Guilt nags at you. If you don’t find a way to appease it, it will drag you down into the depths of despair. I have just dipped my toes in those depths when I begin feeling absolution. I perform some small penance to help reboot my soul and then my life will be blessed once more.
I pause as I pass through the heavy, wooden double doors. They have seen hundred of years of sins and most of them worse than all of mine put together. So why do I feel so nervous to push them open and step into the interior of the church?
I make my way down the aisle, stopping before the curtain obscuring the confessional to take a deep breath. I step inside and the priest greets me with a soothing voice. I kneel on a worn cushion and begin slowly listing all the wrongs I have done since I last dared to step into a confessional five years before.
The priest clears his throat as I finish. “Those are not serious sins, my child, but they are still sins. For your penance, you need to hug ten strangers every day of the next week.”
“Really?” My eyes scan the confessional booth in case a hidden camera has been placed in the booth.
“Yes, my child. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and those ways are better understood when we understand those different from ourselves. May the Lord’s blessings be on you as you work toward forgiveness.”
And that is how I ended up with seven new friends this week. Ninety percent of the people I hugged were as terrified as I expected, but the other ten percent hugged me back and thanked me for reminding me that ours is a God of love and now we have each other to lean on.
~~I hope you remembered while you read this that this is a work of fiction. My church doesn’t encourage such behaviors and I honestly don’t know enough about other churches to attribute this penance to any of them. Sometimes, my fiction is stranger than truth, but couldn’t we all use the reminder to "be the good we want to see in the world"?~~
No comments:
Post a Comment