"Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death" C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce
Most of my readers know that about a year ago, depending on how you date these things, I decided to join the Roman Catholic Church. I was raised Southern Baptist, and as such there are parts of Catholicism which are frankly and simply new to me. The liturgy, the lack of a guitar in the worship service, the missals in the pews and the ever-conspicuous lack of a bulletin providing the outline that I already know, all of these trivial things are fairly new to me. However, the one part of Catholicism which has fundamentally changed how I think about my religious life is confession.
For those of you who don't know, confession can be a surprisingly complicated endeavor. The movies would have you believe that in every church there is always a priest waiting in the confessional for some repentant sinner to wander in and give a confession. The scene from "The Boondock Saints" in which Agent Smecker wanders drunk into a confessional is stereotypical of this. I know, the movies lied, big suprise, right?
The simple fact is that once you've mulled things over and told yourself, "I should go to confession," the logistics of actually getting to confession can be discouraging. Most churches only have confession once a week (or once a month), and it's usually on Saturday afternoon, which I can say after a year as a Catholic is literally the most inconvenient time to confess all the awful things you've done over the course of a month. Furthermore, once you get there, there's usually a long line of old people and small children who are (at least in my case) unabashed in visibly wondering what a 6'7", 21 year old guy is doing there.Mind you, this whole time, from the moment you get in the car and drive out to confession, the consideration of your iniquities weighs on your conscience like a lead backpack.
Finally, though, the moment itself comes. The liturgy of confession is simple, there's a bit about asking for forgiveness, saying how long you've been away, and then you bleed. The priest, who represents Christ himself in the liturgy, watches and listens as your deepest insecurities, your most secret secrets and the worst parts of your soul are laid bare before him. For two or three minutes, you are at your most vulnerable as you overflow with the basic consideration of your own unworthiness. This is validated and made real by the verbal expression of sin: there is no place in the confessional for the words of your confession to hide, and the stark reality instantly presented to the believer is the desperate need for Christ's forgiveness and the moral regeneration that comes with closeness to him. What follows is the most profound religious experience of which I am aware.
The priest, faced with all of your iniquities, having a personal knowledge of all the particular ways in which you have failed to serve Christ and become a child of God, speaks forgiveness to your indubitably tired and vulnerable soul. Through the mysteries of interpersonal relations and psychology, God works his way into the deepest, darkest, most vulnerable part of your spiritual life and tells you through his representative that he loves you and wants you to walk with him.
That is, in a sense, the joy of Christmas and what I would encourage all of you to ponder in this season of Advent. God saw the deplorable condition of the human species and decided that it was worth fixing. The thrill of hope is that as long as we are willing to kill our sin, we are promised something more beautiful than we can imagine. If we will submit our evil tendencies to redemption we are invited to join with the Almighty foundation of all being, the Father of Lights, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
It's been wonderful,
J.R.M.C.
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