Souls or Soles?

I think the irascible old nun who taught my first communion class at St. Joseph's had it in for me. My brother had intentionally put his foot on the veil of her habit as it trailed behind her on the step while she was leading her class down the fire escape.  It came off exposing her steel grey hair bobbed like the stubble that was left on a field after harvest. She not only settled the score with my brother by dragging him by the ear to Father Lachard, but was completing her revenge by harassing me. She walked past my desk narrowing her chilly blue eyes, smacking her wooden ruler threateningly against her palm, ready to slam my knuckles or the knuckles of anybody who wasn't paying attention. She didn’t spare any details when she told me how I blackened my soul every time I sinned. 

She also fed my already overfull imagination by telling me how sinners caused Jesus to weep because their sins helped drive the nails of the crucifixion deeper into His flesh. Blackened souls? I knew what soles were because I had watched Mr. Finesod the shoe maker down on South Main Street resole my shoes, but I wasn´t sure what sin was. At seven years old, the ripe age at which the Catholic Church considers children accountable for their actions, I was observant enough to know that the soles of my shoes hadn’t turned black, but I checked them just to make sure. I took off my socks and examined the soles of my feet and they weren’t black either, so I probably wasn’t going to burn in Hell for all eternity with the other sinners, like sister threatened. Still, I scrubbed the bottoms of my feet a little extra when I took my Saturday night bath.

Saint Joseph's church was a sepulchral, medieval place, the altar a stage for magical rites in a dead language, mysterious and intimidating to a child.  The smell of sandal wood incense and bees wax candles hung in the damp air. The crucifix behind the altar was larger than life and eerily illuminated by colored beads of light that filtered through the stained glass windows. I was concentrating so intently on it that I must have begun to hallucinate, or maybe it was a mystical experience, because I thought I saw tears coming from the eyes of the tortured and suffering effigy of Christ. I sat there in the shadows together with shrunken old women in black dresses, their wispy hair sedately covered by kerchiefs. 

I listened to the muffled drone of their prayers as they hunched in the oak pews or kneeled in front of the rows of votive candles and recited the rosary, regurgitating their incantations like cows chewing their cud, sucking out every last bit of spiritual nourishment from them. I sat there trying my best to think up some sins so that Father Lachard wouldn’t be disappointed when he heard my first confession.

It was my turn. The confessional was an unlighted, wooden cubicle underneath the statue of the Archangel Michael, sword held high, ready to drive God's enemy Lucifer from Paradise. There was a velvet drapery covering the opening like a shroud on either side to give the penitents an illusion of privacy. The priest sat in the middle behind a mesh screen, God's representative on earth, with the power to absolve and forgive even the most grievous of sins. He sat and listened as I kneeled in the darkness and reverently made the sign of the cross whispering the lines that I had memorized "Bless me father for I have sinned" and then I made up lies about having lied, and then lied about breaking a plethora of the other commandments that the nuns had written on the black-board and made us learn by rote. I mumbled my act of contrition, part of the ritual of confession: "O my god, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee......"

And when I was finished he gave me my penance, the customary three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and begged the Church and the Saints to intercede on my behalf to free me from the yoke of sin that weighted my seven year old soul, and finally said quietly in Latin, “Ego te absolve” and while blessing me he added, “You are forgiven my child. Go and sin no more”.

If you were raised as a Catholic you can never really escape the need for atonement and redemption. Guilt is the thread that is woven into the sackcloth that most Catholics wear all their lives.

Mea culpa.