First Confession

The story of Jackie’s first confession bears signature touches of a Frank O’Connor story: a young first-person narrator whose innocence and naivete exposes the moral corruption and hypocrisy of the adults around him, who are so concerned with the condition of his soul that they do not glimpse the flaws in theirs. For all its breezy and gentle humor, the story touches on the heart of Catholic spiritual life. Confession is the most intimate and dramatic of the Church’s sacraments, a moment of self-examination and public admission of sin to a priest who, acting as God’s representative, absolves the sinner of the burden of those transgressions. The intention of the sacrament is not to create terror or to cajole cooperation through threats or even to shame a person into admitting their sins. Rather, it helps them understand God’s mercy and, with their soul now relieved of its burden, resolve to sin no more.

That the sacrament is an adult ritual shapes the story’s fundamental irony: a boy faces his first confession certain that his tantrum involving a grandmother he dislikes and a sister who loves to make his life miserable rises to the level of profound sin. Goaded by his sister and exploited by a catechism teacher who emphasizes the horrors of hell, Jackie conceives of the confessional as a symbol of punishment that threatens eternal perdition for anything less than a completely honest confession. The reader understands what the boy does not, that his sister and the catechism teacher exercise a petty tyranny over him. That Jackie does not see the bigger picture leaves him open to manipulation. O’Connor suggests that threats and taunts are no way to experience God’s mercy and to tap the grace of forgiveness. Ultimately it is the young priest that Jackie had regarded as his tormentor and antagonist who relieves him of the burden of sin and reassures him that he is not the sinner he thinks he is. He is a boy with much growth still ahead.

O’Connor uses confession (the admission of sin and the offer of forgiveness) for comic effect. Jackie is hardly perfect—he is an ordinary boy, after all—but neither is he the great sinner he is made to feel he is. His tantrum over the meal the grandmother prepares reveals how alone and vulnerable Jackie is within his family. His father punishes him without hearing his side; his sister happily tells on him, enjoys watching him get punished, and later taunts him about having to confess such behavior to the priest; his mother, although sympathetic to him, intervenes only after the father has beaten him. As he reviews his sins in preparation for his first confession, Jackie feels that he is an unforgivable wretch, a reprobate who will be exposed in the confessional box. “I must have broken the whole ten commandments, all on account of that old woman,” he says, “and as far as I could see, so long as she remained in the house, I had no hope of ever doing anything else” (Paragraph 7).

Convinced that he is a sinner of some magnitude, “lost, given up to eternal justice” (Paragraph 16), Jackie anticipates only anguish and spiritual suffering as a result of making his confession. His effort to kneel on the confessional’s armrest underscores how little Jackie understands confession, how misdirected his assumptions are, how comically unenlightened he is about the nature of sin. Initially, the priest is angry—here is, he must assume, another child mocking the church and its sacraments by climbing all over the confessional. But the priest quickly detects Jackie’s earnestness and sincerity, and when Nora storms into the confessional to deliver a blow across his ear, the priest protects Jackie and puts Nora in her place. Then the young priest, understanding that Jackie is struggling because no one has shown him where to kneel, explains to him how to use the confessional. The moment of kindness and generosity is strikingly dissimilar from the relationships Jackie has maintained with his family, friends, and teachers. Jackie is suddenly flushed with joy. “The relief of it was enormous,” he says (Paragraph 31).

The story reveals the compassion and concern of the priest for Jackie. The two converse easily in the confessional. The priest puts Jackie’s tantrum into a helpful perspective—the discussion of hanging for those who commit murder underscores how innocent and non-threatening the boy’s actions were. He asks Jackie how he would kill his grandmother, and the ridiculousness of his answer reveals the boy’s innocence. As Jackie explains how Nora put it into his head that the tantrum was a grievous sin, the priest understands the plight of being Nora’s brother. “Is that the little girl that was beating you just now?” he asks. “Someone will go for her with a bread-knife one day, and he won’t miss her” (Paragraph 51).

The priest allows Jackie to feel better about himself. Their conversation, in which the priest talks with rather than down to him, charge Jackie with an unexpected rush of confidence and relief. “I was genuinely sorry to part with him,” he says (Paragraph 57). When he tells his sister the light penance he had received, Nora reveals in the closing sentence the irony of the story. The girl who flatters a grandmother she does not like in return for pennies, tells on her brother, and parades around the church with self-righteousness, finally exclaims to Jackie, “I might as well be a sinner like you” (Paragraph 93). Jackie, who has experienced the spiritual relief of forgiveness, is a sinner no more; it is Nora, clinging to her smug and judgmental hypocrisy, who is the sinner.