How to go to Confession

What follows is an excerpt from the book, Happiness in Holiness: A little guide to holiness of life for members of the Third order of Saint Francis and for other devout souls, edited by Rev. Apollinaris Baumgartner, O.M. Cap.* (who was later the first bishop of the diocese of Agaña, Guam), published in 1930, which purports to be an adaptation of Conduite intérieure pour toutes les actions de la journée, by Very Rev. Joseph of Dreux, O.M. Cap,* first published in 1667.

The following is attributed to St. Bonaventure, though without citation.

"Confess with simplicity as if you were speaking to an angel who knew all your secrets. Do not draw the veil of excuse over your actions and do not seek to diminish the gravity of your faults. Specify your sins but do not give the history of them. Do not enter into superfluous details and do not tell the sins of others. Acknowledge briefly and directly the faults you remember to have have committed since your last confession: but do not make a long series of of general statements such as: 'I have not loved God sufficiently well, etc.' 'I have not fervor enough, etc. ...' You may accuse yourself of such faults to God in prayer. In a word, let your confession be sincere, humble, and brief."

The book goes on:

"Listen with humility and gratitude to the admonitions of your confessor, being careful not to interrupt him repeatedly by saying, 'Yes, Father.' When the confessor imposes a penance upon you excite yourself to humility at the thought that it is in order to condescend to your weakness that he places such a slight burden on you.

"When you receive absolution, place yourself in spirit at the foot of the Cross of Christ and recite more with your heart than your lips, the act of contrition. The Precious Blood of our Lord is poured forth on your soul because its merits are applied to you when the priest pronounces the words of absolution.

"Leave the confessional giving thanks to God, and imploring Him to confirm in heaven, in accordance with the promise of Jesus Christ, the absolution which the priest has pronounced over you. Renew your resolve to amend your life, and make one practical resolution to which you will attend particularly until your next confession. Carry it out promptly and respond to the grace you have just received. Say your penance with devotion and ask God to accept it favorably, even though it is so small and inadequate. Offer some little sacrifice or some penance which you will perform that day in order to make up for what is wanting in your sacramental penance.

"Leave the church with the firm purpose of never again committing what you have confessed, lest falling back into the same faults you may become unworthy of God's mercy: 'Behold thou art made whole: sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee.' (John v. 14.)"

*O.M. Cap. is an older postnominal for the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, now O.F.M. Cap.

Why do Penance?

Brothers and sisters: in your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. (Hebrews 12:4)

Nevertheless, we practice penance now, so that we might learn the fortitude that will serve us well should God some day judge us worthy of the opportunity.

On Time, Or Not, For Lent

Caedmon's comment on this post reminded me of my favorite late-for-church story.

In one my parishes along the way, our pastor was always late. We used to joke about it; it was said that no matter how late you were for Mass, you were still probably early.

One day--the Thursday after Ash Wednesday to be exact--morning Mass started exactly on time. Some of the regulars, having been long unaccustomed to such a thing, weren't even there yet. After Mass the church ladies made unmerciful fun of poor Monsignor: 'Starting Mass on time for Lent, Father? We'll see how long that lasts! Ha!'

And they were right. Thanks to everyone's devout support of Monsignor's (apparent) Lenten reform, the Mass on Friday started as late as ever.

Martyrdom and Desire

Each year when today's feast of the martyrs of North America rolls around, the selection from the diaries of St. Jean de Brébeuf in the Office of Readings hits me pretty hard. It begins so starkly:

For two days now I have experienced a great desire to be a martyr and to endure all the torments the martyrs have suffered. Jesus, my Lord and Savior, what can I give you in return for all the favors you have first conferred on me?

Am I willing to own even the smallest part of such a desire? If I accept with patience the tiniest sufferings of want, inconvenience, misunderstanding, and rejection for the sake of Christ, this is only the most elementary piety. To put up with it is just the beginning. The saints longed for such martyrdom. Have I even made a beginning of learning to rejoice in opportunities to deny myself for love of the Cross? I pray for the willingness.

It is said of St. Jean that his composure and peace under torture was so great that those who killed him later ate his heart in hope of gaining his courage.

Entering the Fray

As folks have no doubt appreciated, I have kept quiet on the burning Catholic issue of Senator Kennedy's funeral last weekend. However, I was asked in another capacity to produce a short opinion on the matter, so I thought I would reproduce it here:

The real problem is that we as a Catholic culture have lost the sense that a funeral Mass is a prayer and sacrifice offered for the continuing journey and salvation of a sinner like the rest of us. As long as a funeral is executed as if it were a beatification, or 'celebration of life' as regular folks like to say, then those who object to beatifying the life in question will be offended, and sometimes rightly so. The funeral liturgy--Vigil, Mass, Committal--is meant to be prayers offered for the deceased as he continues his journey through purification on the way to the beatific vision. It thus is meant to have at least something of a penitential character. Let us not forget that priests were traditionally buried in the penitential color of violet! (Roman Ritual, De Exsequiis, 13.) Had Senator Kennedy's funeral Mass been offered in something closer to this spirit, instead of as a civil canonization, I'm sure many fewer good and faithful Catholics would have been offended.

But don't mind me, I turned it off after they failed to sing the Alleluia.

Meta-Contrition and Compunction

I remember seeing "contrition" on the SAT in the Spring of 1989 and having no idea what it meant. I read it over and over, but there was no association in my mind. I have often recalled that moment with great bemusement, because just over three years later, on September 5, 1992, the Act of Contrition was elicited from me for the first time, and I knew exactly what it was all about.

But I have always had a question about acts of contrition: is the spiritual ideal to make an "act of perfect contrition," or a "perfect act of contrition?" My whole Catholic life, I have heard it both ways. People who would seem to be trustworthy usually come down on the side of the former. On the other hand, I kind of like the latter with its suggestion that we are called to make the act, the spiritual intention perfectly, which might mean we weren't entirely contrite all through ourselves.

For me, I know all to well that contrition is a relative experience. If there were no attachment to selfishness and sin, we would not need to frequent the sacrament of penance. Relative contrition is important, though, insofar as an awareness of the internal struggle is a great opportunity for humility and dependence on grace. When we come to contrition over our inability to be truly contrite, that's when we reach the sublime prayer-moment of meta-contrition. I believe this is what the saints meant when they talk about compunction.

Practically speaking, I don't use the language of perfection at all. I invite people to make the best act of contrition they can, especially in cases in which they have a wholesome spiritual desire for Holy Communion but no option for sacramental absolution beforehand.

So, better informed Catholics than your humble blogger, what's the answer?

From My Confessor: Public Penance

Strong words from my confession today:

Christian perfection is the interior freedom to serve God completely and faithfully at every moment and in each circumstance. Therefore you must look at anything that distracts from or hinders this freedom as the work of the devil. Do I sound too serious? A religious, by public vows, has made their striving for Christian perfection a public property. Thus, any sin you commit, even if it be interior or secret, is a betrayal not only of God and your best self, but of everyone else too.

Penance: to offer a rosary in reparation for my sins.

(My long-standing (14 or 15 years) penance record still holds: to say 15 Our Fathers and then to pray Evening Prayer 'with great devotion')

Why I Have to Fast

In this, my second Lent as a priest, I'm beginning to realize why self-denial is a critical part of the priestly life. You have to practice it in order to counteract the forces that conspire to make you selfish and arrogant.

As a religious who is not or not yet a priest, few people "get" who you are, and you are constantly explaining, often in vain, that you are a lay Catholic religious and not a priest, a Buddhist, or one of those martial artist monks from the movies. In one hectic morning it all changes and you are a Catholic priest and everyone knows--or think they know--what you are, friends and enemies alike.

In a lot of ways this becomes a spiritual hazard to the minority and humility that is sought in the consecrated religious life. As a priest you are often the center of attention. You are given the seat of honor at events. People old enough to be your grandparents address you by title. Since the ministry of priesthood is so diverse, you are bound to good at something at least, and are praised endlessly for it. You attract disciples who treat you with reverence. You become more appealing to the opposite sex because of your power and unavailability.

It's easy to let this "go to your head," and maybe that's what happens to priests who become self-centered and arrogant. Subtle signs illuminate the path to this spiritual death: You look forward to seeing your flatterers and, enjoying their comments, forget that it is those who insult you who are your real spiritual friends. Instead of asking people about their own lives, children, and folks who might be sick or struggling, you notice yourself turning conversations back to yourself as you grow accustomed to being the center of attention.

These sorts of things have to be fought with the utmost ascetic effort in order to prevent them from becoming habits. This is why plain, unglamorous, and elementary forms of self-denial over the course of a day are so important. They train the self not to concentrate on its own wants and whims and open the inner door to concern and focus on others.

Jubilee

This afternoon we hosted the Jubilees of religious profession Mass for one of the local communities of sisters. One of the nuns was celebrating 75 years of religious life. Can you imagine that? I asked her if she had any advice for younger religious. She said, "In religious life it's best to keep your advice to yourself." Now there's someone who has been around the block living in community!

Nah, I Don't Feel Like It

I remember how when I was in preschool, one of my classmates taught me this line, "Nah, I don't feel like it." It was a way to turn down a demand or offer, and very useful I found out. In a very real way, though, this part of my own early learning represents an important element of our culture: what matters is what we feel like doing. And we shouldn't have to be bothered by what we don't feel like doing.

It's always been a struggle for me in prayer. If I only pray when or because I enjoy it, or worse, because like the idea of prayer, or still worse, because I like the idea of myself as a prayerful person, then my prayer is only a self-devotion. This is what it really means to take God's name in vain. That's why the "night of sense" is a real gift of grace; when the Spirit removes from us the natural interest, desire, and gratification we receive in prayer, then we find out if we really love God for God's sake alone.

This isn't to say that a natural interest in prayer and devotion isn't a good thing, or that it shouldn't make us feel good. If they get us praying in the first place, they're good. But we need to notice that when God takes our interest and "feeling like it" away, this is actually a grace.

When this "night of sense" happens, we have two choices. We can panic over the consolation and apparent fulfillment and good feelings we seem to have lost, and run to fill ourselves up with our drug of choice instead. This is what it means to go back to Egypt. Or we can trust in the God we cannot see, and believe that we are being led obscurely through a place where our feeling have become a desert.

Ashes and Irony

Another year has gone by and, as I begin my 16th Lent, I am still convinced that the whole ritual of Ash Wednesday is an act of irony. We proclaim the good news and then do the opposite on purpose, just to show that we haven't lived up to the Gospel. It's all in last year's post, so I won't write it out again like I just thought of it.

As Francis is said to have said, "let us begin again to do good, for up to now we have done little, or even nothing."

Smells Like Lent

Someone once told me that smell is the sense that most easily triggers associated memories. About the monastery this morning is the distinctive smell of the oily smoke of smoldering palms from last Passion Sunday, and immediately you know that Ash Wednesday is coming.

Fasting

The prophet Isaiah is quite clear in today's first reading:

Is this the manner of fasting I wish,
of keeping a day of penance:
That a man bow his head like a reed
and lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed;
Your vindication shall go before you,
and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

Fasting is no end in itself. It should only serve to break our selfishness that we might be less violent and more tuned in to the needs of the world. Fasting to any other end is vainglory.

There are lots of things we can fast from classics like chocolate and beer to other things our imaginations feed upon like the internet and CNN. The trick is to choose not the one that seems the most religious, but the one that will make our hearts less selfish, setting us up to contribute to the justice and peace of the world.

Ash Wednesday

Lent!

I find Ash Wednesday to be one of the most intriguing and curious liturgies of the year. Think about it: first we proclaim Jesus' instructions on how to fast, from the Sermon on the Mount:

When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.

Then, right after hearing about how we are supposed to wash our faces and hide our fasting from others, everyone puts dirt on their head and walks around all day like that.

What can this mean, that we proclaim the doctrine of Jesus and then ritually do the exact opposite? To me it can only be a ritualized form of admitting that we have not lived up to the good news offered us in Jesus Christ. We have heard the Gospel all year, haven't responded, so now we do a ritual that proclaims our failure physically. That's powerful. And that's my theory about why everyone in the world goes to Church today.

Lent Eve

Whatever you call it, Mardi Gras, Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, this is one of my favorite days of the year.

It's the day to get ready for Lent; to decide on practices, to get all the religious equipment together, and to hope for a spiritual renewal to culminate in the renewal of our baptismal vows at the Great Vigil of Easter.

I guess I see the beginning of Lent as something like the fresh start of a new year; a time to gather things back up and start again. It's a moment to dream of what could be, of how I can learn anew to pray, fast, and give alms. Time to quiet down, forget about trifles, pull out hefty volume II of the breviary, and make a new effort to be faithful to the Lord.

Yes the temptation is spiritualized ambition, but hopefully the ambition aims at giving up ownership and control over prayer, fasting, and almsgiving and letting the Spirit of the God and the daily cycles of Mass and Office take control of my imagination.

Ascesis

A spiritual practice or ascesis of thoughts or "guard of the heart" becomes very important for me when I get into any kind of personal conflict in which I feel hurt or angry.

My mind tends to occupy itself with playing out my defensive responses for future, imagined conversations, and going over and over the things that felt frustrating or hurtful.

But all of this is a trick, and if I let myself get more and more committed to living in a world of conversations that might or might not happen, and in any case don't exist right now, I am trading in unreality. And unreality is no-thing, is incapable of carrying meaning, and only leads to further misery.

The ascesis is to notice when the angry, defensive thoughts arise, either before of after they start to coalesce into narratives and "tapes," and decide to let go of them. In their place, I try to simply return to the situation before me, and ask what is called for at this moment, "in the now."

A simple, repeated prayer like the Rosary or the Jesus Prayer can be a big help in this practice: to replace intrusive thoughts that produce anxiety and agitation with holy thoughts that produce patience and peace.

Choice

The breviary gives little blurbs about the saints on their feast days. Usually they aren't very interesting, but part of the one for St. John Bosco yesterday caught my attention:

His early years were most difficult and once ordained to the priesthood he dedicated himself to the education of the young.

I was thinking about how that little statement has everything I need to know about spirituality. We have two choices about what to do with our suffering: we can try get even with the world by making others suffer as well, continuing the cycle of violence whereby the abused becomes the abuser, the terrorized becomes the terrorist, the revolutionary becomes the dictator, etc., or we can choose to transform suffering into compassion.

The latter choice says, "the cycle of violence ends here, for I am returning life in exchange for the suffering of death." And that, I suppose, is the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection.

Taking our suffering and making sure it doesn't become violence, and trying to transform it into compassion is the work of spirituality, by whatever name you call it: ascesis, right effort, jihad, working our program, yoga.

And Jesus promised that his yoga was easy and light. (Same word, no kidding.)

Details, Devil in the

The challenges of the common religious life come not in grand things but in little ones. I hate to admit it, but there's a good and holy reason for things to be this way.

For example, there's an unspoken and yet bitter dispute going in my house over the correct function of the dish rack next to the kitchen sink. Is it for clean dishes that are waiting to be dry, either by hand or air, or is it a place for dirty dishes to wait on their way to the dishwasher? My position is the former, but that's beside the point.

That the struggles of common life should be of this nature is an expression of God's mercy. If the penances and challenges of the religious life were grand or glamorous or even interesting, there would be too much temptation to vainglory. As it is, nobody will ever write in the life of a saint that he courageously endured the dirty dishes of his confreres, and yet, (again I hate to admit it) this is where ordinary calls to patience and humility arise.

Punctuation

The other day after I had prayed the Act of Contrition in confession, I noticed that the way I punctuate the prayer has changed over the years, revealing a shift in my spirituality.

I used to say the end of the prayer like this:

I firmly resolve: with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, do penance, and to my amend my life.

But I realized that I now do it like this:

I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace: to confess my sins, do penance, and to amend my life.


When I was younger I thought I needed grace to do things. Now I realize that I need the grace to even make a resolution.

Feelings

Feelings are a funny thing in the spiritual life. On the one hand you have to pay close attention to them: the little angers and annoyances that arise in our heart remind us of our unreasonable expectations of the world and other people. Our little attractions to others remind us of our vocation to communion with one another, and ultimately, to God. When we're sad for no reason, it can teach us that our home is not here, but in heaven. When we're happy for no reason, it can be a foretaste of our eternal joy and beatitude with God.

On the other hand, sometimes proper ascesis and right effort is to ignore and disregard our feelings. On Sunday I was preaching, and I felt terrible. I was tired, and kept thinking that I was going either too fast or too slow. I didn't feel connected to the assembly, and found my text stale and repetitive. But my pastor said it was the best he had heard from me thus far.

I guess knowing when to listen to our feelings and when to ignore them is a work of discernment.