WHEN THEY SAID REPENT, I WONDER WHAT THEY MEANT?

The looks I get when I tell people confession is my favorite sacrament… confession gets no respect.

But that’s because sin gets no respect.

The geniuses of our time have ‘figured out’ how Catholicism hooks people: it makes them feel guilty and then offers the cure. It dispenses the poison (guilt) to which it offers the only antidote in town (salvation).

That’s why were not supposed to feel guilty about our behavior; but only ‘accept ourselves,’ get counseling or some new pill. Morality is being clinicalized, rationalized, pharmacologized away. The only remaining sin in the modern world is that of feeling guilt.

But sin is real, and until we appreciate its gravity we cannot possibly know the grace of God’s mercy. Richard Rohr writes:

“Until you come to the point when you realize how many people you’ve hurt and how you’ve kept your own self back from truth and light by your own sin; so you want to cry over it—you haven’t really seen how bad sin is, how dark it can be, and how much it can keep you back from God and from truth.”

When a growing awareness of this truth weighs upon our conscience we experience guilt—which is a sign of a healthy conscience rather than a pathology. I would argue that the greater pathology is the need to rationalize away the inner life of the spirit. But unfortunately, modern man seems to have declared war on his own soul. In one of my favorite quotes on the spiritual life, Eric Voegelin explains why this may be:

“Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily, The life of the soul in openness towards God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, the guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsaken and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of certainty which if gained, is loss—the lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust after the massively possessive experience.”

Spiritual growth then involves turning towards the Divine Ground (Voegelin’s term for God), which is turning towards Reality itself. And the path from here to there runs directly through our weakness, directly through our sin. We cannot move closer to God without dealing with what obstructs us from God—and this is where the sacrament of reconciliation is critical. In the confessional we call ourselves to account before God, asking forgiveness for having separated ourselves from His love.

But this is not a masochistic act: the joy and the point of this sacrament is in the sunshine after the rain—our reconciliation with God. Every confession is literally a homecoming, and we are all Prodigal Sons and Daughters. Confession sounds brutal to modern ears—deafened by the hysterics of guilt—but this is truly a gift of healing: so much so that St Isaac of Syria would pray in gratitude: “It is THOU who grantest repentance and a sorrowing heart to the sinner who repents and THOU who easest his heart of the weight of sin upon it, thanks to the comfort of sorrowing and the gift of tears.”