Finding Light in a Small Room

A devout friend of mine once told me that he tried to go to Confession every two weeks. I blurted back, "What? I try NOT to go to Confession every two weeks!" And there, in one exchange is one of the misunderstandings of Confession.

Confession gets a respectable level of airtime in homilies. We are encouraged to receive the sacrament if we are served by holy and wise priests. There are usually evenings available during Advent and Lent where multiple priests gather at the parish to offer assembly-line (but none the less valid) sacraments for a meager parish turnout.

When I think of the extra Masses needed to accommodate the, well, masses, at Christmas and Easter, and then realize that the one evening where the entire parish is invited to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the entire group of sinners is done in about 45 minutes.
It makes me wonder: What do we actually understand about Confession?

My experiences of the sacrament of Confession in most parishes is like the old call and response joke, "The food here is terrible. Yeah, and the portions are so small!"
Of course, if the sacrament is only offered for 30 minutes at 4:00 PM on Saturday afternoons, one might wonder how much the the pastor really wants or expects his sinners to show up. Or, maybe the leadership is just confident in the holiness of their flock? The sad part of the whole situation is that the priest will probably have plenty of time for silent meditation during the short time he's in the confessional. There must be some correlation between supply and demand here.

Personal Holiness
Dorothy Day, an eminently practical holy woman, and a great model for personal holiness (i.e. a saint) wrote, "Going to confession is hard--hard when you have sins to confess and hard when you haven't, and you rack your brain for even the beginnings of sins against charity, chastity, sins of detraction, sloth or gluttony. You do not want to make too much of your constant imperfections and venial sins, but you want to drag them out to the light of day as the first step in getting rid of them. The just man falls seven times daily."

I confess that I rarely face the difficulty of not having sins to confess, but I think I understand what she means. Often, it's easier to confess when we know we've really messed up. The grace of regular Confession is that it tends to prevent the build-up of what often leads to the big messes.

GK Chesteron wrote, "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly."
That's the kind of clear thinking that gets me into the confessional on a semi-regular basis.

As with most disordered theology (i.e. heresies) one can think everything a sin (scrupulosity) or that only the really, really bad things such as murder need sacramental absolution (I hardly know where to begin to summarize this way of thinking with a word, so let's just call it the "99% of everybody else.")

Every sacrament has an actual effective purpose. This actual effect is one of the most beautiful characteristics of the Church. This means that something actually happens. The effective purpose of Confession is the absolution of sins. Given the proper circumstances, a barely penitent person, and a priest who is an otherwise insufferable pain in the neck, combine in the sacrament to effect the real forgiveness of sins. [I hope it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that it is, of course, Jesus Christ who forgives the sins. The priest is, as always, following the Boss' orders, John 20:23.]

To anyone who thinks that sacraments are simply "going through the motions" try simply "going through the motions" of lighting a stick of dynamite, and see what happens.

The fact is that we sin. A lot. And, of course there are reasons and excuses and mitigated culpability and degrees of intention and all of the other Pharisaical loopholes, exemptions, and snares that we can user to rationalize our behaviors and to tag others with their sins.

How long would a friendship. much less a marriage survive if one member refused to say, "I've done wrong. I am sorry. Please forgive me."
How long would you keep your job if you showered and brushed your teeth exactly once during Advent and once in Lent?
How long and healthily would you live if you only exercised for 5 minutes, twice a year?
How happy, fit, and healthy are people who only sit around and think about apologizing, exercising, and eating well?

No serious athlete would forgo their training, and no person serious about their health would eat indiscriminately. No person striving to be a saint can skimp on the hard work of self examination and confession. Only light can dismiss darkness, and by exposing our own darkness to the Light of the World, we can emerge to share and spread the Light that our world so desperately needs.

I'll close with more from Dorothy Day who observed, "The sacraments and the deep spirituality that flows from them are made up of the simple stuff of the earth. It is organic. This is grace."

It's odd to think of finding light in a box, but find it you will.