The art of confessing

By Laurie Taylor

There are rituals when confessing

Breaking one of the 10 Commandment is easy enough to do but confessing your sins can be a tricky business, however much you want to.

My hero at junior school was Edward the Confessor. Not because I knew any specific details about his reign, but because his name suggested that he had particular prowess at confessing.

I fondly imagined that in order to earn such a sobriquet he must have spent a great deal of his life going around the country confessing his sins to any priest who would lend an ear. (It really was quite a wonder that in between all that confessing he found the time to commit any sins at all.)

What most attracted me to King Edward, though, was simple envy. Along with all the Catholic boys in my form at boarding school, I'd only just made my first confession. And, frankly, it had not gone well.

I'd perfectly mastered the opening ritual. I knew how to wait quietly in the pew until it was my turn to enter the confessional box. I knew how to open and shut the door behind me; knew that I must kneel and stare straight forward through the grille at the profile of the priest's head; knew that I must start the confession by saying "bless me father, for I have sinned". But from then on it was all downhill.

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It was principally the fault of the 10 Commandments. The priest who'd instructed us in the art of confession - the same one who'd taught us not to chew the sacred host after it had been slipped into our mouths at communion - insisted that we must always recite our sins with reference to the specific commandment which they'd breached.

So, if, for example, we'd said something wicked in the playground about anyone in our own family, then we'd have to confess to "sins against the fourth". (The fourth commandment in the Catholic liturgy being "honour your father and your mother"). We'd also have to add in the number of such violations. So a typical confession might be: "Bless me father for I have sinned. Sins against the Fourth. Five times".

But I constantly found myself so overcome with anxiety about the act of confessing - quite unlike the prolific Edward - that I'd mix up my commandment numbers and my frequencies.

Weekly fix

Thus, it was that one Saturday morning a priest, who was sitting comfortably in his box listening to boys whisper their stories of parental disrespect, was confronted by a stuttering nine-year-old boy called Laurence. He confessed that in the last fortnight he'd somehow contrived to commit a grand total of seven murders (seven sins against number five commandment).

My other confessions were no more successful. Only a week or two after my multiple homicide admission I was berated by the priest behind the grille for wilfully misunderstanding his simple question about whether or not I ever played with myself. I'd told him ingenuously that I rarely did anything else at playtime.

But at least that vexed childhood has left me with an enduring passion for watching and listening to other people's confessions. Where would I be without my weekly fix of a cops and robbers serial in which the priest - sorry, the detective - slowly but surely extracts the truth from an evasive suspect?

I'm looking forward to the day when the bang-to-rights suspect asks what will I get for this and the rugged cop leans forward and says 'three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers'.