After an hour hearing confessions, I almost always have the same thought walking to the sacristy. I’m in awe of the vulnerability of people before God. Their openness inspires my own.
Reading the subtitle of Fr. Jim’s fun and candid new memoir, “Confessions of a busboy, dishwasher, caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller, corporate tool, and priest ” I was curious what sorts of “confessions” these would be.
While Fr. Jim describes a number of regrettable (often funny!) choices from his youth that would technically be appropriate for the sacrament of confession, his use of “confessions” goes beyond our Catholic lens. He “confesses” not just the events of his past, but also what was happening in his mind and heart. His candor at these different levels makes the book an invitation for all of us to look back, to “confess” not only what happened, but how it made us feel and what we discovered about ourselves (and God!) along the way.
His candor makes the book an invitation to look back, to “confess” what happened, how it made us feel and what we discovered about ourselves (and God!) along the way.
At 14 years old, I applied for my first summer job—grocery store cashier. Interacting with all kinds of people paired with scanning and bagging items efficiently seemed like it might even be fun. On applying, I learned cashier jobs went to more seasoned employees, and mainly adults. I was offered a job as a shelf stocker in the dairy department, which I took. I cringe at the mistakes I made: forgetting parts of my uniform, spilling and breaking merchandise, being too weak to carry heavy milk crates and misdirecting customers looking for specific products because I was too embarrassed to say, “I don’t know.”
Before reading “Work in Progress,” it had been years since I’d thought about that job. Fr. Jim’s book changed that. In it we learn he crashed into an elderly woman while bussing tables, tried unsuccessfully to avoid wasps while mowing lawns and sat for hours covered in salt and grease while popping cinema popcorn.
His comedic confessions help us to smile with our own past. “I look back on my adolescent willingness to jump into these situations with something resembling wonder,” he writes. Remembering the grocery store, I felt the same. It’s no small joy to spend some time in laughter and awe at the learning curve of our youth.
What kept me turning the pages, however, was not simply the events of his youth, but the thoughts and feelings that came with them which he shares so vulnerably. When he is chased by a German shepherd along his paper route, he confesses how much his growing up was shaped by fear. When he finds himself apologizing repeatedly to homeowners on his route for things out of his control, he confesses how much pleasing people, avoiding conflict and being liked preoccupied him from childhood to young adulthood.
In high school, I was unathletic, not cool and lacked the confidence I saw in other kids. With time, these insecurities wore on me. In my senior year, I ran for student council president and auditioned for a leading role in the musical Bye Bye Birdie. I got both. (Plot twist, so did Fr. Jim!) If you’d asked me why I took these on, it was surely in part because I enjoyed them. But mixed in too was a profound desire to make up for what I felt I lacked, to be liked, to be “enough.”
Fr. Jim invites us to recognize our own vulnerable feelings, to hold them with compassion and to appreciate that as “works in progress,” we’re on a continual journey of growing.
As Fr. Jim shared the preoccupations and insecurities of his youth, I found myself reconnecting with my own. After all, who didn’t desperately want to be safe, to be liked, to please others, to be successful, to be “enough”?
Fr. Jim’s confessions invite us to recognize our own vulnerable feelings, to hold them with compassion and to appreciate that as “works in progress,” we’re on a continual journey of growing into more comfortable, learned, authentic versions of ourselves. Lessons I know I cannot be reminded of enough.
Fr. Jim makes one last confession at the book’s end. Of his many summer jobs he writes, “I can look back on them now with fondness. I know why they call it work, but it could also be called grace.” Grace because of the lessons his work taught him: being kind, working hard, being grateful.
In these lessons, he now sees that God was acting all along. God was forming him, even before he recognized it. I suspect that’s true for many of us. I know it is for me. Even before I could see it, God was teaching me about life in the dairy department and on the student council. And forming me for my own vocation. What a gift to look back and see that now.
By the end, “Work In Progress” left me with that same feeling I get after hearing sacramental confessions. Fr. Jim’s vulnerable, joyful “confession” has inspired my own.
