The annual visit to Confession

It is time for Christmas. A week more and the waiting for the new born king will come to an end and the festivities of Christmas, starting with the Midnight Mass will take its culmination. It is also time for confession for many who have this idea of confessions ‘twice a year’. They blatantly say that they go for confession twice a year as if people in a club who share how often one frequents the parlor or a market in a far away town. It is their souls that are at stake.

I have always been amazed at what possible good can a ‘twice or once a year’ confession do to one’s soul? Sure, the absolution is granted because a person has decided to come for confession. The person has gained much in mercy but how much has the soul to gain in holiness to elevate the state of the soul. I look at it as a small worker who works carrying boxes in a company always reminding himself that one day he will command and direct others to carry the same boxes. He will be great. He will prepare plans and charts where the boxes will go. A soul that goes for confession sparingly much to the persusion of others is like that soul which never turns great, which neither becomes a saint and sapped of all its strength without grace, nor can it aspire for sainthood. It remains cut off from the grace that God can fill in order that it can be heroic.

And what does a Person remember in a 3 minute confession? There are men and women who visit the confessional once in a week or fortnight. I wonder if they are voracious sinners compared to the annual visitors. Quite to the contrary, These are men and women who are more sensitive to the understanding and reality of Sin. They realize that the devil is hidden not in fairy tale epics and fables but in the ordinary events of everyday life. He is hidden in the intemperance shown in food or the charity deprived to one’s neighbor or the sloth shown during work or at home.

I find it hard to recollect what has transpired in the month, in what I have done and what I have failed to do, that I have to now prepare a memo on things that I know I have done wrong in case I want to do a confession and don’t have the time to introspect. Who wants to leave the salvation of my soul to the mercy of a general introspection just before entering the confessional? Unless one does a minute of examination of conscience everyday

What guilt has the person taken to confession if he cannot remember sins? The annual visitor simply starts with ‘I lied I hurt I have been bad I this I that’. I wonder how much guilt remains of the sins to experience an honest act of contrition in order to reform. My point is not that sins are not absolved. I am not questioning the authenticity of the absolution. I am questioning the authenticity of the principle elements of Confession: contrition

If you may have observed how Man is oriented towards sinfulness and pride, you would also know that it so happens that after a year you either feel the one you wronged deserved it or that you didn’t do any wrong at all after what so many others around you are doing. So the objectivity of the sin is ripped apart and cases are built by the mind. What does an annual confession really involve? Sure, I will remember my mortal sins. Does the person deprive himself of communion every day until he does his annual confession and he is free from the guilt of mortal sin? A year comprises months and weeks and days which have a hundred little moments of spite, anger, deceit, selfishness, bitterness, accusations and excess? How do we feel alright about receiving communion everyday while we continue to plunder our soul of its sanctity and leave our hearts farther away from charity?

What about those who have not committed any explicitly mortal sin like Adultery or Murder or skipping Mass et cetera? What guilt are they taking to confession if their souls have become so insensitive to sin that they don’t realize what is a sin and otherwise. Pope John Paul II warned us of this saying the greatest sin of the 21^st century is the loss of sense of sin. A person who has lost the sensitivity to sins against the virtues of charity, faith, hope and justice among others, what guilt can he take to confession when he visits the confessional once a year, far removed from the little accounts of depravation and failings. Everything then becomes simply a recital of the catechism: I lied, I this, I that…

Lastly, Confession is the measure of many things. In today’s material world, where one doesn’t have time apart from Television, books, gadgets and other worldly commitments. A person who goes for a confession sparingly knows where he stands in the realm of things. He knows where he stands in the war between the material and spiritual between things of the world and things divine. When one sparingly visits confession, it indicates how much a soul seeks forgiveness of sins. Thus, it also shows how much the worries of the world consume his heart and hence does not give him an opportunity to seek to clear the clutter and dirt of attachments and excesses.

A person who receives the sacrament of confession regularly knows that he understands that all things will pass away for these things are temporal and come and go. But what will remain is the treasures that we store up in heaven. Perhaps we are busier, sadly, this Christmas, like every Christmas buying trees, Christmas sweets, Cribs, Decoration, Clothes and gifts. If Christmas is separated from the message of Christ-Repent for the Kingdom of God is near, then even a Christianizing culture of Trees and gifts can turn but a popular culture of opportunities to have fun. A world of people who simply wish to have fun and Christmas has slowly now become Xmas or Season’s Greetings: Their way to have it.