Tonight was the final part of our Advent mission. Fr. Madore preached the first 3 days, as you know already if you’ve been following my blog. Tonight I took over, presiding our Advent reconciliation service. After a brief moment of prayer, a reading, a homily, and an examination of conscience, people had the chance to confess their sins individually to one of 5 priests in attendance.
Let me just say I LOVE hearing confessions. Obviously I am not going to blog about anything that was said — I’m just not in the mood to commit mortal sin and be excommunicated to boot. But I love hearing confessions. It’s just great, for so many reasons.
I find, though, that more and more in our society people have a terrible hardness of heart that makes it so hard for us to admit we’ve done anything wrong, or to bring it to the healing power of the sacrament of Reconciliation. I don’t see the point. It’s like that blog entry I did about Brickland — let go of the bloody bricks, people! Don’t let them define who you are! You have a choice!
Sometimes it gets so bad that we can’t even think of anything we’ve done wrong. It’s not that we don’t want to confess this sin, or that we justify that one. It’s that we can’t think of anything to bring to confession! I’ve developed a neat little pastoral trick that cuts through that pretty effectively, though, and I thought I’d share it with you before signing off. I call it the “Somebody else’s shoes” method for examining our conscience.
While I was a seminarian I had a chance to do a retreat weekend. I got to chatting with some of the guys on the retreat — all of various ages — about Reconciliation, which I loved even then even before I was a minister of it. One guy said how he didn’t go to confession because, as he put it, he “didn’t have anything to confess”. He wasn’t a bad guy, didn’t kill anybody, etc. etc., and honestly, he just couldn’t think of anything to bring to the sacrament. He was quite serious. So I asked him, “You’re married, aren’t you?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Ok,” I said, “imagine I was to ask your wife for any suggestions she might have for things to bring to confession. Do you think she’d have any?” “Uh, yeah, probably.” “Good,” I concluded, “start with those, and the rest will come as well.”
“Love your neighbour” is a commandment, and if we put ourselves in the shoes of our closest “neighbours”, we’ll find something to offer to the Lord. It might only be small stuff, but in starting to make even this most basic examination of conscience, a skilled confessor can help us discover the rest of our spiritual crap as well. It’s then up to us to surrender it.