First Confession

“I was too honest, and that was my trouble.”

In a story centered on the sacrament of confession, which assumes the penitent expresses completely and unreservedly the depths of their sin, it is a measure of how much Jackie still needs to learn that he sees honesty as a problem. He will learn only in the confessional the reanimating joy of honesty. In the closing scene, his honesty will be his redemption.

“She might have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.”

Jackie, as a seven-year-old first-person narrator, lacks the maturity and the insight to realize how problematic is the catechism teacher’s presentation of the sacrament of confession. She focuses only on the punishment for sin and never mentions the rewards of a virtuous life, the eternal glory of heaven. Until Jackie talks with the priest, he only knows the threats of punishment as a rationale for good behavior.

“I decided between one thing and another, I must have broken the whole ten commandments, all on account of that old woman.”

Here the story reveals the danger of confession as a ritual for children. Jackie is a typical boy—he has moments when he despises his parents; he resists doing chores; he even dreams of killing his sister. Such offenses are understandable in a child. Within Catholic dogma, however, Jackie is left feeling that he is a sinner, all because of his understandable dislike of suddenly having to share his small home with a stubborn old woman he barely knows.

“She held my hand as we went down the hill, smiling sadly and saying how sorry she was for me, as if she were bringing me to the hospital for an operation.”

Jackie learns how two-faced his older sister is. Despite her pretense of being a model daughter and despite her currying favor with the grandmother he despises, Nora is shockingly cruel to her little brother, goading him into the bread knife swing and even attacking him in church. As the story unfolds, Jackie comes to terms, through the example of his sister, with the complex reality of sanctimonious behavior.

“I knew then that I was lost, given up to eternal justice.”

This exaggerated self-assessment by Jackie of his spiritual position going into the confessional is at once comic and telling of the impact of his Catholic upbringing. His religion stresses too much the sinful nature of God’s creations and the terrifying threat of hell rather than the inspirational, even optimistic, message of Christ himself. At the age of seven, Jackie believes he is damned for all time.

“God, the hypocrisy of women! Her eyes were lowered, her head was bowed, and her hands were joined very low down on her stomach, and she walked up the aisle to the side altar looking like a saint.”

Jackie’s kneejerk assessment of women in general based on the example of his sister is telling about his upbringing. In the background is the example of his father, a drunk who treats Jackie’s mother with little respect and little tenderness. Certainly, Nora is superficial and hypocritical, currying favor for pennies and flaunting her appearance of piety—but Jackie’s conclusion that all women are like her reveals the most damning thing about him. He has begun to absorb his father’s misogyny.

“In the darkness it was a matter between God and me, and He had all the odds. He knew my intentions even before I started; I had no chance.”

Jackie’s thoughts reflect the flawed vision of God he has been given. Despite the New Testament’s depiction of Christ teaching little children, welcoming them to his message, embracing their humility and their innocence, here Jackie takes an essentially confrontational, even antagonistic relationship with God as an infallible bookkeeper, heartlessly tallying sins and waiting in the darkness of the confessional to punish Jackie’s transgressions.

“How dare you hit the child like that, you little vixen.”

The story pivots when the priest unexpectedly intervenes to stop Nora from boxing Jackie’s ears after he causes a commotion by trying to kneel on the narrow prayer shelf beneath the confessional window. Until this moment, Nora has had unchallenged authority over her little brother. This moment, followed quickly by the priest’s threat to assign her even more penance, marks the end of her reign of intimidation.

“‘Oh,’ he said respectfully, ‘a big hefty fellow like you must have terrible sins.’”

The priest here introduces just the right tone to Jackie’s first confession. At a moment when Jackie is certain his soul will be condemned to perdition, the priest makes a joke. He reveals in his gentle kidding that he understands the absurdity of having seven-year-olds confess their sins. He is far more concerned with the adults waiting to go through confession who, unlike the boy, do have an inventory of sins, none of which they would dream of confessing.

“What way is she awful?”

The priest talks with Jackie, engaging in genuine conversation. To this point, Jackie has been yelled at, ignored, punished, and told what to do. When he tells the priest in a moment of honesty how much he despises his grandmother, the priest, far from lecturing the boy, asks him to share what the problems are. Jackie can at last share his thoughts without fear of punishment. In the confessional, he finds at last a place where he can be honest.

“Someone will go for her with a bread-knife one day, and he won’t miss her.”

In this quiet and unsettling assessment of Nora’s future, the priest reveals the dark reality of Ireland’s urban community where dysfunctional families, bankrupt of love and genuine respect, strike at themselves because their troubled lives offer nothing concrete to swing at.

“Between ourselves, there’s lots of people I’d like to do the same to, but I’d never have the nerve. Hanging is an awful death.”

Jackie is at once dumbfounded and relieved that a priest fantasizes about murder. The priest, the embodiment of the judgment and anger of a God deeply offended by sin, here admits that there are some people he would like to swing a bread knife at. What stops him is not his thought of offending God or even the threat of hell but rather being hanged. To a seven-year-old terrified about damnation over a similar impulse, the admission is a revelation, a burden lifted off Jackie’s young shoulders.

“Outside, after the shadow of the church, the sunlight was like the roaring of the waves on a beach; it dazzled me; and when the frozen silence melted and I heard the screech of trams on the road, my heart soared.”

Confession, according to Catholic teaching, allows the penitent to sense the embrace of a forgiving God. The soul swells with the infusion of God’s compassionate grace. The world has not changed—Cork is still a dirty, cold, and noisy city. But Jackie’s heart now soars. This passage is anything but ironic, anything but a parody. Even if his confession was unorthodox and the priest unconventional, the sacrament achieved its aim.