In nearly twenty years as a Catholic, I’ve been to confession countless times. I’d like to think I’ve gotten a little better at it with experience, though I realize how strange that might sound to the uninitiated. It’s not about eloquence, of course. Jesus isn’t impressed by our fancy vocabularies. It’s more an issue of self-knowledge. Across years of making regular confessions, we become more familiar with our weaknesses, and then with the tricks and evasions we use to excuse ourselves for those weaknesses. Eventually we come to understand that brutal honesty really is in our own best interests, because sin hurts us, and the confessional is a place of healing. The doctor can’t help you if you’re not honest with him about your symptoms.
As an adult convert, I have found that confession is one of the elements of Catholicism that most intrigues, but also repulses, non-Catholics. Now and then someone will ask me, shyly, whether this is really something that we do (and whether it’s anything like what they see in the movies). I assure them that yes, confession is absolutely real! Indeed, it’s one of the great gifts of Catholic life. It’s far better than therapy and yet, remarkably, it is free. Help is there for the asking. However heavy the weight on your soul, Jesus can handle it.
The standard Saturday-afternoon confession is probably a lot less dramatic than the ones in the movies. Sin is pretty humdrum much of the time. Normally, I go about my examination of conscience in a clinical frame of mind, first reflecting on when I’ve felt guilty in recent days or weeks, then trying to analyze honestly the real level and nature of my fault. Once I’ve done that, the final stage is to boil my confession down to short, unadorned sentences. Don’t leave yourself anyplace to hide. Instead of “I was uncharitable in my interactions with another person,” just say, “I snubbed a friend because I was envious.” Avoid lawyerly evasions along the lines of “I wasn’t fully up-front in all my dealings with loved ones.” It’s much harder to say, “I lied to my mom,” but if that’s what happened, say that.
That kind of clarity is great if you can get it. It forces you to confront your real failings, but it’s also efficient, leaving plenty of time for the people behind you in line. For an ordinary Saturday-afternoon confession, I try to boil my sins down to greeting-card-level conciseness. It’s healthy sometimes to remind yourself that your sins aren’t psychologically fascinating or the stuff of brilliant anecdotes. They’re just sins. Confess them and try to do better.
We become more familiar with our weaknesses, and then with the tricks and evasions we use to excuse ourselves for those weaknesses.
Occasionally, though, the bullet-point confession doesn’t quite work. There are times when we find ourselves in real psychological or spiritual distress, yearning for God’s forgiveness but not yet capable of fitting our faults into the terse summary described above. For me, there have been just two occasions, across two decades’ worth of regular confessions, when I have entered a confessional hardly knowing what I was going to say. My normal examination procedure didn’t seem to be working. I was in too dark a place. Here’s the interesting thing: though I wasn’t sobbing or hyperventilating, the priest in each instance clearly recognized he was talking to a person in real distress. I think with experience, confessors often develop instincts for this, like a triage nurse in the ER.
On the first occasion, I was rambling incoherently, and the priest let me finish and then said, kindly but with a note of firmness, “I think perhaps you should just tell me what really happened here.” Shocked by his bluntness, I related the event in a few simple sentences. He gave me some excellent, commonsensical advice, and I left with the clarity I had lacked and an incredible feeling of a weight lifted. As a rule I don’t expect confessors to dispense reams of advice, but that experience taught me that from time to time, God does use the confessional to tell us things we need to hear.
The second time, I was carrying something heavy that mostly wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t get perspective on it, and I’m sure the priest was equally befuddled by my meandering confession. But this time, he did not demand an explanation. When I had finished, he simply took a slow breath and said, “You know, Jesus loves you.” I can’t recall any other occasion when a confessor has said that to me. I still get tears in my eyes remembering it. The gift of compassion helped calm the torrent of surging emotion, and praying my Rosary in the church afterward, it became suddenly clear to me whom I needed to ask for help. I was capable of answering my own question, but I needed a little bit of healing first, and I found it in the sacrament of reconciliation.
Movie confessions are mostly of the extraordinary kind. People go to confession when they’ve murdered someone or to give notice that they’ve lost their faith. The confessional is presented as a kind of spiritual defibrillator, available in extremis but not a normal part of life. Although extraordinary confessions do happen, I think in reality they are much likelier to happen when ordinary confession is a normal habit. I expect from time to time a person does show up to confession as a desperate last resort, after years of staying well away from the church door. I certainly wouldn’t discourage anyone from trying it! For most of us, though, a regular sacramental life lays the foundation we need to make the confessional a natural place to come when we are in real distress. Even on good days, going to confession is hard. You’re putting yourself in a terribly vulnerable position. But if you can’t do it on a good day, doing it on your worst day may just be beyond your strength.
I understand why non-Catholics are confused by confession. Whispering your sins to someone in a small, dark space just seems weird. If you want to tell the story, why not trumpet it on social media? If you don’t want to tell, why go to confession at all? I chuckle a little bit when, in company with non-Catholic family or friends, I mention dropping by confession as part of a laundry-list of errands, and a look of bewilderment passes over their faces. (What did she do?) I realize how exotic this must seem to them. It makes sense that people are easily convinced that confession is all about “Catholic guilt” and the Church’s relentless campaign to make us feel bad about ourselves.
They could hardly be more wrong, though. Confession is about the Church’s desire to help and heal us, extending God’s graces to us individually in the forms we most need. It’s an incredible blessing, which only becomes more potent as we come to know ourselves better. It reminds us, over and over again, that Jesus walks with us and is willing to help carry our burdens.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Everyone knows the words. Even nonbelievers find them evocative. So we should repeat them, sincerely and often. We have sinned, but forgiveness is available, and like divine grace itself, it is free.