, but also because most of the most moving religious moments I have experienced have involved candles or other fire symbols.*
The service was quite joyous, but the liturgical dancers were back. They had albs and gold sequined capes–the costumes looked something like what would happen if James Brown were an altar server.
That, and the tendency of more and more people to hold and raise their hands during the Our Father, bother me to no end.
The crowd was very small. I wonder if people are starting to avoid the vigil because of how long it is.
* - This does not include the girl in the Confirmation class ahead of mine who set her hair on fire during the service. That was just funny.
