Confession

I liked this photograph before I took it, surreptitiously, at a cathedral in Honduras, liked it because I respected the personal and silent quality of the man's piety. It's impossible to say he isn't sincere. He's praying, all by himself, at a place he believes God is near--or at least the Virgin, who he's asking to come to his aid in his request for God's hand. Here, knees on the bench, he believes he's in the blessed company of the saints. Look at that incredible altar. I admire him and feel for whatever anxious motives bring him into church. 

"Surreptitiously" because at this point I don't think I was aware of the ban on cameras or camera phones in the cathedral. Eventually I was, and I put the phone away. But whether I knew the rules or not, I did feel as if I was violating the man's privacy by snapping a picture for the sake of what his silent penitence would say in a photograph, this one, the one I took just then. And still like.

All of that is in this picture, maybe even the guilty sense that I shouldn't have taken it at all. Maybe that particular forbidden-ness is part of whatever noteworthy-ness this photograph owns in my scrapbook of shots of our time in Honduras.

And there's this, too, an ancient confessional in the same cathedral, the furniture of piety in his faith. I didn't grow up with this apparatus. It's something foreign, except for the righteousness of the transaction it heartfully signifies--confession of sin and forgiveness. There must haven been a tabloid full of sins recounted here through endless years, but the walls--and those intervening screens--are sworn to silence. 

I remembered this ancient, storied thing just now, when I read a poem by Connie Wanek, who was raised with a piety born here and with such transactions. I was too, of course, but without the furniture. Still I couldn't help thinking of my own sins in that old cathedral. .  .

Confessional Poem

I never told him anything
he didn't expect--
the white lies of a small girl, 
a week's accumulations
related in halting, mouselike whispers.
He blessed me anyway
and gave me my penance
and bade me go in peace.

I suppose all acts of piety, of righteousness, risk becoming rote or knee-jerk, even when you're a child, a little girl seated in that hard seat of confession. Then, Connie Wanek remembers thinking what I couldn't help imaging myself when I stood there at the booth.

Perhaps the next penitent
would offer him what he came for,
a great, meaty, mortal sin like adultery
described in gorgeous language,
words that lit up the confessional
like a flashlight in a closet:
a silk cuff missing its button,
sheer stockings coiled on the floor,
shoes with heels like wineglass stems--
the hypnotic black-and-white images of film noir,
wherein all eyes followed a bad star
with uncontrollable longing. 

End of poem. 

Maybe we aren't so different as the varied apparatus of our one catholic faith might seem. I could be a Catholic. In truth, I suppose, I am.