Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
The Floating Sacrament
How We Confess Today
Created 03/27/2012 - 10:58am
Thomas L. Kuhlman | Kevin Tortorelli | John F. Desmond
Not a Reset Button
I am a practicing psychologist and a
practicing Catholic. Recently a Catholic client expressed serious
concern about his increasing use of internet pornography. When I asked
what he had done to try to control the problem himself, he mentioned
having gone to confession. I asked if it had helped. His reply: “Oh,
come on! He told me to say seven Our Fathers and seven Hail Marys!”
For the spiritually mature, the penitential
recitation of such prayers may be an embrace of the faith that sustains
them. But for many of us these assigned recitations have become little
more than an easy reset button: Say the right words and it’s as if the
bad deeds had never been done. When assigned as penances, memorized
prayers often seem to minimize the gravity of the sins to which they
correspond. They are a small, quick chore that puts the seal on large
redemptive gains.
In the secular world, any punishment that’s
too light or too severe to fit the crime generates strong disapproval
among most who hear of it. There is a lot of research that suggests that
it’s natural for people to believe in some kind of justice. We want to
see efforts rewarded, wrongs redressed, crimes punished. Obvious
imbalances between actions and their consequences create cognitive
dissonance that we strive to reduce. We may rise in angry protest,
spread word of the injustice, collectively confront the powers that be
to raise or lower the consequence to fit the crime. Or we may gradually
learn to think differently about the crime itself. If people usually get
away with it, lightly punished, if punished at all, how bad can it be?
A penance is not exactly a punishment. (If it
were, then Catholics who died in a state of grace wouldn’t have to worry
about purgatory.) Nor is absolution contingent on penance. If it were,
we would do our penance before, not after, we went to confession. All
the sacrament requires is contrition, an acknowledgment that one needs
the mercy God freely offers and a willingness to accept it. Acts of
penance express both sorrow for our sins and gratitude for the
forgiveness we’ve already received.
Still, the sorrow we feel for our sins should
be commensurate with the sins, and the expression of sorrow commensurate
with the sorrow. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts
it, “The penance...must correspond as far as possible with the gravity
and nature of the sins committed” (1460). Over time and many
confessions, the sense of dissonance from having received
incommensurately light penances for serious sin accumulates. There are
two ways penitents can reduce that sense. One way is to uphold the
grievousness of sin by doing more penance than the priest instructs us
to do. So we might decide on our own to do more fasting or more
almsgiving, and this isn’t a bad thing. Lenten practices are a
collective version of this: acts of penance above and beyond those
assigned in the sacrament of reconciliation.
But the other way to reduce the sense of
dissonance—the easier and, I suspect, more common way—is unconsciously
to adjust our sense of how serious the sin is to fit the penances
assigned for it. This incremental adjustment of conscience can be
reinforced by the isolation and anonymity of the penitent. Outside the
confessional, there may be no reality check. Small penances seem to
imply small sins, especially when there is no mention of making amends.
And once we begin to think of our sins as small, it is harder for us to
resist temptation.
The way the sacrament of reconciliation is
often practiced may be reinforcing bad habits rather than curbing them.
It may be encouraging people to treat confession as a device for the
easy relief of guilt feelings, rather than as an occasion for true
reconciliation with God. When penances are mechanical and easy, going to
confession can easily become what psychologists call a “neutralization
technique”—that is, a way to defuse the negative emotions one
experiences as a result of one’s actions. Confession offers the
advantage of a spiritual authority performing the neutralizing work for
the sinner.
In behavioral terms, the act of going to
confession is rewarded in two ways. First, guilt and shame are
neutralized. Once you’ve confessed something, it’s behind you. Not only
are you allowed to stop thinking about it, you may even be encouraged
not to dwell on it. Second, after the penitent has performed his
assigned penance, a euphoric sense of innocence is restored: the slate
has been wiped clean. I still recall the mood swings this created on the
Saturday afternoons of my youth. These began with terror as I walked to
church for confession, believing I would go straight to hell if I were
hit by a car on the way there. Twenty minutes later I’d walk home in
bliss, confident that if anything happened to me now, I’d go straight to
heaven.
In this way, one may begin to associate
thinking and talking about one’s sins (which the act of confession
requires) with the sense of relief that immediately follows confession.
The next time one struggles with temptation, the next time one thinks or
talks oneself through the choice to resist or yield to temptation, the
consequence of sin that will come to mind may be less the damage it
causes to oneself and others than the good feelings the act of going to
confession occasions. And, paradoxically, the more often one goes to
confession the stronger this association may become. Resistance to
temptation is thus weakened by the practice of a sacrament that is
supposed to strengthen it.
This “iatrogenic” aspect of confessional
psychology can be reduced without threat to Catholic sacramental
theology by putting more emphasis on the relationship between penance on
the one hand and both a purpose of amendment and the making of amends
on the other. A confessional practice that took both justice and
psychology more seriously would be more concerned with redressing the
real effects of sin, the habits it forms, and the suffering it causes
its victims. How few confessors insist that we apologize to those our
sins have hurt if we haven’t already, and try to make amends insofar as
that’s possible. Too often, reconciliation becomes something between the
sinner, God, and the church’s appointed intermediary. The persons
sinned against are left out of the picture. I think of my own sins and
the people they have hurt: the people I bullied as a child, for example.
Why did no confessor ever instruct me to make amends to my victims?
Nothing that happens at confession seems designed to reduce the
likelihood that one will hurt the same person again—or a different
person the same way.
This, incidentally, is an aspect of the clergy
sexual-abuse crisis that most Catholics found appalling: the seeming
lack of concern on the part of the priests for the victims of sins
committed by priests. Inasmuch as it was a sin, the appropriate remedy
was confession, and this had nothing to do with the victim. It does not
appear that anything is about to change in this regard. In March 2010, a
regent of the Vatican court that handles issues related to the
sacrament of penance told the Catholic News Service that a priest who
confesses sexual abuse in the sacrament of penance should generally not
be encouraged by the confessor to disclose his acts publicly or (even)
to his superiors. The bishop was also quoted as saying that when a
priest confesses such acts, “the confession can only have absolution as a
consequence” and “one cannot provoke mistrust in the penitent.”
This is discouraging. If the sacrament of
reconciliation is really about reconciliation as well as absolution,
then confessors will have to do better, and the church must train them
to do better. I am not suggesting that confession be turned into an
ecclesial version of psychotherapy. But I do think the practice of the
sacrament ought to be reformed so that it reinforces resistance to
temptation rather than undermining it. Until such a reform, the church
may continue to ask penitents to check their consciences against the Ten
Commandments, but it will only be paying lip service to the Golden
Rule: Love thy neighbor as thyself.
The Challenge of Truthfulness
Writers of confessional narratives in the Christian tradition have never lacked for exemplary models. St. Augustine’s Confessions
is the classic prototype. Augustine’s purpose in writing this great
work was to understand and deepen his relationship with God, to whom his
words are directly addressed. The uniqueness of the Confessions
lies in the fact that it is both a profound work of spirituality and a
great work of literature, brilliant both in its description of
Augustine’s journey toward God and in its analysis of the paradoxes
involved in trying to write a genuinely honest confession.
The South African novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee sees in St. Augustine’s Confessions
the central problem for all writers of confessions, religious or
secular—that the truth about the self remains “inaccessible to
introspection.” The theft of pears described in book 2 of the Confessions
brought shame to the young Augustine. But, as he came to understand
much later, his desire was not for the pears themselves, which were
thrown away, but for the experience of shame—for the young Augustine was
ashamed to be shameless. As Coetzee notes, Augustine’s
heart is
not shamed (chastened) by the knowledge that it seeks to know shame: on
the contrary, the knowledge of its own desire as a shameful one both
satisfies the desire for the experience of shame and fuels a sense of
shame. And this sense of shame is both experienced with satisfaction and
recognized, if it is recognized, by self-conscious searching, as a
further source of shame; and so on endlessly.
Caught in the tangle of sin and guilt,
Augustine laments: “Who can unravel such a twisted and tangled
knottiness?” Coetzee concludes that “until the source from which the
shameful act sprang is confronted, the self can have no rest.”
If the difficulty St. Augustine faced in
scrutinizing himself is typical, it would appear that fully honest
confession is almost impossible. The process of self-examination and
disclosure seems endless, as layer after layer of insight proves
illusory, provisional, distorted by self-serving motives. As the very
process of rational introspection becomes subject to skepticism, the
thoughtful person may constantly doubt his own competence or authority
to make an honest confession. As Coetzee remarks, “Confession is
helpless to construct its own truth.”
Confessional writing has proliferated since
St. Augustine’s day, especially in the modern age. Novelists have been
particularly attracted to the confessional form. Dostoevsky, for
example, was obsessed with confession, so much so that it is possible to
think of all his novels as one long struggle with the problem of how to
make an honest confession. Think of the narrator of Notes from Underground, of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, of Stavrogin in Demons, or of Ivan Karamazov and Fr. Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov.
In all these characters we find Dostoevsky’s lifelong wrestling with
the challenge of truthfulness about oneself. Coetzee sees in
Dostoevsky’s fiction a “sequence of texts” that confront “the impasses
of secular confession, pointing finally to the sacrament of confession
as the only road to self-truth.”
Prophetic as he was, Dostoevsky could not have
foreseen some of the new difficulties for truth-telling that
confessional writers have faced in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Mea culpas seem to have multiplied exponentially in the age
of modern media at the same time that the practice of private
sacramental confession has declined. And as confession has become more
common and more public, it also seems to have become more trivial.
Goethe blamed the rise of Protestantism for the decline of sacramental
confession; the historian Oswald Spengler agreed, and thought it was
inevitable that after the Reformation the confessional impulse should
find an outlet in the arts. He predicted that, in the absence of a
confessor, confessions would tend to become “unbounded.” And so they
have. Exit Fr. Finn from the confessional; enter Oprah Winfrey, Dr.
Phil, the world.
Along with the decline of sacramental
confession and the rise of its secular substitute, there has occurred an
erosion of the language with which we formulate acknowledgments of
wrongdoing. Pop psychology has furnished us with a new vocabulary of
quasi-clinical terms that make it easier than ever for us to excuse
ourselves for our sins even as we are confessing them. This new
linguistic currency seems to offer self-knowledge on the cheap—and
thereby makes true self-knowledge even harder than it always was.
The novelist Walker Percy, a Catholic convert,
recognized the same difficulties of honest confession and confessional
writing that interested Dostoevsky a century earlier. Using the language
of semiotics in his satiric parable Lost in the Cosmos, Percy
stressed the problem of isolated self-consciousness: “From the moment
the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself,
trouble began as the sparks flew up. The exile from Eden is,
semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its world
of signs.” Percy believed it is impossible for one to know and say the
truth about oneself by means of self-reflection alone. He arrived at the
same “impasse” of secular confession that Dostoevsky had run into. And
so Percy came to affirm Kierkegaard’s belief that the self “can only
become itself transparently under God.” To become oneself “transparently
under God” is to stand before God in humble recognition of oneself as a
sinner, as one does in sacramental confession. Near the end of Percy’s
third novel, Love in the Ruins, the wayward protagonist Dr. Tom
More goes to confession, receives absolution, dons sackcloth, and
receives the Eucharist, so beginning a new life in grace. Another of
Percy’s novels, Lancelot, takes the form of a long confessional story addressed to a character who turns out to be a priest. And in Percy’s last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome,
Fr. Rinaldo Smith confesses a life of dissolution and misanthropy, and
an early infatuation with Nazism, shortly before celebrating Mass at St.
Margaret’s Hospice, where he serves the disabled and the dying.
All confessions are made to someone—an implied
or actual listener. And all attempts at honest confession, sacramental
or secular, autobiographical or fictional, are valuable if undertaken in
the spirit of humility and truth. Honest confession is a harrowing
journey, full of traps and pitfalls, a trial in which true victories in
self-understanding are won painfully, and never quite conclusively. But
as we learn in reading the confessional stories of St. Augustine,
Dostoevsky, and Percy—and as they discovered in writing them—the deepest
truths of the self can be fathomed only if there is a transcendent
listener: a divine other who is the ultimate confessor, the dispenser of
the grace of true self-knowledge, and the one person who, impervious to
our self-deceptions, is able to free us from them. Many are familiar
with Augustine’s famous prayer: “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until
they rest in Thee.” It is the natural counterpart of another prayer in
the Confessions, which deserves no less attention: “Lord, I pray you to let me know myself.”
What I Hear
At St. Francis of Assisi Church in
midtown Manhattan, the friars hear confessions for six and a half hours a
day, Monday through Friday, and during that time there are usually two
friars hearing confession. For a few hours on Tuesdays a third friar is
hearing confessions in Spanish. On Saturdays confessions are heard for
nine hours straight, on Sundays for two and a half. When I mention this
to people, they look mildly shocked. And if I add that there are usually
enough penitents to keep the confessors busy the whole time, people
look at me as if I were a visitor from deep space.
In October 1973, I walked into the church with
an elderly friar to hear my first confession. We had been assigned the
same confessional shift. I took a deep breath and tugged at his elbow.
“What do you do?” He looked me up and down and said, “Just forgive
them.” That was it. The next moment I was fumbling with the gates that
slid open and closed on either side of the confessional. In time, one
got the hang of sliding them open smoothly and tugging them along gently
when they got stuck in their runners.
Today matters are very different. The
confessionals have been redesigned so that the penitent can kneel or sit
face-to-face with the confessor. The lighting can even be adjusted to a
soft, welcoming setting. I sometimes wonder if piped-in music is next.
These changes mark large differences in the
practice of the sacrament itself. The new design of the confessional,
with its face-to-face option, tends to encourage conversation. This
conversation contributes uniquely to reconciliation—the word many people
now use for the sacrament. I prefer this face-to-face conversation to
the disembodied voice wafting through the screen, but many penitents
still prefer the older arrangement. I sit next to the screen much as my
father used to sit by the radio listening to the big bands. Talking
through the screen, I listen attentively to silences, to the space
between words. An unforeseen advantage of the new design is the way it
can accommodate young mothers with a little one in tow. Young children
can’t really be left unattended in a midtown church, so they have the
little space of the confessional to explore while mom takes advantage of
their momentary distraction to speak to the Lord. The little ones
regard me in my habit with mild curiosity. I try not to coo.
Nowadays a lot of people are angry. Often for
good reason. My grandfather used to say, “What good is a man without a
temper?” But the anger I hear in the confessional has often lasted too
long and is now hurting. I try to point out that fear underlies anger. I
say, “Ask the Lord to help you name the fear.” Naming the fear is a
step toward banishing it. “Do not be afraid—it is I.” Stress also puts
in a frequent appearance in the confessional—stress about work (or the
lack of it), the mortgage, bills. Anxiety tells a man he is vulnerable,
and this does not sit well with him. It tends to feed his anger and he
often turns this anger on his spouse and children.
Another difference between then and now is the
mention of abuse. I don’t recall such disclosures years ago. And
anyway, after the sex-abuse scandal of the last ten years, it hits
rather close to home. I feel a small discomfort. The victim is usually
female, and the abuse usually took place within the home. Sometimes the
victim asks whether he or she should confront the abuser, who may now be
elderly or even near death. If the victim does decide to confront the
abuser, I suggest that there be at least one more person present. It
will go better with someone else at your side. I do not envy the victim
this task, but I admire the courage it takes to right a destructive
wrong.
Still another difference from many years ago
has to do with contraception. As a young priest, I used to hear married
people confess that they were using contraception, but not anymore.
Perhaps it has become a decision undertaken in good conscience and there
it has remained. Young people tend to consider sexual morality within
the context of a relationship rather than as a matter of discrete acts.
As a result, I find it helpful to speak to them about friendship. I
emphasize that friendship is a spiritual bond, one that sometimes
requires sacrifices. Friends display the affection appropriate to
friends, sometimes a delicate point to make. Of course, the categories
of mortal and venial sin compete with the language of relationships in
talking about sexual matters. But I worry these categories do not really
illumine justice, mercy, and faith—the “weightier matters” our Lord
speaks of (Matthew 23:23). Does an emphasis on sorting our wrongdoing
into mortal and venial sin blind us to serious, often nonsexual moral
questions?
The humanity of the sacrament occasions a good
measure of humor. Some time ago I slid open the gate and there kneeling
before me was a very drunk man. He thought he was in the subway: “What
station is this?” I said 34th Street and Seventh Avenue. “Thank you,
sir,” he said as he got to his feet, with the slightly elaborate
courtesy drink can induce. Then there was the lady who came to my one
side and asked me to be kind to her sister, who was nervous over
confession. “You see, it’s been a while, Father.” I assured her all
would be well. With that, the same lady simply moved to the other side
of the confessional and began her confession. I had a hard time
suppressing a smile and remaining suitably grave. At the end of her
confession, I told her she had a very kind sister. “She is that, Father.
Thank you.”
These experiences lead me to speak of the
sacrament as “floating.” In the days after Vatican II, confession
slipped its old juridical moorings, with its distinctive laws,
regulations, judgment, and penance. At the moment it is searching for
new moorings. What will confession look like once it finds them?
In the future, even more perhaps than in the
past, humility will be the confessor’s most important virtue. He will
not wish to control the conversation, preferring instead to welcome the
penitent and listen with his heart. He will listen to the Spirit of God
already speaking in the confession of sin. It is humbling to hear
members of the church confess their unworthiness to the Lord, confident
of his forgiveness. As for the confessor’s authority to bind and loose,
it must always be distinguished from the priest’s fundamental identity
as a fellow sinner in need of God’s grace.
This sacrament is full of that grace. The
people whose confessions I hear teach me again and again that the Lord
is greater than our hearts. The sacrament is not really about you and
your sins, much less me and my power to forgive them. It is about the
Lord and his love. That is why he has the last word. I remember a young
man who would kneel during the absolution and begin to speak in tongues.
It was a kind of chattering (I don’t know how else to describe it), and
it roughly coincided with the prayer of absolution: we both spoke at
the same time. At the end, there was a brief silence. The air felt
charged. He would smile and stand and go his way. I mention this as an
example of what the confessor receives from penitents. It is the
constant and repeated witness of a holy people who come to this
“floating” sacrament and who, in their great kindness, allow me a share
in their love of Jesus the Lord. Witnessing their faith, I ask the Lord
to keep me out of his way.
Related: Empty Confessionals, by James O'Toole
The Empty Box, by Raymond C. Mann
The Sacrament of Reconciliation, by Patricia Hampl
The Empty Box, by Raymond C. Mann
The Sacrament of Reconciliation, by Patricia Hampl
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