Father Baritone

By the time I was thirteen, I was a fully-formed smart ass.  Not just at home, everywhere. in reaction to what I knew I had, a dull life, and what I didn’t know I had, Hormones.  I still went to confession in our small New England Catholic parish, so I could receive communion on Sunday.  To make a confession you have to commit sins.  A dull life doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity, so I would make up stuff.  But not just me! At church youth meetings my cohorts and I would share our confessional stories, trying to outrival each other in our fables. I also reveled in showing my knowledge of our religion in my own flip way.  I figured, one winter afternoon,  I could outsmart the customary confessor Father Clary. As a Catholic you couldn’t speak directly to God and ask for forgiveness.  You had to go through a middle man, that would be Father Clary.

The confessional is merely a booth you enter by lifting a curtain and kneeling in front of a screen that is shrouded, so the confessor cannot identify you by your face. The booth isn’t sound-proof, so the parishioners waiting in the nearby pews to have their confessions heard would sometimes be privy to the confessor’s efforts at vocal variety in response to the sins he was hearing and forgiving.  Of course, those confessing spoke in a whisper.  Our parish was small enough for the priests to know many of us by appearance or name or voice. As the priest approached his side of the confessional, he took a good look at those seated and waiting. It was Father Baritone, not Father Clary.  He knew all of us. 

After several parishioners quietly made their confession, it was my turn. I walked to the confessional, lifted the curtain, entered and kneeled.  Moments later the priest said he was ready to hear my confession. After asking for his blessing, I told him that I had coveted some of my friend’s possessions.  That was my big made-up sin for the week.  Although coveting possessions is one of the 10 Commandments I thought of it just a venial sin, like a misdemeanor.  To actually steal your neighbor’s possessions, that would be a felony, a mortal sin which would doom you not just for a life sentence but for an eternity, that would be an infinite number of lives…of punishments that would fit the crime, and in Hell.

While coveting is defined as yearning to possess something, I was really too immature, testosterone not having risen to the appropriate level, to have yearnings, so I figured a thought would qualify as barely a sin… just a fleeting, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a couple of Tommy’s LP records.” Remember, I was making this up as I was going along and assumed the confessor wouldn’t have a clue.  I’d be given the perfunctory penance of three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys which took five minutes to recite at the altar and I’d be sin free, pure, in a state of Grace, able to receive communion.   

But Father Baritone didn’t give me the customary penance, he asked what I coveted. I told him, a couple of Tommy’s LPs.  “How much was that worth?” he asked in his deep voice. I had the feeling that everyone in the pews heard him exclaim, “Was that worth it!”  Each record cost $2.99, so $6 I said. I told him sotto voce.  “How many times did you covet?’ he asked in a voice with equal measure of indignation and volume as if he wanted his judgment to echo throughout the stone walls of the church.  That stopped me.  I stumbled verbally and said that I only did it twice.  I didn’t think you could just covet something once.  Remember I never did it at all. I now had the feeling that either he knew I was gaming him, or that he really took this coveting business seriously. 

At this stage, I couldn’t tell the priest I was lying to him about the whole thing.  That would be ”bearing false witness against your neighbor”  another of the Ten Commandments. And this neighbor knew God.  I had the feeling I had crossed the border of a prank and had entered the territory of heresy.  Father Baritone declared as if he were summoning the Faithful from all of New England, “Put $12 in the Poor Box and do two Stations of the Cross.”  Wait….I didn’t take anything…I just thought about it….wait, I didn’t even think about doing it,  I made that up! Why two Stations of the Cross? That will take an hour-and-a-half.  But you don’t  debate the Judge who is just telling you what God told him! 

Reeling as I was kneeling, the math became clear to me--Father Baritone was charging me for each covet.  For that, I would have to pay. Twelve Bucks meant shoveling three feet of snow off three walks, 3 hours of work in the cold.  And I would have to pray in front of all 14 reliefs of the Stations of the Cross, which were placed throughout the entire church.  And everyone would see me carrying the cross of my sins….if they hadn’t already heard Father Baritone’s pronouncement.

This was public penance, a form of shaming.  I never forgot the lesson about paying for the unintended consequences of my imagined action. I never forgot the embarrassment.  While I am not an advocate of the Cancel Culture there was a value in that early exercise.  Have you ever looked up the word shame?  Here’s Webster, “The painful feeling of having lost the respect of others because of your own improper behavior or incompetence.”

I never shared this experience with my cohorts at the Youth Group, but I remained a smart ass right on through high school, the lesson Father Baritone gave me bubbling in the mess of hormones and reflections that would eventually ferment into a heady swig of Truth.  Long after that afternoon with Father Baritone, I realized that I had lost my own respect for myself, and eventually I came to realize, Father Baritone’s.  

Words, it was just words to play with, I had rationalized.   No, it wasn’t just words.  It was words I used to misrepresent who I was to someone who thought he was there to hear the truth.  Yes, words and thoughts are, in fact, acts. We are taught to use words to be clever.  I had to be so wrong about what I was doing and saying for me to gain a parcel of conscience from the experience. Often, after being absolved of sin, reemerging into the church from the dark confessional, the afternoon sun would color the saints in the stain glass windows with a brilliance that set the moment.  You were light, everything was light. But that afternoon, I had dulled the moment into a confusion of guilt and just plan stupid.   I didn’t stop going to confession, but I did stop going to Father Baritone’s confessional. 

When I look back I can see that I was given my first lesson in the ethics of using words that no one had taught me.  Cleverness at the expense of another isn’t funny, it’s a form of ridicule, humiliation. Father Baritone didn’t just see through me; he told me I had to pay for making up a story when what was called for was Truth.  Then, it felt like punishment.  Now I see it as what was owed.  Look back, Toastmasters, who was it that taught you to speak the truth?