I MUST CONFESS …

Ndumiso Ngcobo on the eclecticism of being Catholic

Because we were such filthy buggers, we only had to confess to sins from the past 3 months She spiced up her own sins just to gain some respect for the school

FEW things confuse people who have interacted with me on Facebook, Twitter and suchlike more than finding out that I consider myself Catholic. This is because I do not consider social networks the ideal space to bring out my “deep”, innermost thoughts. Each time I’ve been duped into getting involved in a serious debate on Twitter I’ve felt like I’ve taken a 30-year-old whisky I was saving for the in-laws and shared it with a bunch of random nyaope kids.

About three weeks ago I was accosted by someone who went on a lengthy rant about my “atheism” and “Sies! How dare you? You were raised in a good Catholic family and you benefitted from very cheap, but high-quality high school education courtesy of the Catholics.”

I deliberately took a long, lusty gulp from my chalice of ambercoloured liquid to effect a pregnant, pseudo-intellectual pause before responding, “The rumours of my atheism have been greatly exaggerated.” I came across as profound because this individual had apparently never had sight of the Mark Twain quote I was plagiarising.

The truth of the matter is that the best description for where I am on my “spiritual” journey is “cultural Catholic with strong agnostic leanings” — a cop-out way of saying I’m more confused than a chameleon in a nightclub with multicoloured strobe lights.

I was aggressively indoctrinated in Catholicism and have been grappling with major dissonance the more I’ve assimilated new information, since I was a teenager. Unlike my atheist friends, I lack the cojones (or brains) to conclusively dismiss the existence of the God phenomenon based on the lack of evidence. This is because I would have to be consistent and dismiss the existence of phenomena such as love because they haven’t been proven in a laboratory either.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Catholicism for me is the concept of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, commonly known as Confession. To the uninitiated, this is a sacred “rite” that every Catholic has to subject themselves to.

My church is very big on helping adherents of the faith seek, identify and maintain a general sense of perpetual guilt about pretty much everything that goes wrong in the world. I remember how, as pubescent 14-year-olds, we listened to the news on the (then) English service of Radio South Africa, with Michael de Morgan detailing the disaster of the Challenger spaceship that exploded mid-air.

Sister Dorothea successfully managed to convince all of us that the reason the Challenger had exploded was because we hadn’t prayed hard enough.

That seemed odd because I’d been praying really hard for Charmaine to allow me to put my hand down her bra and nothing had happened on that front. But I guess my prayers were being sidelined because of my evil ways.

The first time I had to participate in the Confession sacrament, I was eight years old and had endured 12 months of catechism classes for my First Holy Communion conducted by a posse of Catholic women in various stages of beardedness. Before we received that sacrament, we had to cleanse our hearts of any sin. Our instructor told my class of eight-year-olds that because we were such filthy, sinful buggers, we only had to confess to sins committed in the previous three months or so.

Big problem. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of any sin I had committed in the previous three months. About five months before, I had peed on the floor by mistake on account of those teensy erections eight-year-olds get in the morning, and denied everything like Oscar.

So I lied through my first Confession, making up sins I’d never committed.

Later on in my Catholic path towards righteousness and avoiding the eternal embers of Hades, I started participating in the ritual of Confession on a more religious basis. There was only one problem. The Catholic definition of sin is a lot more stringent than that of many spaces I have operated in.

For instance, let’s say someone engaged in sexual relations with your spouse in the township you grew up in. Let’s suppose they were unrepentant about that indiscretion and went around boasting about it in shady taverns until you had to sjambok them. Most people would chastise you in public, but privately go, “That bastard had it coming”. Not in my church.

Right at the beginning of Holy Mass we had to recite a prayer called the Confiteor. It went something along the lines of: “I confess to almighty God, to all the angels and saints, that I have sinned in my thoughts, in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. Through my own fault, my own fault, my own grievous fault (Mea culpa three times).”

I always had two problems with that prayer. One, confessing to all the angels, and that bit about all my sins being my own grievous fault. Sometimes one makes mistakes because one woke up randy due to an erotic dream from the previous night. I’m not sure that was my fault.

Until recently I thought I was the only one who felt this way. And then I was reunited with an ex-schoolmate from Inkamana High. She confessed to also having made up phantom sins. This was apparently after a visiting American priest had gone on and on about how boring the sins of the nuns and students of Inkamana were. So she spiced up her own sins just to gain some respect for the school.

Then again, Bishop John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal Church once said, “The Church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.” I may well be wading ankle-deep in the shallow end of the pool.