It irks me when famous people get caught doing something really dumb, illegal or disgusting and rhapsodize publicly about their transgression.
Yes, you might argue there is a basis for confession in the Bible or in our legal history or in the bylaws of various major religious creeds. So, be it. I still think it smells in a despicable hunk-of-yuck-on-the-carpet sort of way.
First order of ick: when the people who are publicly confessing claim to have made right with their own heart and Their Own God. And, yes, they frequently say “My Own God,” as if they do indeed think they own God. They then parrot to the world what their God said, and how their God feels, and how their God dispensed forgiveness and released them from any further turmoil involving the indiscretions that have now officially been stamped, by their God, as “In The Past.”
What better way to get human beings to lay off than to tell them God has already forgiven you?
The not-so-subtle implication is that the publicly confessing person has a one up, a separate, privileged and altogether very special relationship with God.
Some of us are not always so sure that the really rotten things we’ve done are forgiven yet. Seems to me, people lucky enough to posses such certainty about God’s thoughts on their colossal shortcomings shouldn’t go prancing around bragging about it.
Such bragging, in the face of actual forgiveness, lacks humility on a gargantuan scale. If there is one thing a forgiven person should be, it’s humble.
Second factor of ick: people who turn toward the super, too-much-information, highway of public confession only because they are about to get caught, or actually got caught. And then, to make matters worse, but really to obscure, they talk trash about various players in their dastardly episode.
They blame the media, tabloid or mainstream, whichever got to them first. They blame others who were involved. They blame their childhood, their ego, Satan or someone’s short skirt.
When they are done with the blaming, and usually in a carefully worded statement, they claim to accept full responsibility — responsibility that is of course nestled comfortably amid all their excuses, addendums and exceptions that float in the air like a thick, sticky, haze.
Third factor of ick: publicly confessing famous people who claim they mean to save their families. Most families I’ve ever met prefer, if given a choice, that their members refrain from public statements about private and embarrassing goings-on that are still raw enough to seep and ooze blood. Thus, I doubt how much their families have to do with it.
These kinds of self-serving confessions are made by powerful people trying to ensure their own eventual return to status.
They want to end up as sympathetic, wise characters, so they have meetings with image professionals and plot strategy. Step 1: You’re caught, so publicly confess. Step 2: Use the language of God — in this country the more Christian- sounding the better — to make the confession. Step 3: Claim a special relationship with God and absolute certainly about what God thinks. Step 4: Drag your family into it, in words and pictures.
This God-talk is easier and works better than any actual God-walk, especially on TV. These famous people invoke the language of God, of church and of religion to manipulate the fallout from their debacle.
When regular people mess up and get caught, it is other regular people around them who are affected. When the powerful — and I mean people so powerful they can alter our religious, political or financial lives, people so powerful they make our laws or run our religious institutions or send our children to war — get caught, then it is all of us who get hurt.
Recognizing we’ve done wrong and need to do better is a good thing. And, God is glad to be in our muck. He wouldn’t turn one of us down. He stays during our guilty, miserable fallout.
But I’m sick of people conjuring an image of a white-robed, powerful God who has already wiped away the stain of their ick-sticky, slip-sliding footprints and thus cleaned up their mess with the Lord.
For heaven’s sake, forgiveness is a great grace, not a public relations tool.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at .
