It’s easier to be forgiven than to ask for permission
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- May 26, 2019
- 1298
Folks often say it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.
And I get that.
After all I’m a recovering Catholic, and guilt — implicit or implied — is as much a part of me as my 6-foot-5 frame or my obsession with turning all my yesterdays into something like salvation.
But the world doesn’t work like that. In fact the universe cares not a lick about the self-flagellation that often accompanies difficult decisions, so it comes down to how one handles deft indifference.
Not to go all altar-boy ironic on you, but it’s important to understand that each and every morning before classes began, we had to go to Mass, a full one, in the church next door.
Part of that was discipline, part of it was education and part of it was probably propaganda, but it wasn’t malicious in the sense that we were being brainwashed by those whose authority was cloaked in theological pragmatism.
After all, if you get them while they’re young, there’s a better than 50-50 chance their malleable minds will conform to goodness, rather than slink off seeking badness, which is always more fun.
Again, getting permission versus seeking forgiveness.
In the faith in which I was raised, there were things called sacraments, and there were seven of them, one for every day of the week or the number of rooms of gloom in that old Four Tops song.
Let’s see if I can remember them all: Baptism, Confession, Communion, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders and Extreme Unction.
Yep. That’s the list. And I did that just from my imperfect memory.
That’s how deeply engrained my parochial school education remains. I mean if you asked me — right now — to name Snow White’s seven dwarves, I’d probably come up short, so to speak.
But those seven sacraments?
They’re committed to memory for the long haul.
So far I’ve received five of them, and that’s going to have to suffice unless I become a priest in my mid-60s, but I think my wife might frown on that, so Holy Orders is off the board.
Which leaves Extreme Unction, which if I’m not mistaken, has been rechristened as the Anointing of the Sick.
Geez.
The PC Police have gotten their hands on everything.
Extreme Unction — you’ll not find me succumbing to the prettification of parochial nomenclature — is the last stop in the game of life, sort of rounding third base as you head home.
When Dad was nearing the end, we called in the parish pastor a couple of times to administer the last rites, and even though he rallied and lived on for a few more days, I like to believe our father appreciated the effort.
Once again, it’s easier to be forgiven than to ask for permission.
All of which brings us to the most important of the seven sacraments: I refer, of course, to Confession.
The concept is reassuringly simple, so concise and easy to grasp that even a 10-year-old can master it without having to stumble around the mysteries inherent in Transubstantiation, which is the central core of Communion, with which Penance is always linked.
Before you can receive the host, you must cleanse your soul.
There were two kinds of sins, venial and mortal, and both required confessing, though there were precious few fifth-graders who’d committed felonies.
Maybe none, the nuns hoped.
So you had to catalogue your venial sins, and this required what was called an Examination of Conscience.
Using the Ten Commandments as a guide, you’d kneel in church and run through them all, sort of the way a pitcher would prepare to face the nine hitters in the other dugout before the game started.
And then, confident that you knew the difference between stealing the other team’s signs and copying a classmate’s homework — both violations of Commandment Number Eight — you took your place in line and prepared for your, um, turn at bat.
The waiting, to quote that great old Tom Petty song, was the hardest part. Your mind would wander. Your concentration would fray. You’d forget the order you wanted to spill your secrets.
I always wanted to get the really bad stuff out of the way early, figuring that by the time I’d worked my way down to fighting with my brother and calling my mother’s beef stew “worse than pig slop,” the priest on the other side of the curtained window would be less likely to recall my most flagrant fouls.
I remember the last time I went to Confession.
It was early in my first semester at Notre Dame, maybe late September, and I wanted to get some heavy sinning off my soul.
I’d endured a very rocky start to my collegiate career, owing to a toxic combination of academic inadequacy and social misanthropy, and I needed to hear the words that had always offered such succor when I was back home.
“Go in peace,” my parish priest would always say, “and sin no more.”
And I could hear my name — “Michael” — unspoken but real, at the conclusion of the sacrament as he slid the window closed and turned his attention to the next transgressor.
But at ND, arguably the most prestigious Roman Catholic university in America, they’d done away with the privacy of the old-fashioned confessional and had adopted a more modern version. It was called “face-to-face,” and it was supposed to be more a conversation than a confession. The priest saw you.
This really jarred me, rocking my world so much so that my first experience with that kind of liturgical experiment was my last.
One time for all time.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to go back into a church and do it again, starting with those words that always paved the way to forgiveness, bypassing permission.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I’d say. “It’s been too long since my last Confession, so hang on. This could take a while.”