Two Confessional Mishaps and Some Tulips Sketched Waiting in Line for a Third Confession
A reader around my age, who I know from the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory, asked me for more funny stories about my mishaps. My other posts are too long, she said. And not funny enough.
I’m posting these anecdotes because I got a kick out of a comment recently sent me about my post “Happy Birthday, John Updike.”
Boy that’s one long review Roseanne. Any more funny chair stories?
The comment is from Gail, a widow I met at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory I attend in San José. Gail is living bi-coastally, spending some months every year here, some months in Connecticut. When she was in the area about two years ago last June, she uncharacteristically came up to me after Mass. She was barely suppressing her laughter about a story I had written about my mishaps trying to buy a recliner.
So, this is for Gail, and anyone else who might like to read this story about some of the ridiculous things that happen to when I’ve been to confession.
A Shocking Occurrence in the Confessional
Posted on Facebook, February 3, 2012, modified today
Today I reread with great enjoyment (and with many peals of long, loud laughter) The Thurber Carnival. In case you don't know, James Thurber wrote hilarious stories for the New Yorker about misadventures in his family. I wonder what kind of a comic gold Thurber might have been able to mine out of this little misadventure of mine.
My mishap occurred when I went to sing last Sunday, January 29, in the Mother of Perpetual Help Oratory’s choir at Five Wounds Portuguese National Church, a few minutes from my house in San José. Canon Fragelli, who was the rector at the the Mother of Perpetual Help Oratory in Santa Clara I attend, had gotten permission to celebrate a traditional Latin Mass at Five Wounds at 7:00 p.m., in honor of the traditional feast of St. Francis de Sales, who is the patron of Fr. Fragelli's order, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. Many of us from the oratory were happy to be back at Five Wounds for the evening.
Thanks to the former pastor, Fr. Donald Morgan, we had been able to sing at Traditional Latin Mass there at 9:30 on Sunday mornings for a year. Five Wounds is a unique and gorgeous church whose parishioners would not consent to let it be wreckorated after Vatican II. It has a marble high altar, highly polished mahogany altar rails, a high pulpit, and ornate confessionals, multiple side altars, and dozens of saint statues, and it is perfect for the reverent celebration of the traditional form of the Mass. But then after that one year, Fr. Morgan was replaced as pastor by a Portuguese priest, the Portuguese parishioners wanted the 9:30 time slot back, and we went back to celebrating all of our TLMs at our tiny formerly Protestant 75 seat church in Santa Clara.
After our schola rehearsed in the school cafeteria, and then everyone else went up to the choir loft, I waited in the nave until Fr. Donald Morgan went into the confessional, as he typically did when we had a high Mass, since he was not the celebrant.
The church’s big mahogany traditional-style confessionals are designed to allow the identity of the person confessing to be hidden from the priest. The priest sits behind a door facing towards the church, and the penitent or penitents kneel facing one side of the priest in one or more separate compartments behind heavy burgundy velvet curtains.
Fr. Morgan pulled open the sliding door behind the screen between us to begin while I was still struggling to get down onto the kneeler. The curtain was partly unhooked at the top, and even though I held the curtain closed as best I could, a shaft of bright light shone into the confessional from the gap above where my left hand was holding the curtain, right into Fr. Morgan's face. I have trouble getting down onto my knees these days. The original kneeler must have been removed at some point in time, and the movable one that was there was tucked in an awkward place that I wasn't able to find with my knees on my first attempt. I had to struggle up again, move the kneeler, and gingerly lower myself again feeling around for the kneeler. All while Father waited for me to begin.
And meanwhile the Mass was going on and other people had started lining up for confession when they had seen Fr. Morgan enter the confessional. My whole process of repeatedly kneeling and trying to put my knees on the kneeler and hoisting myself up again and kneeling back down again was complicated by the fact that I was trying to hold the heavy velvet curtain against the door frame at the same time. In retrospect I realize that all these complications may be partly to blame for the extreme wardrobe malfunction that occurred—but I'm jumping ahead of myself.
Before I even got to say, "Bless me Father for I have sinned," I had to say, "Father, the curtain won't close."
When I was finished with my confession, he gave me a penance and prayed the prayer of absolution. I said the act of contrition, then I hoisted myself back up off the kneeler so I could get out of there. When I let go of the curtain, I could see some people kneeling in the nearby pews. Fr. Morgan got up too, I think he was going to try to fix the curtain.
That's when my skirt fell down. I stood there for a moment in plain sight in my blouse and slip, with my skirt around my ankles.
I told this "most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me story" to friends at the Oratory at the weekly potluck held after the 10 a.m. Thursday Mass this week. Although Fr. Morgan usually only celebrates the Tuesday Mass at our Oratory as a visiting priest, he had been filling in for our usual Thursday priest and had eaten with us at the potluck, but Father had already left when I started talking about what had happened. One friend tried to be helpful. "Maybe he didn't see your face?"
Not likely, I thought. "Yeah," I said sarcastically, "Maybe he had been focusing on my skirt down around my ankles." Then the friend got thoughtful, "Maybe that's why Father's face was red today when he was eating with us. Did you notice how red his face was?" No, I hadn't. Father had been asking for the recipe for the simmered Chinese chicken I had brought to the potluck, and I didn't see anything unusual in his looks or actions.
"What did you do next?" somebody asked. "I pulled my skirt up and went up to the choir loft. … Come to think of it, there was a woman in one of the pews who was looking at me funny, so maybe she saw what happened too and wondered what was going on. Maybe others too." My friends had to agree that I was probably right.
Some have asked me how my skirt could fall off. To this I reply that with my current shape, trying to get a waistband to stay in one place without it slipping down is similar to what it must be like to try to securely cinch a string around the middle of a beach ball.
The choir director’s wife, Rita Hey, told me firmly that I have to get suspenders.
Unfortunately, this was not the first time I've had a piece of clothing fall off that week. The first time I was wearing a dress, so that didn’t fall down. But my underpants did.
Four days earlier, I had been sketching one of the paintings at the Palace of the Legion of Honor on my first and only field trip from the Santa Clara Senior center, when my underpants fell down. It was a challenge to sketch standing up in an exhibit with a lot of people milling around, especially that day, when the elastic on my underpants gave way and slid down to rest around my ankles in a white cotton puddle while I was sketching. What’s the emoticon for embarrassed?
When I confessed my sins to a storage shelf
Memory from March 20, 2020 during COVID lockdown.
Going to confession yesterday at the Clergy Residence for Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory was a unique experience. A sign on front door says, “Enter by the gate to the right.” You walk along a paved walk along the front of the house, then turn into the yard through the gate and walk a sidewalk along the house's right side.
The sidewalk turns a corner along the back of the house, and then you see a sliding door open on the patio door to the left, which leads into the home's great room, which has been converted into a chapel, sliding door to the right. Before the COVID confessional reconfiguration.
You enter through the sliding door, and there's a kneeler about eight feet away from and facing a chair on which Canon Ueda is sitting. He is partly hidden by a lace tablecloth folded over what looks like a tall folding clothes rack.
I dragged a chair over to sit down, since I can't kneel down any more. When I was done with confession, I put the chair back where I found it, and Abbe O'Brien came in to wipe things down before the next person. They directed me to turn left on leaving the door, which I realized would allow another penitent to come behind me from the right without us encountering one another on the sidewalk along which I had entered. By the time I got back into my car, I had walked along all sides of the house. Strange procedures for strange times.
The next time I went to confession there, when I got as far as the Great Room, I didn’t see the kneeler set up so I went inside the sliding door. When I spotted a curtain, I pulled up my chair beside it, then I started with "Bless me Father for I have sinned," and so forth. I waited for Canon to say something. And waited. And waited.
Finally, I figured out Canon had moved his seat, the lace curtain on its clothes rack, and the kneeler outside around the far corner of the house out of my sight. I hadn’t gone far enough.
I had begun confessing my sins to a storage shelf.
Souvenir of a Confession at San Damiano Retreat House
I made this sketch of tulips in black ink when I was waiting in line for confession in the garden at San Damiano retreat house on one beautiful Good Friday afternoon during a silent Carmelite retreat March 2008. Then I colored it in Photoshop. I did not shed any garments that time. Sometimes sketches bring back moments even more than photos do.
