Dusty attitudes of confession. The routine for confession during school hours was this: There was a quiet time allotted for us all in the sober classroom to reflect on our sins and it was understood that silence and shoegazing was required for this purpose by us the little kids. The quietly officious teacher before trudging out to leave us in our repose would hand out, kindly and hushed, little confessionary leaflets to help us.
These leaflets were impossibly worn and patchy and made out of some old grey nunnery card held together by feeble tape, but their antiquated mustiness only added to their official, pious look. The whole thing was taken with dread seriousness by everyone.
The leaflets has a brief rundown on the procedure and then a whole lot of sins possible for confession, of various categories. This was basically to help us out a bit since being little kids we didn't have much to confess. The nuns who wrote the leaflet had in fact been imaginative and encompassed a broad range of wickedness. I always tended to choose those vaguer, lightweight sins which it was hard to specifically pinpoint but which I knew I must've committed at some point back home. Such vague misdemeanours as selfishness or unforgiveness, maybe even the occasional use of bad language or perhaps a lie here or there. These sins were certainly true though kind of trifling.
And then, off we would be dispatched one by one to the confessional.
No comments:
Post a Comment