WAGBAI: CONFIRMATION

I still call myself  today "an aspiring Buddhist" because I'm not quite there. But as readers of The Buddha Diaries will surely know, I was brought up in the tradition of the Anglican "Church of England." What follows is the story of my confirmation.

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CONFIRMATION

            I was confirmed at the age of twelve. Confirmation in the Anglican church is akin to the bar mitzvah for Jews. You go to confirmation class for several weeks before, in preparation, to learn certain things about the dogma of your particular religion. I already knew most of the New Testament stories from growing up—the Christmas story, the Easter story, the story of the Ascension, and so on. I knew the parables—the story of the Good Samaritan, of Lazarus rising from the dead, of the loaves and fishes. I knew, particularly, about Peter, my namesake. I knew how, as a simple fisherman on Lake Galilee, he was recruited by Jesus to become a “fisher of men”; how he denied knowing Jesus “before the cock crowed thrice”; how he went on after Christ’s death to preach the gospel, ending up in Rome. He was persuaded by his followers there to flee the city to save himself from persecution, but on his way out—the spot is recorded to this day—he was waylaid by the risen Christ to whom he addressed those well-known words, Quo vadis, Domine? Where are you going, Lord? And when Christ shamed him by saying that he was going back to Rome to be crucified a second time, Peter was so remorseful for having contemplated this second betrayal that he turned and went back to face the certainty of execution. He chose to be crucified upside down because he was not worthy of the same death as his savior. Caravaggio re-imagined the brutality of that moment in a magnificent painting which I saw once, years later, in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. And Peter went on, of course, after his martyrdom, to become the first “bishop of Rome”.

            I knew these stories. The purpose of the confirmation class that I attended in my father’s study with a handful of other children of my age was to initiate me into the other rituals and dogmas of the Anglican church. I learned, for example, about the sacraments. We Anglicans did not subscribe to the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation—the belief that the bread and wine in the communion service actually become the body and blood of Christ.  For Anglicans, they remain a symbolic value, not a real one. But we were all in awe at the prospect of approaching the altar rail and kneeling to receive the slim wafer and the sip of wine, consuming them for the first time. In order to be worthy of that honor, though, we had first to kneel before the Bishop and receive his “laying on of hands.”

            (I came to believe much later in life, by the way, that “confirmation” is a pale substitute for initiation. The transition from boy- to manhood has been traditionally marked, in societies other than ours, by more rigorous and demanding rituals. In order to become a man in tribal societies, boys might be sent off into the forest or the jungle for days on end, to encounter real, life-threatening dangers; or face excruciating rituals at the hands of elders in their village. In Western society, we long ago learned to condemn such practices as barbaric, but failed to find truly challenging, life-changing alternative ways to mark that big step forward into manhood. The result, I came to believe, when I myself was challenged to experience a rigorous form of initiation only in my fifties, is that we are surrounded—even led—by men who have never made the transition from boyhood and who for this reason remain, in important ways, little boys. The drunken rituals of American fraternities, to my mind, are nothing more than a mockery of true initiation).

            The day of my confirmation was nonetheless an important one in my young life. The Bishop came in a big, black motor car. This was in itself an event that inspired awe. The Bishop, to us children of the Rectory, was a distant and exalted eminence. Unlike my father’s black cassock, his office was distinguished by splendid purple robes; his church was the ancient cathedral at St. Albans, and he answered only to the Archbishop of Canterbury. His arrival was the cause of great celebration in the village and meticulous preparation at home. In the kitchen there was much baking of cakes and making of delicate finger sandwiches, with Gentleman’s Relish and cucumber and home-made jams, for the afternoon tea that was to follow the confirmation service.

            I remember little of the service itself. It must have surely pleased my father, who had worked so hard to prepare us for the sanctification that the Bishop bestowed. What I remember instead is my father’s gift to me that day. It was a copy of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but no ordinary copy. Bound in soft, pliable red leather—I can still feel the touch—and embossed with gold lettering, it was a St. Swithun’s prayer book, which contained not only the liturgies found in every other version but also an exhaustive guide to the “Sacrament of Penance”, or Confession. It listed every sin imaginable—and every sin beyond my child’s imagination—in unsparing analytical detail, along with the correct verbal formulations in which they should be presented to your confessor. There were sins of omission and commission, sins of gluttony and greed, sins of concupiscence and rage, sins of pride and sins of sloth. The most appealing and also the most mysterious to me were sins of lust, which I could already recognize as the most wicked of them all but had, as yet, no notion how to commit them.

And yet, as I can now to confess without the shame that I was once obliged to feel, it was not long before I acquired the skill to perform the most basic of all the sins of lust, the one the good St. Swithun, with joyless sanctimony, was pleased to condemn as“self-abuse”; the one known to most of the rest of us as the delectable art of masturbation.