Sunday Confessional

I learned to kneel before I learned what desire could do to me. ~ M.

"The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread." ~ N.H.

Catholicism gave me guilt in careful, ceremonial doses.

It came wrapped in incense and candle smoke, in folded hands and lowered eyes, in whispered prayers spoken beneath the watchful shadow of a crucifix. It lived in the hard wooden edge of the kneeler against my knees and in the hush before confession, when you were expected to examine every corner of yourself for evidence of wrongdoing.

I learned early that temptation did not necessarily begin with touching. Sometimes it began with looking. A glance held one heartbeat too long. A face you noticed when you were supposed to be listening. A thought that arrived uninvited, was immediately condemned, and somehow became impossible to stop thinking about precisely because you had condemned it.

Then our parish got a young priest.

And God forgive me...he was beautiful!

Not beautiful in the soft, harmless way religious paintings made men beautiful. He was startlingly human. Dark hair, strong features, quiet eyes, a mouth that seemed almost too expressive for someone who spent so much of his life speaking about restraint. There was something composed about him, something almost innocent in the way he carried himself, and perhaps that was what made him so dangerous to my imagination.

He would walk into the sanctuary in black, or stand beneath the stained glass in white vestments, and suddenly I would become acutely aware of myself.

My hands
My breathing
The warmth gathering in my face
The heat spreading to my core

I would tell myself to look at the crucifix.
I would look at him instead. And then, inevitably, I would feel guilty for having looked.

That was the first delicious little paradox: the looking was wrong, but the wanting made me feel vividly alive. Yes, I was old enough to understand the boundary. That was important. He was a priest. I was a girl. There was a line between us so obvious that no one needed to draw it. He had given himself to a life of discipline, devotion, and celibacy. Whatever attraction existed belonged nowhere except inside the private chambers of my imagination. And imagination, as I discovered, is a remarkably lawless place.

I could sit perfectly still in the pew, hands folded demurely in my lap, wearing the expression of someone contemplating salvation while my mind wandered somewhere considerably less innocent.
Nothing happened. That was precisely why it was so intoxicating. A glance across the church could become an entire story.
A passing smile could acquire meaning it probably never had. A moment when our eyes met could feel strangely intimate, even though it was nothing more than two human beings looking at one another.

I became fascinated by that tiny distance between reality and fantasy.

He hadn't touched me
He hadn't invited anything
He hadn't done anything wrong

And yet my imagination could take the smallest moment and turn it over and over until it glowed. I remember the strange physicality of it...the warmth in my skin, the quickening of my pulse, the sensation of being simultaneously ashamed and exhilarated. I would leave Mass perfectly composed, carrying my hymnal and pretending to think about the sermon while some secret, unruly part of me replayed a single look.

Perhaps that was the real seduction. Not possession...possibility. The possibility that he had noticed me noticing him. The possibility that, for one suspended second, he had wondered the same thing I had. The possibility that beneath the collar, beneath the vows, beneath all that beautiful discipline, there was simply a man. And perhaps that is why the women in the parish seemed to orbit him. They stayed after Mass a little longer. They suddenly had questions about parish announcements. They smiled when he spoke. Nobody said anything. Nobody had to. We were all perfect in the eyes of our Lord:

Perfectly civilized
Perfectly reverent
Perfectly aware*

There was something almost comical about how carefully everyone behaved around the obvious. We could admire the stained glass. We could praise the choir. We could discuss the sermon.

But admiring the priest?

He was celibate. Consecrated. Untouchable!

That required a lowered voice and an innocent expression. The forbidden thing was not necessarily the desire itself. It was admitting that you had it. I think that was where Catholicism left its deepest imprint on me: it taught me to separate the woman I appeared to be from the woman who existed inside my head. One could kneel. The other could burn. And somehow both could be me.

I used to think desire made me dirty.
Now I think shame simply taught me how powerful desire could feel when you were forbidden to speak its name. He became the great irony of my private spiritual life.
The man who was supposed to hear my confessions became the one subject I could never confess. Not because anything had happened. Because nothing had. There was only that invisible tension...the charged silence between what was permissible and what was imaginable. The strange intimacy of wanting something you had no business pursuing. The awareness that sometimes restraint doesn't extinguish desire. Sometimes it gives desire a sharper silhouette.

Years later, I can finally admit what I could not admit then. I wasn't wicked, I was young, alert to my own hunger, and caught between what I felt and what I had been taught to fear. But, I still remember the rush...the dark little pleasure of realizing that I could be composed and restless, innocent and curious, obedient and secretly rebellious...all at once.

That I could kneel beneath a crucifix with my hands folded and still possess a private universe nobody else could enter. The sacred and the sensual have always lived closer together than we like to admit. Maybe that's why temptation has such a peculiar language. It doesn't always ask you to cross the line. Sometimes it merely asks you to stand there.

Close enough to feel the heat.

And wonder, just for a moment, what would happen if you did.

M.

Is forbidden attraction more tempting because it is forbidden?

Click to View Show Anyway