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<span title="2014-10-13">October 13, 2014</span>
<h1>Rediscovering the Pleasures of Penance</h1>
<span><a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/author/regis-martin" target="_blank">Regis Martin</a></span>
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<img src="http://3m7ajlsrzj92lfd1hu16hu7vc.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Giuseppe_Maria_Crespi_-_Confession_-_1712-660x350-1413181570.jpg" alt="Giuseppe_Maria_Crespi_-_Confession_-_1712" height="350" width="660"> <div>
<p><b>Growing up Catholic at a time when</b> everything you
needed to know to save your soul was presumptively understood by
everybody, there was never any excuse for those of us who fell short or
missed the mark. Having been carefully coached by legions of dedicated
priests and nuns, where would the wiggle room be when you’d clearly done
something wrong? Which happened rather a lot, actually, but only
rarely were you unhinged by the experience, since the solution was so
straightforwardly simple. And it was always the same, too. Even for the
nuns and the priests.</p>
<p>You went to Confession. Where, amid the dark anonymity of the box,
the whispered voice unburdening itself of its own brokenness, you
discovered <i>life.</i></p>
<p>Only consider the goods God has given us. Such a plethora he has
poured out upon us. Yet even among so many one or two must surely stand
out. And what could be more heartening that having the capacity to begin
again? “The only joy in the world is to begin,” the poet Pavese reminds
us. “It is beautiful to live because to live is to begin, always, and
every instant.”</p>
<p>For those who traffic in the realm of sin, remaining recidivists
right to the end, absolution is the relief we long to receive. This
impossible gift of renewal offered as often as we fall and feel the need
to get up again. “Here was the baptismal promise beating along the
pulse,” explains <a href="http://www.patriciahampl.com/" target="_blank">Patricia Hampl</a>
in a fine essay reflecting on her own Catholic childhood. This quite
“astonishing procedure,” she calls it, was no mere idea of forgiveness,
as if absolution were no better than an abstraction, a bloodless
Cartesian exercise both boring and ineffectual. Instead, she says, it
was “an intense throb of liberation,” coursing through the self, which
left one speechless with gratitude. “There is no way to describe (to
over-describe) the transport of being shriven.”</p>
<p>What the penitential encounter aims to accomplish, in other words,
whether in that halcyon world back then, or amid the messier
arrangements of today, is nothing less than total release. The sudden
experience of the self blessedly set free from sin. Hampl, in an
inspired phrase, describes it as “an ecstasy of self,” and she is
exactly right. Because the outcome of those few moments spent unloosing
the chains of sin, represents the fullest possible restoration of the
moral life. “The unbelievable second chance,” she calls it. “Nothing
short of rebirth. Absolution returned the self to itself, back into the
housing of the body and its mind—but new, fresh, ready to roll.”</p>
<p>Confession, then, is the key. And there is no other way to unlock
that door releasing the soul from its self-enclosed prison. It is the
pivotal moment, therefore, the moment of optimal grace when, finding
ourselves alone before God, we freely acknowledge our nothingness, and
thus our absolute dependence on the mercy of God that we receive in
confession.</p>
<p>And when it happens, grace having relieved the soul of its distress,
we come away, Hampl assures us, “in possession of a wondrous
discovery—that we are creatures born for radiance.” That in some
unmerited way, the human heart was made for more—that, to quote a lovely
line from a tune sung by Marie Bellet, “hearts were made for better
things, they were made to catch the light.”</p>
<p style="padding-left:30px">There are signs and wonders everywhere /<br>
Joys and sorrows enough to spare /<br>
And glorious mysteries in the air.</p>
<p>What that means is that even the most quotidian events of the day,
all boringly set down amid so much unglamorous clutter, need not defeat
or oppress us. Such things are meant to become a means of enrichment, a
launching pad as it were, for an ultimate liberation. To kneel before
God in the ritual of the sacrament is an event meant to suffuse the
whole of one’s life with a palpable sense of <i>his</i> presence. That
is the point, the whole point, of going week after week, of repeating
over and over the sins that diminish the soul.</p>
<p>“In the hush of the confessional,” declares Hampl in her moving
evocation of the experience, “penitent and confessor huddle in the dark,
a scrim veiling their faces, as if the exchange between them were so
intensely intimate that it partakes of the sacred, and therefore, like
the face of God, cannot be looked upon directly.”</p>
<p>And, as always, what it requires is a special kind of journey, an
excursion undertaken toward the light. Or, better yet, a pilgrimage
implicating directly two people, one of whom is there to mediate the
light, the other to receive its transforming brightness and warmth.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most profound description of the sacrament I ever
read—certainly the most amusing—was in a piece that appeared some years
ago in, of all places, <i>The New York Times Magazine</i>. Written by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Albacete" target="_blank">Msgr. Lorenzo Albecete</a>, it renders in the most hilarious detail the very first confession he ever heard.</p>
<p>“Look Father,” said the fellow who had just wandered in off the
street, “it’s been a long, long time. I’m going to tell you things you
have never heard in confession before.”</p>
<p>“That’s not too difficult,” brightly answered the newly ordained
Albacete. “This is my first confession. Anything you say will be a shock
to me.” The penitent then laughed, we are told, his loud chortling
evidently causing those in line to flee at once to another line.</p>
<p>Fr. Albacete, however, wasn’t taking the occasion lightly. “The
mystical tradition speaks of something called giddiness before the
sacred,” he informs us, “a way of expressing the infinite disproportion
between you and the mystery with which, somehow, you have become
involved. I was simply feeling the infinite disproportion of it all.”</p>
<p>Well, what exactly does that mean, this business about
disproportion? Is there a pulse here that we need to take? These are
questions that lie at the heart of what nowadays we are taught to call
the Rite of Reconciliation. And never mind what it’s called, what is
meant to happen between those two people in that sacredly terrifying
space, remains as deeply mysterious as the God who long ago designed the
encounter. Who is not, by the way, without a touch of irony,
particularly in the disproportion he permits between so utterly
over-the-top an outcome of mercy, and the strict requirements of justice
which, were he to impose them, would so scarify the sinner as to leave
him in state no better than that of burnt toast. But precisely because
of that disproportion, the penitent is sent reeling gratefully from the
box. How can it be, he asks in a state of happy bewilderment, that a
few contritely spoken words can effect so total an effacement of sin? So
much so, in fact, that if I were to sit down with God and ask him to
compile a list of every sin I just confessed, he would have to refuse.
Why? <i>Because he could no longer remember them. Because they no longer exist. </i></p>
<p>“Confession is not therapy,” Msgr. Albacete advises the reader near
the end of his little piece. Nor is it, he insists, an exercise in moral
accounting, as though God were taking inventory of our iniquities. God
is not a numbers cruncher. So what goes on in that little box? “At its
best, it is the affirmation that the ultimate truth of our interior life
is our absolute poverty, our radical dependence, our unquenchable
thirst, our desperate need to be loved.” And citing the great Augustine,
who knew a thing or two about sin (also sanctity, which became the path
on which he trod, finally, home to God), he reminds us that confession
is ultimately a matter of praise.</p>
<p>His conclusion is so eloquent that I reproduce it in its entirety:</p>
<p style="padding-left:30px">Confessing even the most dramatic
struggles, I have found, people reach for the simplest language, that of
a child before a world too confusing to understand. Silent wonder is
the most natural response to a revelation that surpasses all words, a
beauty that is beyond images; if one must say anything at all, what
better way than in a few words that, in their very formalism, protect
the infinite majesty of this mystery? The language of the inner life is a
serene silence, a deep hurt, a boundless desire, and, occasionally, a
little laughter.</p>
<p>Here is what I think. That in going to Confession, which I often do, I
am carrying all the broken pieces of my life to God. And with as much
humility and trust in his mercy as I can summon, I entreat God to
forgive me. Which I feel perfectly confident in doing, thanks to the
sheer wonderful transparency of the priest, who stands <i>in persona Christi</i> before me. And in asking God to put the pieces of my life back together, I give him reason to smile.</p>
<p><i>Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from “Confession” painted by Giuseppe Maria Crespi in 1712.</i></p>
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<p>
<span>Tagged as</span>
<a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/tags/confession" rel="tag" target="_blank">Confession</a>,
<a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/tags/msgr-lorenzo-albecete" rel="tag" target="_blank">Msgr. Lorenzo Albecete</a>,
<a href="http://www.crisismagazine.com/tags/sacraments" rel="tag" target="_blank">Sacraments</a>
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