March 27, 2022 - Pastor Message
04/24/2024THE YEAR OF HEALING SPIRITUAL HEALING: RECONCILIATION (cont.)
“Turn away your face from my sins; blot out all my iniquities. A clean heart create for me, God; a steadfast spirit renew within me…My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a humble, contrite heart, O God, you will not scorn” (Psalm 51).
Last week we reflected on the history of the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. This week we will look at the celebration of the sacrament. The sacrament begins before we even enter the confessional or reconciliation room with our examination of conscience. We celebrate the sacrament in order to receive God’s forgiveness for our sins, a necessary first step of which is to recognize our sins so that we can then name them and be healed of them. This can be the most difficult step in the celebration of the sacrament. We live in a culture that downplays and denies sin and so desensitizes our conscience to it. A thorough, prayerful look at what we have done and failed to do since our last confession through the lens of an objective guide, such as the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes, helps form our conscience properly and helps us make a good confession.
Having examined our conscience we then enter the confessional and choose which of the two forms of the sacrament we will celebrate: either facetoface, speaking with the priest directly; or anonymously, speaking with the priest through a screen. It is always the penitent’s right to choose the form of the sacrament, whichever he or she finds more comfortable. That said, regardless of the form, the entire celebration of the sacrament is protected under the seal of the confessional, meaning that the priest confessor will never, under any circumstances, divulge any information gained through confession, so please feel free to use either form of the sacrament knowing that everything you say will be kept in strictest confidence.
We then begin the celebration by making the sign of the cross and greeting the priest, telling him about how long it’s been since our last confession. This helps give the priest a sense of where we are along our spiritual journey and some direction on how to advise us. We then confess our sins, as well as we can remember, in number and kind what the sins are and how many times we did each one. This is called making an integral confession, and its purpose is to help make both the penitent and the priest aware of how severely particular sins are afflicting us, thus directing the priest toward the most effective remedies for those sins.
Once we have concluded our confession by indicating such to the priest, the priest will offer some spiritual counsel and encouragement and assign a fitting penance. Sin wounds us spiritually, harming our relationship with God and one another. Just as we need to do physical therapy and exercise when we harm ourselves physically, so we need to do spiritual exercise when we harm ourselves spiritually by our sins. That is what penance is, spiritual exercise, which strengthens us to resist the temptation to sin by strengthening our relationship with God and his Church.
We then make an Act of Contrition, of which there are many versions, all of which are fine. Through this prayer, we express sorrow for our sins and a firm purpose of amendment to change our behavior by avoiding sin and making better choices in the future. Our contrition is expressed in the form of a prayer because we know that it is only by God’s grace that we can make progress toward this lofty goal, and so we turn to him to help us do that. The priest will then pray the Prayer of Absolution, through which God forgives our sins. From that moment, the sins we just confessed, as well as any we may have honestly forgotten to confess, are completely washed away, our souls are healed, and our guilt is removed. The priest then sends us out of the confessional, as pure as the day we were baptized, to do our penance and live more fully Christlike lives. And that is really the goal of all the sacraments, each in their own way to make us more like Christ. There is no better way to do that when we have harmed our Christlikeness by sin than by letting Christ restore and build it up through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation.
Fr. Marc Stockton-
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