The things that we hear in the confession as confessors often do
several things to us. Many, if not most
of history’s well-known confessors have admitted that hearing confessions have
humbled them to a great degree. This is
true. It always humbles us to see how
hardened sinners have come to the realization that the God of mercy had been waiting
so long for them to come to that point in their lives to admit that they had
strayed and drifted so far off course.
It further humbles us to be used by God in the celebration of the
Sacrament to impart God’s mercy so lavishly.
The other thing that is often revealed to us is how stilted and
underdeveloped many Catholics are in their notion of God. While it is lamentably true that many of the
faithful have a very simple and basic theology (if at all), what they reveal
about how they feel about God, his mercy and his justice give us the impression
that so much of their so-called ‘sins’ are really an unnecessary burden that
they are carrying around with them, sometimes for a huge part of their
Christian lives.
Let me explicate. Let’s say
that a penitent confesses that he is very angry with God because there is so
much violence in the world. In this one
line, he is saying much more than he articulates. First of all, there is the reason for his
anger. When asked why he is angry, he
could reply by saying that a loving God, and a God who is just, will not let
such injustices happen in the world. It
is also very possible that he is saying that if he were God, he would do a much
better job at being God. There’s a
hidden pride in this, if we get to the ‘brass tracks’ of things. This person may have prayed with great fervor
that the violence be stopped by some divine act, and this would solve problems
at so many levels, one of them being that angry atheists who don’t believe in
God’s existence would then have to rescind their stand. However, God doesn’t operate this way, and so
it gives one some reason to be infuriated with this god. Again, the hidden or unseen arrogance would be
that God’s ways appear to fail, especially when put against the scrutiny of
man’s very limited judgments and standards.
Getting back to being angry with God, putting all that was
considered into perspective, it becomes clear on such occasions that the real
sin isn’t so much anger with God, but that one’s idea of God was faulty and
erroneous. The penitent was, to be fair,
guilty of worshipping a self-created or false god, than of being angry with God
per se.
I’ll try to use a metaphor from mathematics to make this clear – if
we get the fundamentals of a mathematical formula right, we will be able to
apply this to the problems that we are trying to solve, and come to an
acceptable answer. But if we get it
wrong from the level of the formula itself, the correct or acceptable answer
will never be reached. We will need to
address the formula and right what was wrong in the first place to reach a
correct solution.
I am not saying that faith is like math. It is far more complex and delicate, with
more mystery than epistemology. But just
like math, the basics often affect the end with results that are grave and
alarming.
I try to spend some time counseling my penitents in the confessional
whenever I see signs of this in their confession. Though it is often appreciated, I am sure
what is not appreciated are the very slow moving lines outside my confessional
room, resulting in causing penitents in line being angry or impatient with the
line that moves with the speed of molasses.
A wise priest once told me – as a confessor, treat each person in the
confession as the most important person in the world. Doing this will always mean that time cannot
be hurried. But if I have helped to open
the eyes and mind of a person who had been worshipping a God of his or her own
construct, it would have been worth the wait.
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