The Kid Sister of Blessed Imelda

Went to confession on Saturday… the weather was still pretty bad and I have a feeling I’m the only one he saw.  I’ve enjoyed reading the perspective of Father Longenecker on the ‘priestly’ side of confession and find that a source of joy and comfort. However, after I spent some time in prayer and was leaving the sanctuary I caught a glimpse of Father through the open door to the confessional.  He was sitting in his chair but leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.  Certainly, it appeared a prayerful pose but also a bit of a melancholy one and I couldn’t help but wonder if my confession (fairly run of the mill and certainly nothing very exciting… I am just a homeschooling housewife after all… and nothing like the silly women on that Desperate Housewives show I see advertised) had somehow been burdensome to him. Not JUST mine of course, I began to wonder about confessions in general.  Father Longenecker’s posts have gone a long way to put such a notion to rest and still I wonder. Perhaps after many years of hearing confessions, do our confessions burden our confessor? 

I don’t know why, but lately after confession I feel so much more aware of just how sinful I am.  Not that I don’t have peace from the absolution… I do… but it’s followed by such an intense mourning over my sinful nature and how very many ways I fail God each day. Yesterday, I listed a few things and then just was overcome and said, ’so many things Father, so many things…’  I felt bad for not elaborating further, he waited, but I just couldn’t express it.

In a recent post to the Spitfire Grill, I shared something that had come to me a few months ago when meditating on why God called me into the Catholic Church and not any other member of my family (so far, that I know of). 

There was a time earlier in my conversion when I was thinking ‘why me?’  I mean, why not anyone else in my family.  I’m the youngest, and definitely the least ’spiritual’ I guess you could say, of them all.  The thought also occurs that it probably isn’t anything special about ME per se.  Not only that but thinking about how much I wished that I could share what I’ve found with my family… and knowing that wasn’t possible. 

I don’t remember how the thought process segued but I ended up thinking about the people of Israel and God’s dealings with them.  In the scriptures, when God talks about Israel being taken into bondage, and then brought back out four hundred years later, He talks about them as though they are the SAME people.  He considers His promise to bring them back as fulfilled, even though the generation who was taken captive died long ago, even though generations have died during the captivity.  He doesn’t see them, or always deal with them, individually.  He deals with them COMMUNALLY.  He says His people have been brought home, and so they have. 

At the time, that was a rather revolutionary concept for me to understand.  It did give me a measure of comfort though, to think that however long ago my family broke away from God’s Church militant  and the Authority He placed over us, in some small way my family had come home, or begun to come home, in me and my children.

Since then, I’ve been learning a lot more about the communal life of the Body of Christ.  As gracious as He is to us individually, it really isn’t about us individually...

As a former protestant, I was intimately familiar with the individual aspect of faith in an imperfect form. As a Catholic, that individual aspect has been re-formed into a more ancient, more perfect form.  A form that helps me to be better at the individual aspect of the faith.  However, God has been teaching me more and more about the communal aspect of the faith… something I very much needed in order to have a more balanced and accurate perspective of the life of faith.  I find that balance very hard to maintain as I tend to be such a selfish, self centered person. I do not find that focusing on the communal causes me to neglect or sacrifice the individual. Rather, focusing on the communal helps me to keep the individual in it’s proper place and aids me in self discipline and sacrifice. 

Tonight we had our Advent communal penance Mass at Church.  It began very like a normal Mass, but the altar candles remained dark as we did not celebrate the Eucharist.  Having progressed through the readings, and prayed a common confiteor, our priest explained the procedure for individual confessions. 

He had two priests assisting, so they were spaced at three of the four corners of the sanctuary. At the front of the Church, there was a small table with a lit Christ candle on it which was surrounded by very small red candles which were unlit. Father turned on music, to assist us in prayer and to help maintain the privacy of the confessional in the open room. After we went to confession, we were to light one of the small candles and return to our pew to pray. After everyone had been to confession and candles were lit, we knelt or sat quietly and prayed.

I was done fairly quickly, as I tend to sit near the front of the Church and the priest I preferred was up in that corner by the baptismal font. Having lit my candle I knelt to pray and wait for my children to finish.  Slowly, one by one the individual candles were lit from the Christ candle. Slowly, as each soul was cleansed, the light spread and grew.

As the last parishioner lit their candle and sat, our priest, the last still hearing confessions, came down to sit by one of the other priests.  He leaned close and I thought he was just speaking to his brother priest while waiting for us to finish.  However, when the priest nodded and completed the absolution and blessing over him, I realized that our priest too had made his confession.  Rising, he lit the last small candle and the beauty of this service broke over me.  This man, our priest, our brother… the completeness of our communal penance made more perfect by his joining us in the sacrament. This small portion of the Body of Christ come together to purify itself during Advent, to prepare the way of the Lord as best we could in obedience to Him.

It struck me deeply, the beauty of this communal act.  The humility and brokenness of each penitent, admitting before each other and God their sins.  The mercy, comfort, and forgiveness evident in the welcoming smile of each priest. The indescribable blessing that comes with the hands upon your head as absolution is given, the burden lifted. A new beginning, ours once again.

The older three children are all preparing for First Reconciliation tomorrow. Examinations of conscience all around me, with much better results than the last time we attempted this. Thus, when my 8 yr old dd began to talk to me about her list I was rather pleasantly surprised at the depth of her examination.  This is going to be so good for them… Dh and I will go to confession tomorrow as well, though dh’s First Confession was long ago in the mists of time, and I went back close to Thanksgiving for my First (as soon as I was told I could… I was ready LONG before I got the ok). 

Confession has been good for me in so many ways… and I did anticipate that, but it has been surprising how that accountability has dramatically affected some areas of sin that I struggle with in my life.  The Lord had impressed upon me some years ago that a certain genre of reading material was not good for me to indulge in and that He wanted it removed from my life.  I obeyed, simply because He said so, but in truth there was no conviction in my heart that this was sin for me.  As a result, a few years went by and I picked up a book of that genre.  It was the beginning of over 5 years of reading material that I knew God didn’t want in my life, it didn’t MATTER than 300 million other women read it and it is ok for THEM, God had said that for ME  it was unacceptable. It was a constant struggle that invariably I lost.  Then recently, I chewed my girls out but good over something that SEEMED small but really was important in a much larger way.  In the silence that followed, that still, small Voice said to me that this is how I am with Him in regards to this reading issue.  It seems small to me, just like the situation seemed small to the children, and yet HE can see with me, as I could with my children, the possible ramifications of that disobedience.  For the first time, I really saw the reading issue as a sin for me as HE sees it… not just with head knowledge and trying to obey that way, but with a deeper, heart knowledge… deeper understanding.  I went to Confession the next available time and confessed the reading of such material for me as sin, even though to the Priest it might not seem as sin, and to many other women it is not, God has made it clear that for ME those kind of books are sin. (This along with the sin of gluttony, with which I also struggle, prompted a very unexpected penance… Father told me that the very giving UP of those things was my penance… and while I see the wisdom in that, it was rather the odd feeling to have my struggle with the sin in my life become my penance.) This is no small thing, this type of reading material has affected my life in many ways (and not all good) but it is deeply ingrained after some 15 years of it as my ‘down time’ reading.  It is what I picked up at the end of a long hard day, or during a weekend, in order to relax… and that is no small change.

Fast forward to yesterday at the grocery store.  I went down the ‘book aisle’.  I don’t know why I did that to myself, I knew when I turned DOWN the aisle that it was stupid.  Sure enough, first major test.  There in the rack was a book by an author that I loved.  A book I had been anticipating the release of, and BADLY, I mean BADLY wanted to read.  So there I stood, for at least five minutes, staring down at the book, whining and griping to God.  I didn’t touch it.  I DID know better than that.  Finally, I turned and headed off down several more aisles, all the while still muttering and grumbling… (I think I finally found my ‘garlic and onions’ issue much like the Hebrews in the desert.)  In the ‘old days’ I would’ve picked up that book and run with it, justifying it all the way to the big sigh of gratification at the last page.  What was different? Confession.  I knew that if I picked up that book, I would have to confess it. There is a whole new level of ‘awareness’, of  immediate accountability, that has never been there before.

This morning at Morning Prayers, I was thinking back to that.  Thinking how horribly tempted I was, how badly I WANTED that which was unclean to me, and how Confession had given me extra strength to resist that temptation (and how glad I was that I could go into tomorrows Confession with victory in that aisle instead of defeat), even if I was whining about it, and I realized that TRUE temptation is no fleeting impulse easily denied.  Temptation, REAL temptation, is a wrestling match on a narrow bridge above a mud pit.  The question is whether or not you walk away clean or dirty, NOT whether or not you struggled.

As with so many of the rituals and liturgy that has infused my spiritual (as well as phsyical) life in the Catholic Church, Confession has given me strength, added tools/weapons with which to fight so that I may emerge victorious rather than remorseful.  Once again I am struck by how those very things (ritual and liturgy) which I thought were crutches for my human weakness and should not be necessary, are instead pedestals from which greater heights may be attained.

I pray this is so for my children, that God may use these aids and graces in their lives to catapult them to greater depths and loftier heights in their spiritual life as well.  That they would forever see these liturgical support systems as the essential and valuable assistance to the deeper Christian life that they are, never mistaking them for empty, vain and repetitious traditions of men and losing the power they bring to the godly life.

Another milestone behind, as I celebrated my First Reconciliation on Saturday.  It was much easier than I expected, and has given me more food for thought although not in a way I would’ve expected.  I had expected Father to want to know more, and to be harder on me than he was.  I ended up being much harder on myself.  I shouldn’t be surprised I suppose.  While giving the assurance of forgiveness, the Sacrament of Penance also reinforces for me how far I have yet to go.  How very far I am from the Christ-likeness I so wish to attain.  So I find that this too is only another way station, a recurrent way station to keep pointing me yet further along the narrow way God has called me to. A reminder of humility and the desire for holiness as I recognize how far I have fallen yet again from the heights that are my goal.  Whether or not it is going to all be spoken in the confessional, I will continue to do the same intense examination of conscience I did for this First Reconciliation for each one… and deal with what I find as I look inward.

It is a long road home and each at each examination of conscience I ask “How much farther?” but examination of the map shows I haven’t progressed nearly as far as I had originally thought, many milestones that seemed long past are simply a mirage in the distance and many long miles yet remain.

One of the things most protestants have a hard time with coming into the Catholic church is confession.  I hit that wall early in my marriage when dealing with the differences between Baptist doctrine and Catholic doctrine.  Since my husband and I both had decided that scripture was the tie that binds, and the final word, I began to search.  I found, much to my chagrin, that scripture was on HIS side.  So, as I tend to do when I realize that I was wrong, I realigned my beliefs/thoughts/opinions accordingly.

That made it a LOT easier, when God finally made clear His purpose and His call for me to join the Catholic Church, to think about celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the first time.  That said, it still wasn’t easy.  I mean come on, going into the confessional and catching up for lost time (33 years of it) isn’t exactly a fun thing.  However, I tackled it with the same enthusiasm I would a toothache… let’s get it over and done with as soon as possible!  To that end I learned what I could about it, picked up some materials on making a good examination of your conscience in preparation and began my list, all before ever stepping foot in the  church for the RCIA process.  Oh, I knew I would go through that, but it never occurred to me that it would take SO long to get to start (upcoming move to Illinois slowed everything down by six months at least).  In the end, I had quite the lengthy list, even after being told that you didn’t have to be specific.  Grouping sins together generically by type and number (if possible which often wasn’t), made creating the list possible, but it was still substantial.  In despair, I mentioned to a friend (also Catholic by conversion) that it was going to take multiple sessions with the priest, no WAY could I cover it all in one sitting.  She laughed… knowingly.  In the end, I not only got a grasp on what needed to be covered but began to anticipate my first confession.

It is a bit of a strange thing to WANT to go to confession… and you tend to question your sanity too when you are coming from a protesant background anyway.  Yet there I was, ready to make my first confession, looking forward to it eagerly.  Move over, the girls and I had begun the RCIA process at our local parish.  WONDERFUL people there, the woman who led the RCIA process in particular won my heart instantly. So when my desire for my first confession did not abate, I went to her and asked if I could do that, and how to go about it.  She said she would talk to our priest, but that normally we did that a little closer to coming  into the church formally.  I confess to feeling dread.  However, I knew that she would try and that is all I could ask.  Time went by and when no word came, I knew that once again I would have to wait.

Waiting is hard, and tempting too.  The opposition knows how to make an area of weakness appear in what would seem at first only a stronghold.  I began to hear the tempting whispers of “but you haven’t gone to confession yet” in my head.  I fought against it, but this new method of temptation only made my desire to go to confession stronger.  Most of the time I won, sometimes I blew it.  All the while, the desire to go to confession condensed and concentrated.

Last week we covered the Sacrament of First Reconciliation in  our RCIA class and our leader had told me we could go to first confession  shortly after that the week before.  Anticipation once again rearing it’s ugly head, I asked the woman who lead the class if we could do so.  She didn’t know, would check, but that usually they wanted that to happen a  few weeks before the ceremony and that isn’t until sometime after Christmas! I fought the disappointment, welcoming this new possible wait  as I have the one for coming to the table (whole ‘nother story), as the Lord’s way of preparing me  more fully for what is to come.  The request had been passed on however and in passing our leader told me that she would check on it with Father.

Then today, on Friday of all days, the phone rang.  Children came running with the  phone, happily announcing the identity of the caller.  It was our RCIA leader, almost as dear to the girls as she is to me.  She had good news that couldn’t wait she said… even though Father probably intended to tell me on Sunday at class, she just couldn’t wait to share the good news.  Father had given the ok for us to have our first confessions.  (She meant the girls and I as we are all coming into the church together.)  I was SO excited… the timing of her call means that I could conceivably go to the regular confession time tomorrow at the church.  I can’t tell you the joy that exploded through me at this news, and dear, true friend, she was as excited FOR me as I was myself.

Isn’t that an amazing type of friend? The kind who when bearing good news runs to you, as excited for you as you are yourself, wholeheartedly, genuinely joyful for you… and especially a friend who so desires to help you as you seek to grow in the Lord.  That is a precious gift indeed, and all too rare a find.  Such joy her tidings brought to me, that even hours later the glow remains, along with the sweet anticipation of what tomorrow brings.