The Sunday morning liturgy was a comfortable and yet baffling thing when I was five or six. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t known it by heart.

Today I can’t remember a time when I chose to color rather than imitate the grown-ups as they worshipped, though I assume that my younger siblings weren’t the first in the family to have little bags with crayons and scratch paper, weren’t the first to snatch up copies of the children’s bulletin and have to weigh the relative merits of finishing the coloring pages as soon as the family sat down or to wait for the interminable sermon to get underway.

Imitation often prompted long serious ponderings on the way home, though, since there were a couple of pieces of the liturgy that I couldn’t reconcile with sound theology. I couldn’t figure out, for example, why we sang “God rest ye Mary, gentlemen.” Perhaps this was a mis-categorized epiphany piece and then the wise men could be the gentlemen that were there with Mary. There were also shepherds around, though I wouldn’t have thought of them as gentlemen. Still, maybe they’d earned that rise in status due to their proximity to Jesus’ birth. (Years later, when I could finally read well and fast enough to do so while singing along, “merry gentlemen” made everything so much clearer.)

I also developed a complicated theology based on a line from the confession of sins. I puzzled and puzzled over my weekly pronouncement, “But I am hardly sorry for them, and sincerely repent of them.” Why, why why would I tell God that I wasn’t sorry for these sins? Any kid knows that the first thing you do is say you’re really sorry for whatever-it-is you’d done. That’s how you get forgiven.

Then I figured it out. Since God could see what I was thinking, he’d know if I wasn’t sorry enough, so the best course of action was to be brutally honest. Moreover, I was pretty sure people could never be sorry enough for their sins, so this was a good default statement.

After sincerely confessing my lack of ability to repent sincerely for many years, I finally read the actual printed words and was rather disappointed to find that we’d been sugar-coating things all along after all. “Heartily” is quite different from “hardly.”