My early experiences with forgiveness come from confessions with Father Bill, our parish priest when I was growing up. He was over 80 years old and deaf as a post. He made up for his difficulty "hearing" confessions by asking the sinner to speak loudly. Father Bill would then confirm what he thought he heard by repeating the confessed sins with deafness-induced loudness. So when I, and anyone else, confessed to Father Bill, everyone in church heard it too. Unfortunately, there was no back door out of the confessional.

" F O R G I V E N E S S  I S
T H E  F R A G R A N C E
T H E  V I O L E T  S H E D S
O N  T H E  H E E L  T H A T
H A S  C R U S H E D  I T "
Mark Twain














" F O R G I V E N E S S  I S
T H E  A C T  O F
A D M I T T I N G  W E  A R E
L I K E  O T H E R  P E O P L E "
Christina Baldwin

















" T H E  W E A K  C A N
N E V E R  F O R G I V E .
F O R G I V E N E S S  I S
T H E  A T T R I B U T E  O F
T H E  S T R O N G "
Mahatma Gandhi

Upon reflection, confession was a little like a spiritual audit. I reported a list of sins and their number of occurrences as accurately as I could remember. Father Bill absolved me and sentenced me to do penance prior to my receiving communion during Mass the next morning.

I spent a good deal of time "keeping the books" between confessions so that I was always prepared. Now don't get me wrong. I was not a terrible sinner. I was plagued by a need for accuracy and by the fear that I would receive communion with trace impurities still on my soul. A sure ticket to Hell, I had been told. The emotional relief that came with absolution was quickly replaced with the anxiety of how to stay pure between confession and communion.

My sins were just the normal course of being a flawed human being but, in my mind, did not reflect what I thought I knew about being a saint. So I hit the clicker every time I got mad, transformed the truth in some small way, did not obey my parents and other such transgressions, the most troublesome being "impure thoughts".

I had trouble counting my impure thoughts because I had so many of them. I had to resort to using quantifiers like "many, quite a few, a lot of " when confessing them because to state an actual number would have put me at great risk for inaccuracy. You can easily guess how difficult it was for me to have my impure thoughts and enjoy them too.

My situation became particularly burdensome when one of the nuns asked me to stay after catechism class. I panicked, thinking I must have really committed the big one! Frantically, I skimmed through my behaviour, since my last confession, to see what terrible thing I might have overlooked. Oh no, maybe she could read my thoughts!

"Gary, you should become a priest", she said. Oh my God, the added pressure!

The burden of sin was heavy to carry from one confession to the next. And being dependent upon a deaf, geriatric priest to mediate my forgiveness only added to the burden. I wonder if old Father Bill repeated what I confessed to him so that he would not immediately forget it.

Despite my best efforts over the years, I remain a flawed human being. I figured that at least my experience in spiritual bookkeeping would guarantee my success as an accounting major in university. No such luck. I changed majors in the midst of my first year.

I have become willing to accept, albeit grudgingly, that being flawed is quite a normal state of being. That acceptance is like granting myself amnesty or a general pardon for being the person I am by making space for my flaws. With that in place, I can forgive myself as I go for each negatively judged thought, word or deed that arises. I try to just notice and then let go, rather than letting each one collect like lint on Velcro.

That doesn't mean I have to like them, be satisfied with them or that I can't choose to do things differently in ways that serve me better. It is an acknowledgement that as I grow more fully into my life, my destiny is not likely to be perfection. I will paraphrase a quote here because I cannot remember it exactly. Every time you raise your consciousness a little higher, you will find a dust bunny under it.

Each present moment is quickly added to our accumulating past history. A sustained focus on already committed flaws is the mistake a fly makes when landing on flypaper. Stuck! Better to think of past experiences as compost for enriching our growth in the present and the future.

Now, I should confess that I have many fine qualities too. Whoops, there is that confess thing again!