A few years ago in Krakow, Poland, I went to confession. You might see a couple of problems with this: (A) I’m not Catholic. (B) I have serious doubts about the existence of God. But that didn’t stop me. It all started when I went for a walk and stumbled upon the Schindler factory. After that, I found myself wandering down Bożego Ciała Street in the Jewish section when I saw people entering a church. What the hell, I thought, and walked in. Suddenly, I was in the middle of a full-blown mass. The priest and his assistants were performing before an altar so massive and drenched in gold that it looked like King Midas had a hand in the interior design.
Standing in the back, I spotted the confessional. Now, every confessional I’d ever seen was empty—like a sad little photo booth nobody wanted to use. But not this one. I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a real, live priest inside—or at least some sort of priest-in-training. So, naturally, I seized the moment.
First, I had to check if he spoke English. He did—just a little bit. Good enough. So, through the screen, I confessed that I had serious reservations about the existence of God. He asked why I had stopped believing. I hit him with the usual: wars, killings, hate, Hitler, dying babies with cancer—you know, the greatest hits of existential despair. He nodded thoughtfully and replied, “This is not the whole story. This is only the beginning. It will get better.” Then, he prayed for me. He was kind and pleasant. I thanked him and left.
And yet, as I stepped outside, I was more puzzled than before. If this is only the beginning, what guarantee do we have that it will get better? I mean, if the first 200 pages of a novel are an inconsistent, meandering mess written by some sophomoric hack who believes in patriarchy, misogyny, revenge, stoning, witches, virgin births, ghosts, hell, and murderous wars—why should we have any faith that suddenly, on page 201, the author turns into Hemingway?
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