Thank God for Confession
Some non-Catholic Christians suspect there is some priestly perfidy at work in the Sacrament of Confession. Older anti-Catholic books often have passages tirading about the "modesty of women" being "put on the rack" for "bachelor priests" (I'm lifting those terms directly from books I've read). They seem to think that going to Confession is a humiliating experience meant to shame, or, worse, degrade. Well, it isn't.
Granted, I've been going to counselors since I was thirteen, and I'm very used to spilling my soul to other people. So my first Confession (back in March) wasn't a new experience, per say. What
was new about it was the result it had. I mean, you can complain all day, and I often do, but what do you get out of it, usually? Nothing. At my first Confession I found what I had sought in years' worth of counseling appointments:
unconditional forgiveness.
Confession has two purposes, I think: to humble (not humiliate) and to forgive. Humility is essential for sanity. It is essential for actually letting go of sinful practices. Because
until you've been humble enough to say that what you did was your own doing, that you chose freely to do it and you recognize that it was sinful, you're in no position to receive the grace that actually enables you to defeat that sin. Proud people often mislabel that necessary humility as humiliation, which is too bad, because humility is strengthening, too.
So thank God for Confession. Thank God he invested the apostles and their successors with the authority to hear and forgive in his name (Matthew 18:18). Thank God he asks us for that kind of vigilance and maintenance. More than that, thank God he
does require us to be humble. If he didn't we might be, I don't know,
cloning monkey-human hybrids. *cough*
Labels: sacraments
