St. John Chrysostom said: “Listen my dear children, God has created us to have shame when we sin and courage to repent. The devil has changed the order.” St. John said: “The devil has made it so we have courage to sin and shame when we think of repenting.”
Have you ever truly thought of that? How do we become ashamed or afraid when we think of asking for forgiveness? If we continue feeling afraid or ashamed, when we keep secrets hidden in our soul, when we don’t reveal what needs healing, the natural life course is isolation, fragmentation and unhappiness. The natural response is lying, hiding and pretending!
The Priceless Gift of Forgiveness
Asking for forgiveness and receiving someone’s forgiveness is priceless. It is hard to imagine a deep friendship or marriage without some sort of forgiveness being asked of one another. As we dance together in life we have surely stepped on each other’s toes at some point and have felt hurt by the other and for sure have regretfully ‘caused’ suffering as well.
Confession: A Forward Movement into Life
To restore our relationship with God and one another, our church invites and encourages the faithful to have courage to repent and come to confession. According to Dn. John Chryssavgis:
Confession can be looked at as a forward movement ‘into’ life. It is not an invitation to hopeless guilt but to freedom and responsibility. The purpose is not that we be ashamed or demoralized but it is rather to point us towards life; a life characterized by honesty, integrity and personal accountability to God, to all others, and to oneself. To repent is to awaken from the sleep of ignorance, to rediscover our soul, to gain the meaning and purpose of our lives by responding to the incomparable love of the One who is ‘not’ of this world, the One who ‘demonstrates’ His own love toward us. The focal point should not be our imperfection but the perfect love of Jesus, who is good and loves humankind. The church reminds us that it is necessary for our healing, to confess our peculiarity, our brokenness to someone who does not shame us, who will stand as a representative and as a witness before God, then our healing can begin. When we are able to take off our mask, and together with at least one person look clearly at our vulnerability without judgment and full loving acceptance for who we are, then our recovery and restoration has begun. It is important to be brutally honest with ourselves and before our spiritual father. We ought to be wary of any dishonest ‘niceness’ in our relationships, in our marriage, and in our churches, which undermines the process of consultation and the sense of community. We are called to love, not pretend; to be holy, not to be ‘nice’. —Dn. John Chryssavgis
The Design and Purpose of Confession
Jim Forrest, An Orthodox Christian lay theologian, educator, and peace activist states that, “we were designed for confession. Secrets in general are hard to keep and if they are not confessed rarely go away but have a way of making life harder, heavier, and unbearable as time passes.”
Isn’t this true? The more we hold on to the lie, the suffering, the blame, the anger, the hurt, the more our heart becomes heavy, the more we feel depressed and hopeless. Clearly confession is not only remembering past wrongs, not only reciting a list of how we hurt God and others, but should be about reconnecting ourselves as members of Christ’s body and one another.
A Path of Healing and Reconciliation
Repentance is the act of our reintegration into the healing body of the faithful, our way toward reconciliation with God, ourselves and others, with the ‘community of saints. As the Evangelist John wrote: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9) The Apostle James wrote in a similar vein: "Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed." (James 5:16).
Let's do our best to allow the light of Christ to enlighten our minds, to transform our thoughts, to direct our path towards His Kingdom, to His Mansion, to His power of life!!! Let us learn to become vessels of the Holy Spirit, vessels of forgiveness, vessels of peace, people of love.
Make time for confession this year!
Have a blessed Lent!
+Fr. Tom
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