Confession

I have to admit, one of the least things I like about caring for mom is having to sleep on the couch at her house on those weekends when her live-in caregiver takes off, to go home to care for her own mother. Throughout the night my mom calls out my name, and I awaken and quietly walk to the door of her room and listen: Is she calling me? Most often she then calls to my (deceased) dad, or her dad or some other family member, and I know she is just talking in her sleep, and then I try to return to mine – not that I need that much.

I am blessed with needing less sleep than most people, and have been waking at 5 or 6 AM for as long as I can remember. Having retired, attending weekday morning mass is no great sacrifice for me, but waking early here at mom’s gives me a special quiet time. Mom now often sleeps until after 11, and the house is silent, except for the birds pecking away at the feeder on the front window – often 6 or 7 at a time from flocks of 20 or 30 taking turns, and sometimes loudly pecking as they reach the plastic at the bottom of the feeder as it nears empty. Then they often peck and look up into the house: “What, is this all?” they seem to say. But they don’t disrupt my thoughts, they just seem in harmony with them, and some of my morning meditations take on a deeper meaning.

I’ve always been intrigued by the gospel words about the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, and “he felt healing flow from him.” Flow? I do think of the powers of God given to us, grace, as flowing. They fill our souls, washing out the dirt, but then they continue to flow, often as nourishment for our own weak bodies, but just as often or perhaps even more, they flow from us to others – and so our grace supply can lessen, and/or our need for re-cleansing grow more acute. I find that if I let my trips to the Confessional take beyond a couple of months, I seem to run dry, and I seem to not have much for others, and unfortunately I also seem to not have much for myself, and sin becomes easier. My soul becomes like a sink full of dirty dishes, inevitably needing cleaning but my approach to them and to sin seems to become “hey, what’s one more to add to the stack.”

I liked the meditation I read this morning on Confession, taken from Meditations from the Oratory: Experiencing the Mystery of Christ, by Fr. Benedict Groeshel. It’s a great little book for morning readings. I can’t really summarize my thoughts on his words about Confession, and so I’ll just print them here, and let you take the time to think on them.


The Sacrament of Reconciliation: A Path to Ongoing Conversion
Our lives can be described in many ways. Perhaps one of the most realistic of these is to say that they are journeys of ongoing conversion. From the moment we become aware of God, we also become aware that no matter how we try, we fall short in our relationship with God. We try to love, but we fail. We try to be generous, but we’re selfish. We try to turn our backs on sin, but somehow we end up running toward it instead. Our conversion to God is always a process – usually a difficult and sometimes painful one. It will never be complete until we leave this world and rest in God’s eternal changelessness.

St. Paul’s conversion was about as dramatic as is possible for a human being to undergo and still survive. Thrown to the ground by a blinding vision of Christ, he finds his whole world transformed. All that he believed is changed. He has but one concern now – an obsession really – and that is Christ. His name is even changed from Saul to Paul because he has encountered the divine presence and can never be the same. But he still sins. In his letter to the Romans he laments this in frustration and bewilderment: “We know that the Law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate” (Rom 7:14,15). Even after his experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is still in need of constant forgiveness, of reconciliation, of conversion. If this is so for St. Paul, what must it be like for the rest of us?

Human nature is frail, enfeebled by the effects of origin sin. It is weakened still further by the many actual sins we commit and the patterns of sin in which we live so much of our earthly lives. If the human race were left to its own devices, only one person who ever lived would find her way to God – Mary, the Mother of God. We are in need of constant help, constant conversion and reconversion. Without it we are lost. But such help is graciously given to us. It is in the sacrament of Reconciliation that we find an endless supply of such help, for Reconciliation has as its inexhaustible source our Savior’s sacrifice on Calvary, the most complete and perfect act of reconciliation possible.

As Catholics, we are realists. We know our propensity to sin; we know our love of the very things we should avoid. Despite this, however, we should be joyful.
For hope is given us. We fall again and again, but we return again and again to the wellspring of grace that is the sacrament of Reconciliation. Days pass; years vanish; and still we continue to revisit this great sacrament and are forgiven anew. If we stand firm in this, if we do not lose hope, we will one day see a change in ourselves. As the grace of Reconciliation enters more and more deeply into our lives, it slowly begins to bear fruit. It reconfigures us to Christ. It makes us into the people God created us to be.

Prayer
Lord Jesus,
you chose to be called the friend of sinners.
By your saving death and resurrection,
free me from my sins.
May peace take root in my heart
and bring forth a harvest
of love, holiness, and truth. Amen.
- From the Rite of Penance