more confessions

nothing too sordid or exciting, I'm afraid

This is the third and probably final post in my mini series of thoughts on confession. Read the first post, and the second.

K visited this weekend, and as we hiked to the Haw Creek overlook, through green rhododendrons and tall, bare trees, talking about death and justice and visions of the afterlife, she asked if she could get a preview of the end of my confession mini-series, the hot gossip, the secrets I hadn’t spilled yet.

I told her a few things I won’t put online. You’ll have to ask me in person. But mostly, I said, I don’t have any secrets to spill, just some thoughts about what it is, why we do it, and the story of the ghost who visited my first confession.

Well, not my first confession — in most Episcopal churches, we confess our sins every week, or even every day. We all kneel together, clergy and lay people alike, and say (and if this prayer is unfamiliar to you, and you’re in a place where you can, do read it aloud!):

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.

And we hear the words of absolution:

Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins
through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all
goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in
eternal life. Amen.

I love this corporate confession, and I always have. Part of the reason I love it is how comprehensive it is: what I’ve said, and thought, and done, and also what I left undone! Part of the reason I love it is that it gives me words, when I’m not sure what to confess. Part of the reason I love it is how it normalizes our status as sinners, leaving no room for anyone to think they’re too good to be here, leaving no room for anything to think they’re so bad they don’t belong at church. All are sinners. All are forgiven.

Confession can also be a part of personal, private prayer. Perhaps that was my earliest confession, in the individualistic evangelical churches I grew up in, just a quiet prayer on my own.

But in the Episcopal church, we also practice individual confession in the company of a priest. It’s called the reconciliation of a penitent, and it’s a sacrament — that is, it works like a magnifying glass to intensify the sun on a patch of grass, to heighten our experience of the grace of God, to make the grass catch fire.

This kind of confession is the kind I didn’t grow up with.

Growing up resolutely Protestant, I had a romantic infatuation with the idea of private confession. It was the stuff of stories for me, I liked to imagine myself, or some more dramatic version of myself, in a confessional, but— theologically I didn’t understand it: I thought that only Catholics confessed to a priest, and that they did so because they didn’t believe that they could speak directly to God. Or I thought that they went to confession so that they could earn forgiveness by doing the acts of penance assigned to them by a priest. 

But these are not accurate reflections of a Catholic — or Episcopal —theology of confession. We practice private confession in the company of a priest for a simple reason: sometimes you need to say aloud the worst things you’ve done or thought or said and you need to hear the person who has witnessed your confession tell you that you’re not too far gone for God’s love to reach you. 

And sometimes you need to unfold aloud the more ordinary sins that you’re stuck in, and hear that God forgives that, too. 

Sometimes you need to speak it and to have it pronounced forgiven by an audible voice, just to help you believe in the invisible one who is there too, the one who offers that forgiveness.

But even before that — even before confessing in the company of a priest — scheduling a confession is an invitation to a kind of  self-examination that we tend to avoid. As I thought about scheduling my first confession — what would I say?? — I realized that half the time, I’m not sure what to confess. Some things are easy — my pride, my apathy — and then there are tangles of desires and what I do with them that I don’t know how to diagnose. I don’t know if they need to be confessed, or not. But if I knew that I were going to confession, I would give some time to looking at the things in my heart that confuse me. 

When I was in junior high, I wasn’t allowed to watch PG-13 rated movies. At sleepovers, when my friends turned on movies I knew my parents wouldn’t approve, my solution was to try to, or pretend to, fall asleep, so that I could plead innocence later if I needed to. (Years later I found out that my sister had used the same strategy, though we’d never discussed it.)

I think that’s how I treat my sin, sometimes. I just pretend to be asleep to it so that I don’t have to deal with it. But turning off our desires and our attention in order to avoid messing up does not equal living into the fullness of life than God wants for us.

When I got ordained, I knew that people might request the rite of reconciliation from me. And I knew that before I offered it, I needed to practice receiving it myself. So my first confession (sorry for all you normal-gossip lovers waiting for the dirt!) wasn’t prompted by any unusual sin, just a need to experience the sacrament.

If you’re curious about receiving the rite of reconciliation yourself, here’s what it looked like for me.

I emailed a priest and asked if she could see me. We agreed to a time, and she wrote, “It is my practice to have a pre-confession meeting with those for who confession is a new-ish practice. I look forward to setting up a Zoom with you for this conversation,” and offered me some times to meet virtually.

Over zoom, she asked questions like

• what are your hopes and expectations for confession?

• what do you expect this experience to be?

Then she talked about what our relationship would be like after confession, noting that she would “hear but not hold on to” what she heard; that she will never again bring up to me or to anyone anything that she heard during confession (and that she would even try to let go of the memory of it). She’ll never ask, “so how’s it going with your pride and apathy?” (You know, for instance). ¹

Together we opened the Book of Common Prayer and looked at the liturgy — there are two options, and the second form feels a bit more comfortable to most modern folks. She encouraged me to read through the liturgies a few times before we met, and notice what resonated. Think, she said, about the categories of sin or the ways of being that you want to put away, that you need to name before another human. She encouraged me to come prepared, even with a list written, because in the moment, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and forget.

She also talked with me about the nuts and bolts of the day. We would meet in a side chapel. Usually, the penitent (that’s me), would face the altar, and the priest would sit to the side. The penitent faces the altar rather than facing the priest because she’s confessing to God. The priest is there as a witness and a pronouncer.² The priest might or might not wear vestments. When we finished the liturgy, she would leave, and I could stay in the chapel alone for as long as I wanted.

And that’s all exactly how it happened. I didn’t write things down, and I did forget one or two things that I wanted to say. But that’s ok — corporate confession and absolution was coming the next Sunday, and anyway each of us does have a direct line to God.

Only one thing surprised me — a happy surprise. The side chapel where I confessed was, she told me when I arrived, the first place where Pauli Murray had celebrated the eucharist. While I tarried there, I heard movement in the back of the chapel, but to all appearances, I was alone. I asked Pauli to pray for me, too.

We practice honest self examination, and then confess to God in the company of a priest, in the hopes that we might see ourselves—and the goodness of God—a bit more clearly.

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Three Things:

• Podcast: What Is Confession? on And Also With You (there are many wonderful lines about sin and forgiveness in this episode, and I was so thrilled that the Rev. KD Joyce was the guest, as I’ve missed Kelli’s voice on twitter!)

• Non-fiction: Reconciliation by Martin Smith (a classic guidebook to the practice)

• Fiction: The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey (a twisty English novel that turns on a question of last confession)

• PS: you can watch My Name Is Pauli Murray on Amazon Prime.

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.

1. I believe she also noted the reality that clergy are mandatory reporters when it comes to abuse, and so that is an exception to the general rule of privacy.

2. A reason this set-up might be different, and face-to-face, is if one of the two needs to be able to read lips.