Alone.

Last night Oscar and his fellow second-graders lined up to be interviewed for First Confession.  (Margaret posted about the same event here.)    He did fine, passed the "test," and he is cleared to confess next week.

His dad had practiced the interview with him for three evenings straight, and he knew the answers back and forth.  Still, yesterday morning he came downstairs, head rumpled from sleep, and crawled into my lap, folding those long legs up and curling into a ball.  "I’m scared," he told me.  "I don’t want to be interviewed.  I don’t want to go to Confession."

These are the times when I have no prepared scripts.  I was never a seven-year-old preparing for First Sacraments.  I went through RCIA (and a feel-good version of it, I might add).  I held him, glad that the other children were still asleep.   I thought about telling him that I am sometimes scared to go to Confession too.  I decided not to, at least not until I understood his feelings a little bit more.  Maybe they are entirely different from mine, maybe I shouldn’t impose my own experience on his.  "What about it scares you?"

"I don’t know."

"Let’s go through it step by step and you tell me which part is scary."  One of the questions they had to learn is about the steps to making a confession, so I began with the first step.  "First you’re supposed to ‘go into the confessional and kneel.’  Think about going into the confessional.  Does that worry you all by itself?  If I said to you, ‘Oh Oscar, I left my purse in the confessional, can you go and get it,’ would that be scary to do?"

He smiled, averting his eyes.  "Noooooo."

"OK, so going into the confessional isn’t scary by itself.  How about kneeling?  Are you afraid to kneel?  Maybe you think it will hurt your knees."

He smiled again.  "Nooooo."

"The next part is to wait until Father is done with the person on the other side of the confessional.  You wait until he opens up the little door and you can hear him.  Are you afraid about waiting?"

And then he surprised me by saying "Yes." 

"It’s the waiting that scares you?"

"Yes."

I questioned him carefully.  To my surprise he didn’t seem to be afraid of Father, afraid of confessing, afraid of what Father would say to him, or afraid of the penance.  Any or all of those would have been my guess.  I had expected that.  I knew what I could say about any of those things.  But no… it was the waiting.

"Tell me what scares you about the wait."

He was very, very quiet and then told me:  "Because I’ll feel very alone in there."

He nestled his face into my neck and I squeezed him a little more tightly, thankful that I had resisted the impulse to make this conversation about what I do with my confessional hangups.  The solitude and privacy of the confessional, to me, is a refuge. 

I tried:  "There’s a crucifix inside the confessional booth.  While you are waiting, you can look at it and pray and remember that Jesus is with you.  Do you think that might help?"

I could tell he was considering that possibility carefully.  "No," he said at last.  "A crucifix won’t help me be not lonely."

"I can understand that."  Worth a try.  Another few minutes passed and I rocked him gently.  Then I said, "It’s okay to be scared about waiting.  Lots of people are."  Some more time went by.  "When you’re scared about waiting, you could remember the story about when Jesus was scared and sad.  You know — in the garden."

He nodded.  "But it won’t help me be not lonely."

"No," I said.  "It won’t help you be not lonely."  More time. "But it might help you all the same."

He stayed there for a while and I listened to his breathing, thinking of all the things I might add, rejecting them one by one.  Any more from me would be too much.  In the end this is something he does on his own.  In the end he has to go into the confessional and kneel; to look around at the close, acoustically lined walls, at the blind and closed grille, at the painted plastic crucifix gazing mutely down;  to hear the muffling whir of the fan; to wait for the grille to open and the sound of a human voice.  We prepare them, we set it all up.  We tell them what we expect them to do.  We throw a lot at them and we hope that some of this sticks.  That it sticks in the heart and not in the craw.  I never felt the peculiar impotence of this knowledge as much as I do this week leading up to First Penance.  In the end they do it on their own.