Lent: Day Nine

It feels like a month ago, but it’s only been a little over a week, when I thought about what humility is, and defined it in part as “an honest appraisal of one’s abilities and limitations.” I have a lot of natural abilities, a lot of abilities that I have learned, and I have a lot of limitations. One my limitations, it seems, is my inability to avoid sin, even when I want to. St. Paul said it himself: “I don’t understand why I do the things I do. I don’t do the kinds of things that I want to do, and I keep doing the kinds of things I despise doing” (Romans 7:15).

St. Benedict makes it clear that part of the process of growing into that honest appraisal of my abilities and limitations is confessing my sins. The fifth step to humility, he says, is: “when one hideth from his Abbot none of the evil thoughts which rise in his heart or the evils committed by him in secret, but humbly confesseth them.”  Which simply means:

Go to Confession and Hide NOTHING.

I have been doing the part of humility on regular basis for over a year"usually I go once a week, but there are times when I can’t make it and I have to skip a week; there have been other weeks where I had a chance to go twice in one week. I would go every day if I could. Reconciliation (Confession) is my favorite Sacrament, or a close second or tied with the Eucharist. I am surprised by how much I actually do like it. Well, to be fair, I don’t like it until it’s over, but when it’s over, I like it a lot.

I come from two traditions that don’t require confessing before a priest. I basically grew up Presbyterian with a Roman Catholic background. Protestants don’t tell people their sins and generally seem to get offended to the point of anger if you mention going to Confession to them. The other tradition is Old Catholic which holds Reconciliation (Confession) as a Sacrament, but says confessing sins before priest isn’t necessary for forgiveness, but it is encouraged and helpful to do so.

A while ago, I was plagued with anxiety. Armed with the advice of Psalm 38:18 “I confess my sins. They cause me great anxiety,” I went to the Roman Catholic Church around the corner from my house one Saturday afternoon to confess my sins and see if that would help. The church has old information on their website, so I showed up at four for confession, which was over by then, and I waited. After about forty minutes, I wandered around the church offices and dwelling and found a priest and asked if he would hear my confession. He was just about to eat dinner, but he agreed, and I spent the next hour or so telling him not only sins, but also things that I had been carrying in me that I knew weren’t sins or my fault, but that always bothered me. When it was over, he said I was forgiven, and I felt clean. I felt a closeness to God I hadn’t felt in years. Since then I go when I can. I don’t get that same feeling again, but that’s because I don’t let things collect and build up for years and years and years. I let them build up for a week or two at most.

So I get where St. Benedict is coming from on this one. When my Protestant friends declare to me in their superior voice, “I don’t have to tell my sins to a man! I go straight to God!” I think to myself, “That’s all well and good. So do I.” I confess my sins to God long before I go tell a priest. But I’m not actually “CONFESSING” anything to God"at least not in the way we mean it. I’m not telling God anything He doesn’t already know. So I’m not going to take pride in the fact that I am willing to admit to God things about myself that God already knows. My sins are forgiven, but I may still be carrying the baggage around, and it may not help me progress spiritually or emotionally. And it gets easy to just sin and say “Sorry God” and then do it again.

Frankly, asking God to forgive my sins is easy. Looking someone in the eye and saying, “This is who I am when nobody is looking,” or “This is what I am capable of,” is humbling"not humiliating, but humbling.

God takes the initiative! God forgives me before I forgive myself, or open myself up to the possibility of being forgiven. Confessing my sins is not an act of misery, but a powerful experience of God’s love and grace. The reality is that I am not confessing my sins, I am confessing my forgiveness; I am confessing god’s love and grace; I am confessing that nothing, NOTHING, can separate me from the love of God.

My pride does not like to admit that I have faults, or that I sin, so even if it acknowledges them privately, it tries to conceal them publicly. Humility exposes them. Sins privately concealed are fears that torment"the fear of being exposed as a sinner, as a hypocrite, or whatever subtly and daily works on the spirit, weakening it and robbing life of joy. But exposing our own sins, on our own terms, robs fear of its power and restores to me the joy of my salvation. I hide nothing, just as St. Benedict says.

Each of us has thoughts and desires that we seek to conceal. But the more we keep these unattractive parts of ourselves in darkness, the more they seem to grow, becoming more twisted and distorted. If we but open wide the windows of our souls and let the light of God shine through, exposing all that we are to God, then the power of those desires and thoughts diminish and we find freedom from them. The sunlight of the spirit of God is the best disinfectant for our moldy souls.

The trap of this rung of humility is the belief that we can expose ourselves to God while keeping ourselves secret from others"it is the belief that we can confess to God without confessing to another person. There is no humility in telling God what God already knows. Perhaps there is some humility in coming to realize the depth of our sin, and confessing that awareness to God, but true humility is required to look another human being in the eye and confess to that person all that we are, all that we desire, all that we think, all that we do. Humility says “This is who I am. This is me. These are the desires of my heart.”

So the fifth rung of humility requires confession. We confess to the Lord, we confess to those we are comfortable with (priest, friend, loved one), we confess to ourselves, we confess to circumstances and situations we cannot change, we declare to everyone and everything exactly who we are. We strip off our pride and stand before everyone and everything completely naked, for those who are in innocence do not fear nakedness; it is only those filled with shame who seek to cover themselves.