Elementary Confessions

A memoir excerpt from the WritingItReal subscriber series

The Author’s Third Grade School Photo

After unburdening my soul and conscience, I walked solemnly back to the pews to pray so that I would be absolved of guilt for the week.

Inevitably, a classmate’s elbow would nudge me, interrupting my good intentions, whispering, “What did you get?” As though we had just been before a judge and a sentence had been handed down.

“Two hail Marys and one Our Father,” I would answer, which was almost always the penance I received. “What did you get?”

“Shhh!” A command for silence was the reliable response issued from Sister’s pursed lips.

Chastened by the swift rebuke and not wanting to risk further punishment, we stopped our whispers immediately. Talking in church would be added to next week’s list of sins to confess.

It is understood that even good Catholic children are guilty of breaking rules. We accepted there were sins we had committed for which we needed to atone. I regularly worried that the bad angel sitting on my left shoulder would overrule the goodness of the better angel sitting on the right. To stay in God’s good graces, the nuns shepherded students to the chapel at the basement level of our school for confession once a week. Upon entering the vestibule, we blessed ourselves with holy water. This ritual meant time for talking, if we dared to speak at all, was over, and that we should be thinking about the sins we were there to confess.

As churches go, Sacred Heart’s décor was spare in keeping with its working-class, devout, and prayerful parishioners. The decorations were stark and serious. Above the altar, hung a vividly rendered painting depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its heart wrapped with thorns, trails of blood seeping from a wound, topped with a burning cross. As a child, I imagined this was meant to focus our thoughts and to suppress the idle chatter and occasional giggles that escaped our lips.

In the chapel, daylight filtered softly through stained-glass windows. Blue, green, red, and yellow shadows swirled in dust and remnants of snuffed candle smoke leftover from early morning services. The scent of incense, sweet, woodsy frankincense and myrrh always hung in the air. It was a familiar smell woven into the fabric of our childhoods. In between each window were small paintings depicting the Stations of the Cross in increasingly disturbing detail. During Lent, and especially on Good Friday, we were led around the church, following the pictures representing the path Jesus took on his way to certain death. We were told to pray and to reflect on the suffering he endured on our behalf.

In the early years, confession was a bewildering and sometimes frightening event. After lining us up in the narrow pews with a stern reminder that silence was expected, we were directed to the back of the church one by one, where we took our places in the confession booths.

The booths - really two booths – were separated by a compartment in the middle. Like the pews, they were constructed from dark wood, which made them seem even more foreboding. Heavy red velvet drapery covered the entrances and smelled stale and musty.

When the curtains were parted, the stalls were backlit briefly, but they became impenetrably dark when the curtains fell back into place. It would be years before our dangling feet reached the floor as we sat there in the darkness, with plenty of time to think about which rules had been broken. There was also plenty of time to reflect on your personal list of transgressions.

Punctuating the quiet, hums of a mysterious, disembodied voice from the middle compartment could be heard. After what felt like an eternity for a nervous elementary schooler, the heavy wooden divider would slide back, rumbling across its track before coming to a stop. We never saw who was behind the opaque window. Our declarations of guilt were delivered from our lips to God’s ear through an intermediary.

Though at times, the reverent tone of voice and the cloudy screen that covered the space between us often left me wondering if I might be speaking to God himself.

Very quietly, you were prompted to begin, “Tell me, child, when was your last confession?”

“Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been seven days since my last confession.” I would hesitantly answer. We had been instructed to declare our sins, no matter how trivial we thought they might be. It was not for us to judge.

The encounter lasted mere minutes as I would rush through what I believed my offenses had been. A delivery of penance followed, and a parting blessing was bestowed, signaling it was time to return to the pew to say the assigned prayers. 

Once we arrived back in our places, whispers would begin as penances were compared. We discovered from these comparisons in the early years that regardless of the offense—talking back to a parent, chewing gum, talking in church, or fighting with siblings—we were all given similar prayers to recite: an Our Father, Hail Mary, or Apostles’ Creed, though the choice, order, and number of repetitions varied. We realized pretty quickly that it was better to be sparing with our admissions of guilt to avoid long prayer sessions.

As I got older, I wondered how tedious it must have been to listen to the sins of the young who really had so little to be repentant about. Perhaps I reasoned, hearing grade school confessions might be a priestly penitence bestowed for some misdeed they had committed. Ultimately, I concluded, by comparison, it must have been infinitely more interesting to hear the secrets that adults kept.

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Michelle Kehoe is an emerging writer living in Southern California. While she is inspired by all forms of writing, she is most interested in creative nonfiction and memoir stories written in small, bite-sized tales, mining the sometimes surprising and wild journey of living, told through the long lens of experience.