So began, roughly, the confession several years ago of someone with whom I’m well acquainted: me. I share this with you today to try to put an experience with the Sacrament of Reconciliation on a one-to-one level. We human beings are like this, I think: We can understand the personal experience of another person sometimes better than all the intellectual, educational, social – even scriptural and ecclesiastical reasons – that abound for going to confession. These latter things sometimes even enable us to keep our distance, keep us “thinking about it.” Here’s a guy going into the box.
Sorry. You won’t get to hear what I said after that. The only sin I’m going to tell you about is the one that kept me away a long time. You guessed it: Pride.
Suffice it to say that the Hound of Heaven was after me. It was He who overcame my pride. My spiritual life was pretty empty. I really didn’t know what I was looking for.
There’s a saying, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’ve got.” I kept living the way I was living: and I kept being hungry, or uneasy, or guilty. Whatever it was, I kept being that way. I didn’t want to live that way anymore. You can laugh at this if you want to, but I wanted “fullness.” I don’t know how else to say it.
I wanted to be honest. I wanted to be able to be honest, but I guess I had gotten so far away from God I couldn’t even imagine what being reconciled with Him would be like. At best I’d feel okay for a while and then I’d get real bored, real fast. At worst I’d face a bunch of impossible demands for perfection, demands I’d never be able to meet.
When I was just a lad, I had been in the confessional one day and had just said my contrition. Then, Father asked me what I had just said. I said I had said I was sorry. Yes, but what else did I say? I couldn’t think, I was I was truly sorry, Father. Well, don’t you know that I also made a firm purpose of amendment. I said I was going to change. Father made it clear that amendment was part of contrition. It was that same firm purpose of amendment that stuck in my craw those years later. It was both a stumbling block and what I wanted to do.
Enter now that pride I mentioned. Please don’t get me wrong in this. I’m not quite sure what it was all about. I am trying to be honest with you and this is, after all, a personal story. But it wasn’t the big wrong things I had done which were keeping me away from confession: you know, like the banks I robbed and so on. It was the petty, embarrassing, sniveling, mean things I had done which were the hardest for me to face. Does this make sense to you?
So there I was, spiritually empty, afraid to change, afraid what change might bring, knowing I couldn’t meet the demands out there, nagged with the idea that I’d been away too long.
Then one day I hear this little bit of wisdom. The story goes that a man died and met St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. Fully expecting a thorough interrogation, the fellow was ready with a long list for when St. Peter would ask him, “What have you done?” Much to his surprise, however, that wasn’t the question. Instead St. Peter asked him, “Who are you?”
It occurred to me that sin was not so much what I had done, but who I was. I am a sinner. That’s before, during, and after the confessional. Sin was a condition in my life, and sin meant those actions which lacked love. It wasn’t so much that I committed this sin of pride, or that one – although certainly I did. But it was that I reacted pridefully to situations in my life, including the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Because I had not been loving, I was consequently very empty. I needed to come and let Jesus fill me with His forgiveness and His love.
I’m no authority on the Sacraments. But Christ gave His Church the power to forgive people, and the Church vests that power in her bishops and priests. I fit somewhere in the “People of God.”
No doubt there were many more dynamics in my coming to Reconciliation than what I have detailed here. I did go, though, with all my imperfections, all my embarrassment, all my memory loss, all my uncertainty, all my emptiness.
There was no magic in there, just a lot of honesty, gentleness and love. I’m still as imperfect as they come. I don’t hold myself up as better than you.
I came away from that confession reconciled with my God, knowing He loved me beyond my wildest imagination. He wanted to say to me, “I absolve you of your sins.” He wanted me to hear those words. He knew I had been responding to situations in my life without love, had known it all along. He just wanted me to acknowledge it, too, so that I could understand firsthand a little better the depth of His love.
written by Thomas A. Russell in February of 1986
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