True Confessions

You have probably heard it said that “Confession is good for the soul.” I myself don’t have much to confess nowadays – but in my “growing up” years, I had tremendous feelings of guilt, especially in connection with sex – and particularly masturbation. When a psychiatrist I went to asked me about it, I actually denied I ever did it. He never raised the subject again. It was not till some time later – when I was no longer seeing him – that I had what seemed the great courage to write out a detailed confession and mail it to him. That was the beginning of big changes in my life.

But later I discovered that, for me, the best and most effective way to make any serious kind of confession was to do it publicly. I had never been afraid of public speaking per se. And during the “Hippie Era” of the 1960s, in San Francisco, I became a sort of informal outdoor speaker in Golden Gate Park, gathering quite an audience for my regular daily appearances. In one of these, I made the big confession that I had for years had a nasty personal habit, of picking bits of dead skin off my hands, and eating them. (As you can imagine, this habit produced very ugly areas on my hands. My mother called me a “cannibal”!)

I wasn’t actually asking for help – and in fact, nobody offered any – although there were, of course, expressions of sympathy. But, as a result of this public confession, I did experience a “cure.” I can’t say it was anything like what people often claim who have been to Lourdes. And it did not happen overnight – but, over the next few weeks, I gradually found myself losing that compulsion about which I had for so long felt so guilty; and I began to rejoice in the growth of healthy new skin. All because I had the courage to go public with the problem. 

Since then, my only bad habits have been ones which many of my readers probably share, and about which, in this computer era, we can all find much information and help from support groups online.

But I do have a sort of confession to make: I am now in my nineties, and long past having any physical ability to indulge in any kind of sexual activity. (No, I have not tried anything like Viagra, and have never even been interested in doing so.) However, I still sometimes like looking at photos of attractive unclothed women – images which nowadays are so abundantly available online.

On a more humorous note, my favorite source of knowledge on this subject (and many others) is Tom Lehrer – the very popular satirical songwriter of the 50s and 60s – who wrote and sang a beautiful updating of Catholic practices which he called “The Vatican Rag.” I can’t resist quoting some of it here:

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional.
There the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original.
If it is, try playin’ it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, Four. Six, Eight,
Time to Transubstantiate! 

If you need any explanation: The “confessional” is the small booth in a church, in which people confess their sins to a priest, whom they don’t see. He then prescribes an appropriate penance.

“Original Sin,” as I understand it, is the doctrine that, since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, all Mankind has carried some of the burden of their sin – which was to eat forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and thereby acquire knowledge of Good and Evil, and thus become mortal.

Transubstantiation is another Catholic teaching – that the wine and wafer, served and consumed as a regular part of the Mass ceremony undergo a profound change in the process. To non-believers, they are simply symbolic – but to the Faithful, they literally become the body and blood of Christ. (At one point in the history of Christianity, this was a major and theologically divisive issue, for or against which people were willing to give their lives.)

Sometimes people who have secrets so shameful that they retain them all their lives, when they know they are dying, feel the need to tell somebody the truth. Hence the legendary “death-bed confession.”

But a more edifying story is that of Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1543 his Earth-shaking book was published, demonstrating that our planet revolves around the Sun rather than vice versa; that humankind is thus not the center of the universe. The very first printed copy of his book was brought to Copernicus on his deathbed.