Better Late Than Never: Confession and Reconciliation

I am one of those Catholics who were in the cross over generation--the cross over from pre-Vatican and post-Vatican II.  The nuances of the changes were lost on those of us in the Bronx. We went from everything in Latin, big black spot on the soul, condemnation and judgment to every man, and woman, for himself on what is or is not dogma. I went from the Baltimore Catechism to Jesus Christ Superstar in one fell swoop, sometime between 1966 and 1968 as the ill communicated information came to us theologically untrained souls.  And the confusion this poor communication wrought caused a lot of young people to lapse or outrightly leave the Church.


I was already prone to obsessive compulsive thinking, which in the religious world is called "scrupolousity".  I had a parent, my mother, who demanded a perfection from me that no child can possibly provide, and, at the same time I was weaned, from kindergarten in about 1959 until 1965 and fifth grade, on a form of Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots that tied me in knots. Some kids blew it off. But with a strict mother at home and strict (though never striking one of us) nuns at school the idea of rebellion simply never occurred to me. When the "ya ha" times came upon us, I was well formed in rule following out of pure fear. And while things might have gotten loosy goosy in places like the confessional, the things I struggled with as an adolescent seemed too large to bring to confession, where even then, you did not know who the priest might be and some of the things that you might need to discuss were well, just too much even to speak, well beyond, I fibbed or talked back to my mother (I did not talk back to my mother in early years and by the time I did, she was too weak with cancer to fight back, and frankly, whatever rule bound existence she had had before she got sick, she softened with her illness anyway.).  So, one day in 1970, at a retreat in Beacon, NY, I looked toward the confessional and felt so evil and unredeemable that I could not even approach the priest. I did not return to Catholicism until 1983. And while I found a more nuanced Church, I did not understand any of the the theology (theology in the 1970s in college was everything but Catholicism, more like a precursor to the New Age).  Even when I came back I did not trust what I would find in the confessional, by then, already renamed to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Priest after priest tried to tell me that it wasn't a star chamber, that I was harder on myself than God was on me, but I wasn't sure that they were, well, kosher in the explanation of either the faith or the Sacrament, and I remainded suspicious and unable to experience the celebration in the Sacrament for any extended period of time.


Nothing changed. But everything had.  It just had to catch up with me.


I went to a seminar on Reconciliation with a teacher from St. John's Seminary, Fr. Brennan. He said that so much opportunity was lost in the past with how the Sacrament of Reconciliation was adminstered because of a 17th century legalism run amok into the 20th century.

When Christ approached sinners, he never said anything much about the nature of their sins. He'd always say, "Peace be with you" and then only, "go and sin no more."  Forgiveness, not judgment. This is not to say that sin is not real nor that there is no requirement of repentance, only that the role of the priest was as instrument of the forgiving God, not the dispense of His Judgment.


What happened with this too much human legalism, is that everything became a sin and those of us who tried to address it were frozen in counting and in fear of not saying enough for the confession to be valid. Confession became an expression of human control rather than of the expansive love of God.


Thus the faithful either became rigid or rebelled. I became rigid in many ways, but felt like a fraud for knowing my own evilness and sins that I could not master. I even picked a career where I administered rules as if they could be neatly framed and implemented.

Father said that even when he had been ordained he had not heard the Good News of God. I almost wanted to cry as I heard him speak of my own experience. We ARE a church of sinners, but we were somehow left to believe that our sins were just too great and the judgment on us so hard that we gave up. I did. That was NEVER what was intended, in any form of the theology. Human nature seems to have tainted this most blessed of visible signs of Christ's presence.

It will take a while, Father said, for us to recover the nature of celebration that is the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We do fail to livew up to God's loving plan for us, but He knows that we will fail and He comes for us with reckless abandon anyway, and He gave us this gift of restoring our relationship with Him by simply saying, with true repentance,"Lord I am a sinner. Forgive me."  And He will. And the priests who are his mediators who say out loud the words of absolution, have learned a lot in the last 40 years.

If you have been away for a while, please think of coming back. There is nothing like the peace of absolution and the ability to receive Christ crucified and resurrected in the Eucharist.