Beating the Kerplunk

I come from a community that went to Mass every Sunday. Attending Mass in our family was not an option and it certainly wasn’t like school where you could complain of a stomach flu and maybe get to stay home. To get out of going to Mass, you had to throw up a spleen at least. Every one in our town were hardcore Sunday Mass goers. Except of course Mr. and Mrs. Garret; they were of a different breed; they were Protestants. Protestants did their own thing, so I was told, and they could eat meat on Fridays, which I found totally unfair. But for us Catholics, in our books, skipping Mass and eating meat on Fridays were transgressions of divine law, and mortal ones at that, the worst kind of sin. These violations of our religion's laws would get you a one-way ticket to damnation, that is an eternal tour roasting in the eternal flames,...not just any kind of flames, but the eternal fire and brimstone kind of flames, aka hell.  I was always of the opinion that this was kind of a harsh consequence for eating meat on Fridays and skipping Mass on Sundays. But then, let's face it, as a deterrent, it worked. I never skipped Mass, and I never ate meat on Fridays. And besides, who was I to question the precepts of a 2000 year old (at that time more like a 1960 year old) institution that had been founded by none other than the son of God?

It's a good thing we had Confession. By simply telling the priest that you had sinned, he would assign you penance, usually comprised of a few Hail Mary's to recite while doing a round of the Stations of the Cross, all the while sorrowly asking for forgiveness for your sins with the promise to not ever, ever commit these awful unrighteous misdeeds again, and voilà, your soul would be sponged of any wrongdoings you may have committed since your last visit to the confessional, and thereupon, your descent to the fires of hell would be vetoed altogether.  I thought Confession was the one of the best inventions on earth, a kind of reset button you could hit when lost in some occasional wayward behaviour, and which would enable you to return to the path of eternal happiness, to heaven. At least that's what the nuns used to tell us.  

The nuns used to drag us to confession every first Friday of the month. As an 8 year old child, and a good kid at that, my repertoire of sins that I could confess was pretty limited. After discussing this sin deficiency with my brother Jack, the wisest and most creative thinker of my siblings, he assured me that this was a quandary for all the guys in our village, and he had devised a plan to overcome our plight. After all, this sin-shortfall appeared to cause all of us some unnecessary anxiety prior to our monthly cleansing of the soul at the confessional. 

My brother Jack's plan entailed choosing two standard sins that we were sure we'd perpetrate during the month (my two were the inevitable disobeying my parents, which fell under the fourth commandement of honouring thy father and thy mother; and the second would always be in regards to using foul language, which really couldn't be categorized in any of the ten commandements, unless my offensive language made reference to anything Catholic, which it never did because my swearing vocabulary limited itself to 'shit'. At the beginning, I thought the rather ambiguous nature of my second sin a bit worrisome, but luckily my brother Jack was again able to put my mind to rest by unravelling the perplexity of my faux-sin. 

My brother Jack in front of the Church

According to my infallible brother Jack, the act of confessing that I had used foul language when it really wasn't a sin was a sin in itself because I was lying to the priest about committing a sin that I really had not committed, which basically boiled down to perjuring myself. If I had not sinned by using foul language, I had surely sinned by lying about sinning, but, somehow in the whole melee of false sins and true sins, the resulting aftermath would be an automatic absolution of all sins.  His clarification made sense to me back then.  



When it came to the third sin, my brother Jack had made a list of 'third sin options' that he readily shared with the guys. He encouraged us to select a different one every month so as not to bore the poor priest to death with the same sins all the time. Sins in the sin selection list had all been carefully vetted by my brother Jack himself so as not to be too outlandish and possibly raise suspicion, or worst of all, to bring on follow up clarification of the said sin by the priest. This had happened to my brother Jack once when he had clumsily included 'having impure thoughts' to his three sins, which unfortunately brought on a follow-up 'what kind of impure thoughts did you have my son' from the confessor. After that episode, all potentially open-ended sins were eradicated from the list.   

There was another stopgap safety valve that you could employ to keep you from the fires of hell in the event that you were to die with a polluted soul. The Act of Contrition was a kind of ‘safe-word’ prayer which after recitation would immediately redeem you of all sins used in the event that you suddenly faced the grim reaper before having had the opportunity to confess your transgressions to your priest confidant. By reciting the prayer before your last breath, you would be automatically absolved of the offending sins. Unfortunately, the only flaw to this was that the Act of Contrition was one of the longest prayers in our stock of prayers and usually took at least 30 seconds to get through, which, in a case when your dying process lasted less than that, you were not able to get through to the end before your last heart beat. 

Again, my brother Jack came to my rescue. I recall he and I timing our reciting of the Act of Contrition so as to improve our chances of beating the odds of having the devil as our landlord in the event of an untimely and quick death. There was a rather high steeped embankment, kind of a headland, overlooking the river situated at our neighbour’s place. It was a great place where we would meet with the neighbouring kids in winter after a snow fall to slide down on our makeshift toboggans. It was also the test site where my brother Jack and I would play the high stakes game of ‘beat the kerplunk”, an experimental designed final-destination-sort-of test that would, in a quick death scenario, give us the tools to divert our descent into hell.  The test would entail lying on our stomachs, our faces and arms protruding from the edge of the cliff, and dropping rocks down to the river and reciting the Act of Contrition while the rock dropped. The kerplunk sound of the rock hitting the water represented our last heartbeat, and therefore the aim of the experiment was to try to get to the Amen before the sound of the fateful kerplunk. I never did succeed in beating the kerplunk. Oh well.