Confession and Curls

Item: I went to confession last week for the first time since Easter. It's not that I don't mean to go, you understand. In my ideal world, I go to confession weekly. Alas, in the real world, usually the first thing I have to confess is my talent for procrastination. In the real world also -- and this is a subset of the general tiresome topic of procrastination -- I tend to wait until my soul has piled on more burdens than it has hands to carry them with, with the result that my confessions usually involve a lot of interrupting the priest as he's about to give me absolution because I can't possibly have any more to say, except that I do. "Wait, Father, I'm not finished yet," I have to say, while the people outside tap their feet and whistle little tunes and look nonchalantly off into space the way you do on an elevator. Waiting for your turn to go into the box is an awful lot like standing on an elevator, now that I think of it; there's that similar disinclination to speak to people for fear of betraying too much interest in where they're getting off and what they might plan to do there.

I like anonymous confession, as in going across town to another parish where the priest has never laid eyes on you and won't recognize the sound of your voice. Most of the time, however, (see "procrastination," above) I end up going to our own parish, where the priest does know me, and anonymity is a bit of a charade. Aelred, who heard many confessions during his career as an Anglican priest, assures me that at the end of the day, by a special grace of the ordained state and the mercy of God, the confessor's memory is wiped clean, and that he does not then at the next parish fete accept a drink from you thinking, "Procrastinator." I believe him when he says this. The situation I encounter most often is, rather, that my usual confessor seems reluctant to let me confess things. It may be that he does this to everyone, believing us all to suffer from scrupulosity. But this was the case at my first confession, which happened face to face, and when I told him some of the things I had to confess, he didn't want to believe that I had actually done them, a nice person like me. And then he thought, you know, that the things I was concerned about had happened a long time ago, and why was I worrying about them now? "No, really," I had to say. "I've thought hard about this, and I truly think I need to confess X, and Y, and while we're at it, Z." O-kaaaaay, he said. Thus I was able to go home ten pounds lighter in my spirit.

So this happened again last week. And I should say right now that I don't think the situation arises from any particular theological squishiness on the part of the confessor, or I wouldn't go to him at all. I think instead that he worries that some of us might be harder on ourselves than God would actually be, and perhaps there's truth to that, though in my case I had some real burdens to lay down, and I wanted to be very clear about laying them down once and for all. Some of them were old burdens I had been carrying for a long time but not especially thought much about lately -- I have no shortage of sins in the present to keep me occupied. Though I'd long since repented and given up actively making them heavier, I still had them with me, remora-like in both their forgettableness and their tenacious hold.

My confessor raised the question of whether I needed to confess them at all, but when I said I thought I needed to, he heard me out. And then he absolved me. In that moment, I experienced a flash of understanding about the office of the priest, how he stands in, in his dealings with us, for Christ Himself. What the priest said to me, verbatim, was, "Your sin is gone. You are not that person any more." And it was Father's voice, but I heard the voice of Jesus, saying what He said to the woman at the well, to the woman caught in adultery, to the lepers, to the paralytic who rose from his mat. "You are not that person any more." Whatever I was, whatever boring selection of the infinite and dazzling variety of sins belonged to me, I am not that person any more.


Item: Since getting my hair cut some weeks back, I've been looking for ways to embrace the sudden abundance of curls which cutting length off and layers in has unleashed. At the same time Epiphany has been experimenting with her own hair, which is even curlier than mine. Several people have mentioned to me a book called Curly Girl, by Lorraine Massey, which advocates a no-shampoo, no-brush approach to treating curly hair.



I don't have the book, but I did stumble across this delightful website, sponsored by the Young Ladies Christian Fellowship, devoted to the celebration of the gift of curly hair. Here you find out how to wash curly hair (no shampoo, just conditioner), how to style curly hair (no brush, just your fingers), and how to love and give thanks for curly hair. The site features real girls, not fashion models, who exude the kind of natural, wholesome, realistic feminine beauty you'd like your daughter imitating. Anyway, if you're a curly/wavy girl, or you know someone who is (or would be, if she'd just get over wanting straight hair), check it out.


My own lovely real-life Curly Girl.