Reconciliation

Today, Michael and I rode up the watershed road to Saluda, North Carolina, had lunch at the Wildflour Bakery, and browsed a little in the quaint shops there. I bought a teapot to add to my collection. It’s a Celtic teapot because it has a cloverleaf design on it—at least I’d like to think of it that way. I now have a teapot from Oxford, one from Highlands, NC, and one from Tennessee. There are others in my collection given to me by various loved ones, and I cherish the memories they evoke.


Teapots are one of those items that are both functional and beautiful. It’s not a far stretch, I think, to compare them to our sacred liturgy. Okay, I can hear some of you thinking, “Huh?” Well, our liturgy is functional in that it connects us to the Holy, and it’s beautiful in that the words and the actions re-enact the divine life. Yesterday, I attended Liturgy to see two dear friends ordained as deacons in the Episcopal Church. I certainly felt connected to the Divine as I watched the beautiful Eucharistic liturgy unfold.

But what about the other sacraments that we hold in our tradition? Can we classify them as both functional and beautiful? Certainly, we can do that with Baptism, Confirmation, and even the Anointing of the Sick. And yet…

I know of very few Catholics and Anglicans—even devout ones—who take the practice of Sacramental Reconciliation seriously. Confessing one’s sins to another Christian, especially one’s own priest, is something that seems just too gut-wrenching. We’d rather pay a therapist trained to help us with life’s difficulties than accept the free grace of God from a brother or sister in community. I have to ask myself why that is so—especially when the end result can be a feeling of lightness and joy.

I think the answer lies in the controlling and manipulative way the confession is written and in the way it has been traditionally used by the hierarchy in the Catholic tradition to control the laity. Even in the Book of Common Prayer, while the liturgy talks about God’s mercy and the confessor asks for the prayers of the penitent, the words fairly well slam the penitent with all sorts of indictments including equating him/her with the Prodigal son. While I know I am subject to darkness and evil, I find it very difficult to identify with the Prodigal Son. This approach may seem logical, but it is not the most loving approach to restoring inner harmony disturbed by wrongdoing. A more loving approach may be to remind the penitent—the one making the confession—that he or she is filled with God’s light, the light given at Creation. Perhaps something as simple as adding the phrase “have mercy on us and forgive us; free our light from the darkness that we may walk in your ways…” would bring the sacrament closer to our hearts and practice.

If we look seriously to the Celtic tradition of spirituality, it is not long before we discover the practice of the anamcara. Although the Celtic Church devised its own form of sacramental confession, it was more of a private exchange between penitent and confessor, and often the confessor was a spiritual friend. Confession wasn’t something that happened once before death or even something a person dutifully attended to once a year. And it certainly wasn’t done in a Reconciliation service. Confessing one’s sins was a normal practice. In fact, all of life was considered sacramental, and life was interwoven with practicalities and mystery.

If sacramental confession is ever to become a normal part of Christian practice again, it has to be seen as the teapot. It has to be beautiful and functional. There’s a vast difference between perfunctory and functional. When confession is seen as a way to access the inner grace, to own that the light is there deep in our hearts waiting to be lived into, instead of a way to get rid of inner darkness, then it will serve a beautiful purpose. Then we will acknowledge a just and good God who wants us to know the Holy as the Holy knows us. We will learn to listen with the heart and in so doing, we will live sacramentally. My prayer for all of us—my readers and myself—is that God will allow us to listen carefully in order to gain wisdom and live fully.