Confessional booth part#2

Confessional booth part#2
 
We learned much from the confession booth experiences and mainly; effective lying technique. The best kinds of lies snuggle up to the truth, as tight as possible, yet secretly stay aloof, you could hardly tell . Parents hold lie detecting pride; priests in the booth?—I never knew. In final analysis, a good lie equals a believed lie; bad lies far-fetch it, create suspicion. A good liar worships his craft; his situation might mandate extracting one outta you-know-where, in a pinch, and once a lie floats, the sincere cover-up follows up and defends.
 
So, first step for good-lying-management students?—mastery of the “straight face.” Child’s play really; as kids, we did anything to avoid a belt-licken, motivation waxed strong. It stands to reason then, we so sharpened
the face, never compromising a lie’s success potential. See, good
facial posture greatly diminishes the need for a clever thought out
story line.
 
In the booth, we only had to master the straight-tongue; the priest couldn’t see us. By now, we were alternating priests, so as to restrict any from becoming too familiar with our voice. Carefulness fore-thought the tone of our spiel. We tried to “routine” it the best we could; no unusual reports, but hyped-up sincerity on the final act of contrition (a prayer that started “O my God I am heartly sorry for having offended Thee, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell”); something worthy of seriousness, I’d say. So, just everyday sinning was the idea, however, outright omissions were too fearful an idea at this young age.
 
As we got older we perfected something called strategic-confession-timing. See, the confession schedule was a problem—usually Friday evenings, and if we went at this time, we still had the Saturday night dance before Sunday communion. We could not miss communion every week. We had to take our chances we wouldn’t sin; Yeah right! Remember, you couldn’t just confess your sins straight to God, no, if you had sin, you must be absolved by the priest.
 
So SCT worked out this way; go and stay clean for one week, get communion, then miss a few weeks and when you couldn’t go to communion, say to whoever asked “I missed confession this week, had to work or whatever.” All of our practice at fibbing was developing with sophistication.
 
The plan seemed reasonable to my entire crowd, and raised no suspicion. Amazing how everybody always “knew”  this week’s sinners; they couldn’t go up and get communion and were forced to sit and let everyone climb over them. For this reason when we missed, we bit the bullet, but then it got easier. We exchanged glances with those not going up, and gained a measure of solace from our fellow sinners. This became just a part of a normal Sunday morning.
 
When we were dismissed from the Mass on Sunday, our priest said “the Lord be with you” and the rote response was “thanks be to God”. A lot of times I was thanking God it was all over. We had done a wonderful thing to appease our consciences and felt good about ourselves. Objectively speaking, I didn’t know what in God’s name was going on the majority of the time. It was kind of an endurance test.

At our church, we started Saturday evening Mass and this worked well for a big group of us. Confession Friday, church Saturday with communion and it all replaced the Sunday obligation. In addition, the Saturday service usually went faster as there was rarely a sermon.
 
In closing, this helped a lot, but as life took more of a wild-side turn, all routines eventually became an annoyance. Now, lying assumed a new and perfected dimension. We couldn’t just lie to priests and moms and teachers. We had to lie to ourselves.
 
The requirement here was the development of good and rational excuse formation, and we had to believe them all. More sophisticated lying techniques had to be thought of and learned. Good friends helped. Some of my friends were advanced liars and taught the rest of us. 

People say churches are full of hypocrites — well said!