Reflection authored by: Fr James Downey, Associate Pastor OLIH and St Luke’s
The Confessional, also referred to as “the box” or “the sin bin,” is often understood as a cramped, dark place surrounded by fear, shame, and generally unpleasant feelings. Within it’s confines, you get to dredge up all the parts of you that you don’t want to even acknowledge to yourself, let alone to someone else, and then openly and audibly admit where you have been your worst. But don’t worry, if this association of fear wasn’t enough to keep you away, most of society will tell you not to bother about confession: it’s unnecessary, because you’re a generally good person or at least you can point out someone who is worse, and any bad feelings are just a product of the inhumane moral standards set by your “Catholic Guilt.” I mean, if there is such a thing as sin and God is as nice as people say, then surely He’ll understand and let my less flattering moments just slide, right? Also, “guilt” and “penance” and “mortal sin” are such ugly words; I think I’ll skip those and only think about nice ones like “forgiveness” or “mercy” or “happy-accidents.” I could go on with a hundred other reasons justifying why I can stay miles, months, years, and decades away from that strange little place called the Confessional, each more sincere and more self-exculpating than the last, piling into a mountain between me and ever darkening its door. If it’s really necessary, I’ll just save it till my deathbed…
As is evident from the paragraph above, many of us could be Olympic gold-medalists for the mental gymnastics we go through to avoid facing and confronting the reality of our own sins. Even for the best of us, there are times when we fall short of the perfect fulfillment of those two great laws: Love God and Love your Neighbor. When we fail or miss the mark in those, when we don’t love our God or our neighbor to the degree we are called or we love something more than them, we sin. When we sin, that relationship between us and the Creator or His creation is wounded or broken and its beyond our power to fix or heal it. Trying to avoid facing one’s sin is like a person, hobbling around with a compound fracture, trying to convince themselves and others that “its fine.” The best way that person is going to find health and healing is if they get to a doctor and place themself, wound and all, in the doctor’s care. The best way you’re going to find the fullness of forgiveness and freedom is if you get to that sacrament of Reconciliation and place yourself, sins and all, in the care of Christ.
This will require Honesty, which will both stem from and beget humility. By fully admitting one’s faults, without reserve, it leads to a humility which shatters pride. It helps dispel the lie that I can live uprightly on my own strength and it helps me to recognize that my sinfulness is too big for me to handle. At the same time, honesty and humility also help me to recognize that nothing I have done or can do is too big for God. When at last, we’ve seen with clearer eyes both God’s goodness to us and our rejection of His goodness, it will lead us to the odd couple of Contrition and Hope. The contrition, or sorrow, for our sins is ideally more concerned with the One whose great and saving Love we’ve spurned rather than with threat of punishment. It is not a useless sorrow which only succeeds to discourage or overwhelm, but a sorrow about right things, like failing to love the one’s we’re called to love and rejecting the love of the One who loves us the most; a sorrow which sets us on the road to reconciliation. Hope comes from that knowledge of God’s promise of forgiveness and salvation and from the knowledge that His promises are trustworthy. This hope gives us the drive to walk that road towards reconciliation to its end. What the Church calls “a firm amendment to change” is us saying that, no matter how many missteps and faceplants I have along the way, I will continue to walk that road to reconciliation with the One who loves me until every part of my life is reconciled to God’s life. Nothing is more worthwhile than walking this road and it all begins with taking a kneel or a seat and the words, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”