Sacramental

[telerib]

I think I finally "get" the sacrament of Reconciliation.

I hated to go to Confession as a kid. Did any little Catholic not? It was embarassing and shameful and bloody inconvenient. (Saturday afternoon? Come on.) Probably 90% of the time I wasn't really repentant anyway, just feeling guilty because, well, young Catholic. And you were supposed to.

(For the record, this was all self-imposed and/or absorbed from schooling; Mom and/or Dad would take me to Church but neither of them actually stayed for services.)

But when you truly are repentant - when you've done something you know is wrong and you're sorry - you want Absolution. You want someone to say, "No, it's OK. You're good." I know a lot of faiths keep that between the penitent and God, and if that works, it works. But there's definitely some comfort in hearing it with real ears, rather than ears of faith[1].

And Penance? I figure that's how you know whether or not you're repentant. If you're really sorry, you want to make amends. It's the priest's job to help you figure out how. The rather infamous "six Hail Marys and three Our Fathers" aren't probably good answers. Not that they're likely to hurt or anything, but there probably ought to be something a little more... active in there, too.

How many little kids are emotionally and spiritually sophisticated enough to not just realize when an apology is needed, but to actually discomfit themselves to try and fix things? (Probably they do, now and then, and my gut feeling is that those are "Awwwww, I'm so proud of you" moments, because they are rare in young children. Heck, rare in some adults.) Not the kids' fault - they're kids! They're learning. But we Catholics get introduced to Confession at age seven, when we really don't understand what it's about. Instead, it's going to the priest and getting yourself in trouble by confessing all the bad stuff you did. There's a laundry list approach to it, and you end up confessing to bunches of sins that you really don't feel bad about. The Church tells you that you should, though.

And that, in my opinion, is where myself and everyone I knew growing up learned to hate Confession. If it had been presented as a place to go to get things off your chest, to air self-doubts and self-hates, to seek guidance for failings that we knew we had and wanted help getting rid of, a place to grow and improve ourselves and our souls - now that would have been something sacred. And maybe - maybe - as one grew in faith, things that never previously bothered one would start to gnaw at the conscience, and those would start to come up in Confession. Instead, it was an all-or-nothing approach that we blindly accepted as kids and blindly rebelled against as teenagers.

I probably haven't thought about Reconcilliation in ten or more years. I'm not sure where this came from. But here it is.

[1] OK, I made that up. But I like the image of "ears of faith" better than the more cliche "in your heart," OK? OK.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, but I think that if you yourself put importance on a ritual for the "right" reasons, then it's ok. In the end it's what you put into it, and what you get out of it. If doing some kind of ritual can focus you on God/higher power/goodness, then I think it's a pretty useful ritual.
-Preet