When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a sinner. That was the first time I felt something resembling ambition.
This was brought on by the fact that even though I was a Catholic, nobody pressured me to go to confession regularly, like they did all the other Catholic kids in the neighborhood who weren’t crippled.
I should have just left well enough alone and accepted this exemption as the blessing that it was. And for while I did. But as I got older I asked myself why I was excused from confessing regularly. And I came to the conclusion that the reason must be that the Catholic church didn’t think cripples were capable of being sinners.
I was insulted by this. I felt it was my duty to prove them wrong by sinning, regularly. But what kind of sinner would I be? Which of the Ten Commandments would I break? I didn’t want to kill or steal from anybody. Those Commandments made sense to me. Coveting my neighbor’s wife didn’t seem like such a bad thing to do. But one of my neighbors was a burly fireman and the other neighbor didn’t have a wife. And even if I wanted to covet the fireman’s wife, I didn’t think there was any chance that she would covet me back.
Another problem was that the Catholic church had a much broader definition of sin than I did. The Catholic church thought everything from jerking off to belching at the dinner table was a sin. But I thought if you wanted commit a sin you had to commit murder. That was pretty much it
But that turned out to be a good thing after all because if I went with the Catholic church definition, that meant that nobody could go a week between confessions without committing some sort of sinful infraction. Not even a cripple could do that.
To be human was by its very nature, to be a sinner. So I embraced that premise, even though I knew it was bull shit, because if that was the case I would automatically sin regularly without even trying. All I had to do was live my life.. That made sinning a lot easier to do.
It was true that by taking this approach, I wouldn’t experience the full joy of sining. Much of the time, I wouldn’t even know that I was sinning.
But I was a sinner nonetheless.. I cloud look back each week and feel confident that I had done something the Catholic had previously thought I was incapable of doing.
Just because I didn’t feel like a sinner didn’t mean I wasn’t one.
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