Sitting in Confession on a Tuesday afternoon

                     “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of
                        unquestioning faith. I find a capacity for it terrifying.”
                        - - Kurt Vonnegut

I never knew what to say when I was told to confess my sins. I could
run through some long list of rights and wrongs, but are any of
them really sins? I ask the man on the other side of the divider and he says
that doing anything un-Godly is a sin. “But godly?” I ask him. I’ve got no
idea what’s Godly. I wish I was drinking a good thick German beer instead of
sitting here asking forgiveness I don’t want, from a god I don’t believe in, through
a man who holds himself above us all.
He condemns pride in the next breath.
For every question a quotation from his Bible, and I think about info-mercials on
the late night television. Finally I ask him what a god is. He tells me I’ve
got to find belief inside myself. Once again, another answer to make the
audience clap and the money roll in, but he’s said nothing. I talk of thought
and he talks of the shepherd. He gets mad at me when I ask him why he
wants to be a sheep. I get thrown out of the house of God, but that’s
fine with me ‘cause I’m going home. Past the Barnes and Nobles Bookstore
where I first began to question this blind faith I had. Inside those walls,
among the shelves of books, in the non-fiction section, where they keep
all the books with the facts in them, I searched every shelf.
I didn’t find a single Bible.

click here to go back