When I began confessing my sins many years ago, I approached the confessional with some unknown fear. I did not want to confess my sins. I did not want to tell them to some priest. I found very well argued Protestant reasons why I need not go and I tried to cling to them. I was sometimes embarrassed. I was often too proud. I found it a nuisance, the very idea nagging my mind all the time. It wouldn't work, it never changed me. The feeling grew into an aversion for the sacrament.
I struggled to confess and admit - but it was my confession and my admittance that brought the forgiveness - and that I longed for. The more I went to the confessional, the easier it became to confess my sins. The fear began to dissipate after I began submitting to the idea that my sins really were sins, and that I need not have the burden of deciding whether or not I was in a state of grace. That burden I could leave to God, to Christ, to the Church, if only I freely confessed.
The aversion I had developed was sorely misplaced. I had for a long time felt sick with the very place that I could feel satiated. Over time the locus of my aversion changed. It was no longer at the entrance of the confessional, but at the exit. I began having not this irrational aversion of entering the confessional but the very rational aversion of leaving it. Forgiveness existed on the inside, but sin, my sin, existed on the outside. Which did my soul desire? My aversion for the sacrament was replaced by an aversion for sin, and because of that I found the confessional an extremely safe place to be. It is Golgotha. It is where that ancient wood holds the merciful God. It is where the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world.
It is not the ingression, but the egression of my soul from the confessional that brings the most fear. I think perhaps the only place that I can trust myself is in the confessional, because there I am most honest, most transparent. But in reality, it is not about trusting myself, but rather entrusting myself to the care of a forgiving Christ. My whole life should be lived like that - but my life outside the confessional is sin, and to its lure I constantly return.
My aversion to sin is not yet strong enough. But the aversion is present in a way that makes the confessional habitual. I no longer see confession as an antidote to sin (which it may still be), but rather as a path - a spiritual path - to learn the ways of averting sin. Inside the confessional I am learning the way of the cross - and it always, always, always ends in that miracle of Golgotha called forgiveness of sins. The cross slices open heaven and allows the blood of a forgiving God to bleed me free. Why am I afraid of being there? How am I not afraid to leave?
The priest finishes that beautiful prayer that I have heard too many times but then not enough times - that prayer which at first was strange, then was repetitive, then was boring, then was moving, and then was all I desired to hear. "...through the ministry of the Church, may God give you pardon and peace. And I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit..."
Amen! Egress, my soul, and fight!
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