2/27/2019 1 Comment Why Go To Confession? So this looks like the obligatory Catholic Confession Blog but I hope that this might speak something new to you.
My grandma lived with us when I was growing up and while my sisters and I were baptized into the Catholic church as infants and raised in the Catholic church, my grandma was Methodist and didn’t become Catholic until I was in middle school. For the most part, I think growing up with her sharing her faith with us was a very good thing. It gave us a larger, more ecumenical view of the church as a whole. There were things that helped connect me to God in different ways than my upbringing in the Catholic church. For instance, she often told us that her mother (my great grandmother) rarely attended church on Sundays; she would go out into our woods (I grew up on 70 acres of land with lots of woods and creeks) and she would pray outside and she knew God was with her there. I completely understand that feeling; when I go to Florida to visit my great uncle, I wake up early and go to the ocean to watch the sunrise. When I walk on the beach in the quiet, early morning light, I know that God is there walking with me and I feel an immense sort of peace. But there was one thing that my grandma said that I always thought I agreed with until just a few years ago. Even after becoming Catholic, my grandma didn’t really appreciate the sacrament of reconciliation. She used to say that she confessed her sins directly to God and knew that God had forgiven her. While we believe that’s true, and we believe that God has forgiven you before you step into the confessional, there’s more to going to Confession than that. So why go to confession? We believe there is a grace bestowed on us in the sacrament of Reconciliation. Father talked to our Edge kids about how it helps to heal us of pride. Studies have shown that there are hormones released in our brains when we confess to another person that give us a feeling of relief and joy, surely God put those in our heads for a reason, right? But I also believe that Confession has the ability to break the power of sin in our lives. Let me explain what I mean by that. I think often when we hear the words “break the power of sin” we think of it helping us not to sin in that particular way again. In some ways this is true. I had a New Testament teacher in undergrad who used to talk about “strongholds.” He would say that when we sin, there is a part of our being that has become a “stronghold for the devil.” Meaning that once you’ve sinned in a particular way it is easier for the powers of evil to convince you that sinning in that way isn’t so bad. For example, if you tell a harmless white lie and there are no repercussions for it, the next time you might be tempted to lie it’s that much easier to do it. In naming that sin when we go to confession, we break the power over it because we are recognizing that it is, in fact, wrong. In this way, the sin is put in its proper place. But I believe the power of sin is even greater than that. Yes, I do agree with what my new testament teacher talked about, I believe that once you’ve opened that door it is a lot harder to close it and it’s a lot harder not to listen to the lies and justifications that we can hear. But I believe the power of sin is shame. When we sin, we are inherently ashamed of that fact. We hide our sins from other people and guard them like our most important secret. We don’t tell people about them, and if you’re anything like me, when someone discovers that sin it feels like the world is coming to an early end; or at the very least, that you wish it would. Confession and reconciliation, I believe, is the cure for that shame. When I was 21 years old, I went to Confession for the first time in about 5 years. Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, what sorts of things could a 21 year-old really have gotten up to in need of confession? The answer: Plenty of things. I went and I just talked at the priest for what seemed like a long time, but in reality, was probably no more than ten minutes. And I do mean that I talked at him. I didn’t even give him a moment to respond as I poured my guts out, my palms were sweating, my stomach was rolling, and my heart was basically doing a complicated tap routine in my chest. When I finished my confession the priest just looked at me for a long moment and said, “You’ve been carrying that around for a while, huh?” I got choked up at that and I nodded, eyes stinging. He said to me, “You’ve been beating yourself up about those things, I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice, that’s penance enough. Let go of them.” He sent me on my way telling me to say three Hail Mary’s to ask the Blessed Mother to guide me. It wasn’t until a couple of months later, though, that I realized the impact this had on me. I was talking to several acquaintances in my apartment on campus one night and one of the girls was in a pretty dark place and she couldn’t find God anywhere. I’ll never quite understand how it happened, but suddenly I was talking about those sins I’d confessed months before. I was talking about the pain they’d caused, the hopelessness, the feelings of unworthiness and bitterness. I talked about the shame and the way that shame of sin had isolated me from other people in a way I hadn’t understood. But the part that matters was that I could talk about grace. I could talk about the way that God had freed me from those sins. I could talk about forgiveness. I could talk about how God had forgiven me and taught me to forgive myself (which is still a work in progress, but that’s neither here nor there). Going to confession had broken the power of sin over my life in that it allowed me to be honest about struggling, too. Because, let’s be real, we all struggle. No one has it all together, and confession allowed me to admit that and thus carry the gift of healing and reconciliation to someone else. This has been true every time I have gone to confession since. No matter what sin I am struggling with confessing it out loud to the priest allows me to go out after without the guilt and shame so that I can share my struggle and my journey with others. Sin loses its power over me and I am able to speak the truth of that experience to other people; thus I am able to enter into closer communion with those people. I am able to freely say I have made mistakes, I have sinned, and even through that God still loves me. Through that, the Holy Spirit still abides with me and speaks comfort to my heart. In confession, I am able to more fully unite myself to the physical body of Christ made manifest in the people around me. That is the power of reconciliation with God. Unsurprisingly, St Paul elucidates it better than I can, in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 he says this: Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ,as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. So, if you haven’t already been to Confession this Lenten season I invite you to do so and I pray it will be as freeing for you as it has been for me. Peace, Michaela
1 Comment
Michele
4/2/2019 09:40:26 am
Just beautiful my love .I am so proud of you.
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