SEMA WRAY
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300 WORDS:  Confession

8/17/2013

1 Comment

 
I put up a good fight, though futile, and was sent to Catholic school in grade seven. 
Kathy had already spent a year there; after a scandalous 7th grade at the public middle school
she was shuffled off to St. Paul’s, as if it were a convent.  She didn’t care – as long as it wasn’t
an all-girl situation, she was fine. 

But when I started 7th grade, she had already moved on to high school, so I was on my own.

On my own, and not Catholic. Granted, Episcopal – about a pitching wedge from Catholicism but still, not Catholic.   The “Hail Mary?”   The rosary?  Crossing yourself?  I had no idea.  

So I learned the words, attended Mass, and copied the person next to me saying, “amen,” when
the body of Christ was offered.  
   
One day a Priest asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer; he yelled at me and I confessed I wasn’t Catholic, which very obviously earned his contempt.  
 
Another time, we all marched over to the Church to test the newest innovation in Confession.  
No longer to be an anonymous experience – whispering through a wall to the priest on the other side –
it would now be face-to-face.   You would sit in full view of the priest and he of you. 
It was meant to foster a greater sense of comfort, a more personal experience.

I brought a book; I was exempt.  

I was pleased to be exempt. I didn’t want to confess anything. I’d rather have the Priest hate me
for what I had no control over rather than for something I had purposefully done; I didn’t need an agent of God poking around in my business.  
 
Episcopalians silently confess their sins to God; they know the value of discretion,
and He already knows it all anyway.

1 Comment
sue baker
8/17/2013 11:38:59 pm

Nice most people are afraid to tell their experiences. My mother went to a catholic school. She told stories how the nuns would beat the kids. she had pepper put in her mouth. I was always threatened to be sent there. Kathy- scandalous no way!! lol
Keep writing Sema, I enjoy your writing.

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    I was born in Oswego, NY, 
    a very cold place from which 
    I fled in 1988.  I graduated from the University of North Carolina Greensboro with a 
    BA in English, and have 
    worked in marketing and communications in  North Carolina and Virginia. I have lived in Richmond, since 1996, and even though I am not from from here, I am home here.  

    "I had always wanted to be a writer, but was impeded by the belief that to be a writer one had to be extraordinary, and I knew I wasn't.   By the time I was ready to give up my academic career I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than anyone else."     The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
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Sema Wray • Writer

Richmond, VA
phone: 804-282-3609

email: mnswray@comcast.net

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