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ON CONFESSION
THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS
We
first see the forgiveness of sins with Christ, who when a bedridden man
was brought to him to be cured he said:
“Thy sins be forgiven thee”.
In the story of the man sick with the palsy we read:
“And, behold, they brought
to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their
faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be
forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves,
This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore
think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be
forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the
Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick
of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he
arose, and departed to his house”.
(Matth. 9:1- 7)
Here Christ is telling the
scribes that healing the body is nothing when compared to the healing of
the soul, but to show that he is the Messiah and that he has the authority
and power to forgive sins, he shows them in a visible form they can
understand by healing the physical ailment. They cannot see the healing of
the soul, but they can see the cured body.
The apostles were also given the power to cure bodily ailments; we read in
Matthew that Christ gave them “power
against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of
sickness and all manner of disease”.
(Matth. 10: 1) He then told them to “go,
preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse
the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received,
freely give.” (Matth. 10: 8)
THE INSTITUTION OF THE
SACRAMENT
The
apostle therefore had the power to cure the body, but as yet they did not
have the authority to forgive sins and cure the soul. This came later when
after Christ was resurrected from the dead, he instituted the Sacrament of
Confession by breathing on his apostles and saying:
“Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye
remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they
are retained”. (John 20:22-23) Thus
here we have Christ giving the authority and power to his disciples to
forgive or not to forgive sins. This was given to them before the Descent
of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, showing that it was not part of the
general gifts of the Holy Spirit that was given to all, but a special gift
for the select few. This authority was then passed on to the bishops who
are the ultimate spiritual fathers of a Church. Bishops then pass on this
authority to certain Priests whom they deem are spiritually experienced to
guide and advice the flock in spiritual matters.
Now for Christ to institute this
Sacrament means that there is a need for people to confess their sins, but
also that they must confess them before a priest. The bishops and priests
are the only canonical and lawful successors of the Apostles and only they
have the power to grant forgiveness and remission. St John Chrysostom
writing on the glory of the Priesthood says:
“…how great is the honour
which the grace of the Spirit has bestowed on priests… for having their
life in this world, they have been entrusted with the stewardship of
heavenly things, and have received an authority which God has not given to
angels or archangels. For he did not say to the angels “What things soever
ye shall bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven; and what things
soever ye shall loose, shall be loosed.” Those who are lords on earth have
indeed the power to bind, but only men’s bodies, but the authority to bind
that we speak of touches the very soul and transcends the heavens. What
priests do on earth, God ratifies above. The Master confirms the decisions
of his slaves. Indeed he has given them nothing less than the whole
authority of heaven. For he says, “Whose soever sins ye forgive, they are
forgiven, and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.” What
authority could be greater than that? “The Father hath given all judgement
unto the Son.” But I see that the Son has placed it all in the hands of
the priests. If a man “cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven except he
be born again of water and the spirit,” and if he that eateth not the
Lord’s flesh and drinketh not his blood is cast out of everlasting life,
and all these things can happen through no other agency except through the
sacred hands of the priests’ how can anyone, without their help, escape
the fire of Gehenna or win his appointed crown? They are the ones - they
and no others - who are in charge of spiritual travail and responsible for
the birth that comes through baptism. Through them we put on Christ and
are united with the Son of God and become limbs obedient to that blessed
Head. So they should properly be not only more feared than rulers and
kings, but more honoured even than fathers. For our fathers begot us “of
blood and the will of the flesh”; but they are responsible for our birth
from God, that blessed second birth, our true emancipation, the adoption
according to grace. The priests of the Jews had authority to cure leprosy
of the body, or rather, not to cure it, but only to certify the cure… But
our priests have received authority not over leprosy of the body but over
uncleanness of the soul, and not just to certify its cure, but actually to
cure it”.
Thus we should not be as the Protestants who, like many other things, have
abolished this God instituted Sacrament and because they never confess
their sins they are completely ignorant of its significance. When they
read the Bible, they pass over and pay no attention to the words of our
Lord with which he established the Sacrament and gave to his disciples the
authority to forgive sins. They grant remission to themselves and their
mentality, being more easily acceptable in our modern world, has infected
many Orthodox who have also abolished this Sacrament of confession for
themselves and argue that they confess before the Icon of Christ or the
Virgin, or that they tell their sins directly to God in their prayers. But
Christ didn’t tell us to confess before his Icon neither did he tell us
that by confessing directly to him in our prayers we would receive
forgiveness of our sins. Neither the Icon nor our personal prayers can
give us absolution. Christ entrusted this authority to the clergy and
shepherds of his Church. Only the Priest can pronounce the prayer of
absolution.
How we confess today is not how confession was made in the early Church.
During the first four centuries, confession was made openly before the
entire congregation. This doesn’t mean that everyone stood up and gave an
account of all their secret sins and innermost thoughts. It was a
confession of the things that had already become public knowledge like an
act of adultery or murder that came to light and scandalized the faithful
or when someone apostatised from the true Church by heresy and then coming
to his senses wished to be readmitted to the Church. Confession then was a
solemn public act of reconciliation, through which a sinner was readmitted
into church membership. This form of confession was probably founded from
the Epistle of St. James who says:
“Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another,
that you may be healed” (5.16). But
even before this when St John baptized in the Jordan, people came and
confessed their sins, showing that confession was regarded as a form of
repentance and regeneration (Matthew 3.6; Mark 1.5; Acts 19.18).
After the fourth century private
confession was more widely practiced, but even then it did not have the
formal procedure it has now with absolution at the end. Very few of the
Church Fathers refer to prayers of absolution, but this doesn’t mean that
it didn’t exist in some form or other. Certainly there were penances with
penitent sinners having to abstain from Holy Communion for a certain
period of time according to the seriousness of their sin. With the next
few centuries and the Ecumenical Councils we see that penances were severe
with many of the serious or mortal sins being punished with many years
abstention from the Holy Mysteries. These sentences of many years without
Holy Communion were then reduced by St. John the Faster who was Patriarch
of Constantinople during the late 6th and early 7th century. John the
Faster left as a set of 35 canons mostly dealing with sins of a sexual
nature, which drastically reduced the sentences of previous fathers, and
which were adopted and put into practice by the Church.
Many considered his canons as
being very lenient and accommodating, but careful study of his canons
shows that his remedies were in many places more austere than others. With
his first canon, which is in fact not a canon, but an apology, he explains
why he reduces the long sentences of other Fathers. He says that:
“since neither the great
Father Basil nor the other Fathers of the oldest times prescribed for
penitents any satisfaction and canon with fasting, or vigilance, of
genuflection (prostration), but canonized them solely with abstinence from
divine Communion, for this reason we have deemed it reasonable to reduce
the years of penitence for those who are genuinely repentant and willing
to inflict hardship upon their bodies by means of severities and to live
from henceforth a virtuous life contrary to the life they had before.”
If fact what he did was give the
penitent a choice, they could abstain from holy Communion for the period
stated by the Fathers or these years could be drastically reduced if the
penitent was willing to spend these years inflicting himself with fasting
and genuflections (prostrations) which could be anything from 50 to 300 a
day. The time taken off was according to how much the person was willing
to do. If he promised to give up meat then a year was taken off, if he
promised to refrain from dairy products another year, fish another year,
olive oil another year, with prostrations another year and giving alms
according to the amount of wealth he had another year. So the years were
reduced, but other hardships were imposed which in many cases were harder
to observe than the previous canons, which only involved not communing for
a certain period.
The subject of penances is
continued futher down but first I want to finish with how the Sacrament of
Confession has come down to us in the present form we have. The actual
service found in the service books is probably from after the 10th
century. It involves petitions and prayers before the confession and
prayers of absolution after. In practice, today we rarely say all the
petitions and prayers before the confession. The Priest will probably give
the opening blessing and then possibly a short prayer. He will then ask
the person to read a short petition whereby he tells God that he will
confess everything from his heart and reveal everything he has committed
and then beseeches God to forgive him and give him grace to not sin again.
Then either standing or sitting facing an Icon or the Gospel book with the
priest to his side, he will confess his sins and the Priest will if he
feels it necessary advice him on certain matters or even give him a
penance. After this he will ask him to kneel while he places over his head
the epitrakhelion and says the prayers of absolution.
PENANCES
What
has changed especially in our times are the penances, which have either
been dispensed with altogether of have been reduced to a fraction of what
are mentioned in the Canons. Also before, if a penance was given, then the
Priest didn’t say the prayer of absolution until the penance was
fulfilled, today we always say the prayer at the end of confession even if
the priest imposes a penance. To understand why the Church has changed so
drastically in the confessional room, we must first understand what the
canons are. Many people consider them infallible in the same way the
doctrines of the Church are. This is a gross misunderstanding: the canons,
even though they were produced by the same councils that gave us the
doctrines, are only rules for guidance. They guide and prevent men from
falling into error and heresy, and assist the penitent to re-find his way
back to God. We see that many canons were revised or updated from one
council to the next and that is because something that was valid in the
fourth century could not be applied in the same way in the eighth century.
We are now in the 21st century and if we had [as we should] an Ecumenical
council today, the majority of the canons [for Christian guidance] would
definitely be updated or thrown out of the window.
Let us take as an example the sin of voluntary abortion. An early canon
condemns the sinner to exclusion from the Holy Mysteries until the time of
her death.
Another canon excludes a murderer for 25 years, but must spend those years
repenting and fasting from the morning until evening and then eat only
Xerophagia, in other words only bread and water.
The 20th canon of Ancyra [314], excludes the sinner for seven years.
The 91st canon of the 6th Ecumenical Council [692] condemns the sinner as
a murderer, so the exclusion from the Mysteries is again the life
sentence.
The 2nd of Basil excludes the sinner for ten years.
The 21st canon of John the Faster for 5 or even 3 years.
As already said, the canons of John the Faster are in general very lenient
compared to other canons. Why do we have such vast differences from one
canon to the next? Precisely because the canons are not the Christian
Faith, they are not punishments that condemn sinners to a lifetime outside
of the Church, but are to be used to guide the people to lead a righteous
life pleasing to God, thus helping them find their way to their salvation.
We can liken the road from earth to heaven as a very long motorway. On our
journey, we might be tired or need to refuel our vehicle, so for a while
we come off the motorway to find a suitable motel or fuelling station.
Having come off the motorway we become sidetracked from various things and
cannot find our way back to the motorway. We need assistance and this is
where we need the canons, because the canons are like road signs that
direct us in which way to follow, thus helping us return to the motorway.
When Jesus was asked “which is the
great commandment in the law?” He
replied: “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is
the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.” (Matthew
23: 37-40) Love therefore is above all the canons and can replace them
whenever it is deemed a canon would do more harm than good.
Today if a woman comes to confess than she had a voluntary abortion, we
would not exclude her from Communion for 3 years because instead of
helping her return to the Church if would in fact drive her away. The
Priest would judge or rather discern if she truly repented for her
actions, taking into account when she committed the crime. If it was many
years passed and her conscience has all that time been punishing her, if
also she regularly attends the Church services and tries to live according
to the teachings of the Church, then what would be the use of an added
penance. On the other hand if the crime was recent then she will need time
to reflect on what she has done and the priest might tell her not to
commune for 3 to 6 months or even a year and also maybe to keep the fasts,
which is her duty anyway, and maybe to read daily from Holy Scripture.
Christ is love, the Church is love, and we also must be love. The Church
and her Priests must at all time show love and compassion for the people.
We are not Judges of the people. We leave that to God and God alone. In
the days when the Canons were written, everyone that went to church, and
remained in the main part of the church until the end, had to receive Holy
Communion. So someone who didn’t commune stood apart from the rest which
must have been a humiliating experience. Today people rarely attend church
let alone have regular communion. To tell someone that they cannot receive
communion for one, two or three years would not really help them repent,
but would rather keep them away from church for that period of time, so
more harm is done than good.
One other thing that has changed over the years is how often people come
for confession and why they come. Unless someone has fallen into a grave
sin that would bar him from Holy Communion, one, two, or three times a
year at the most is sufficient for most people. A daily, weekly or monthly
confession is not in the tradition of the Orthodox Church as a whole, but
only the practice of monasteries. Monks see their spiritual fathers on a
regular base, some daily, for spiritual guidance, and as an act of
obedience, but not necessarily always for confession. He will seek his
advice on prayer and other matters at the same time the spiritual father
can keep a check on his charge to see if his advice has been beneficial.
In recent years we have seen this monastic type of relationship between
spiritual fathers and spiritual children spreading among lay people. They
use the Sacrament of Confession not so much as to confess but as an excuse
to talk with their spiritual father and ask his advice on almost
everything they do. If they cannot get to see him then they will phone him
with all sorts of questions and follow his every direction with blind
obedience. This is very wrong because, for the spiritual father to guide
and advice them correctly, he would have to be living with them and see
how they actually live. Many couples with already large families ask their
spiritual father for his blessing to have another child. What do they
expect him to say? Of course he will give his blessing and probably tell
them that children are gifts from God; go forth and multiply. What the
priest cannot see is the already difficult life the couple have with so
many children and the added burden another baby will place on the family
as a whole. Such decisions are not the priest’s responsibility but only
the couple’s. If the baby proves to be too much for them to handle they
cannot come back to the priest and say “but you told us to have another
child”. Others again use spiritual fathers as marriage guidance
councillors. Every time there is a small problem at home they seek out his
advice on how to cope with the situation. Now this is not a bad thing as
long as both parties seek advice together. The Priest cannot advice
properly if he doesn’t hear both sides.
There are even times when priests
are the root of the problems between couples. The woman might come for
confession and the priest tells her not to have intercourse with her
husband on Saturday evenings or Sundays, on evenings before a feast, on
Wednesdays and Fridays and during all the fasts, and many other days. She
then goes home and refuses to allow her husband his marital rights saying
that her spiritual father forbade her to give herself to him on that day.
The husband who is not a regular Church goer goes storming to find the
priest and warns him to stay out of his bedroom or else. You find this
funny, but it has actually happened on more than one occasion, and
deservedly so, because the priest didn’t understand what St. Paul meant
when he said: “Do not refuse one another
except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you devote yourselves to
prayer, but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of
control. I say this as a concession and not as a commandment”.
(1 Corinthians 7:5-6)
This can be taken as a warning when seeking out a Spiritual Father. We use
the name Spiritual father rather liberally but not every priest who has
the blessing to hear confessions is also a spiritual father. If we want
more than a father confessor we should look for someone with whom we feel
comfortable with and in whom we can trust to open our innermost self to
without feeling embarrassed or feel that he will judge or lose his good
opinion of us. When we find such as a spiritual father we should not
change him for another when we fall into the same sin because we feel
ashamed to face him again or because we didn’t like what he prescribed for
us. We should obey his every direction in the same way we go to a doctor
for a certain bodily ailment and receive the proper medication that will
make us better. The Church is a hospital for sick souls, Christ is the
Head Physician and the Priests are his many doctors specialized in many
fields of spiritual ailments. But just as there are good knowledgeable and
experienced doctor and others not so experienced, so too are there good
experienced priests and others inexperienced.
A spiritual doctor like a
physician must have many years of studying, training and experience, not
necessarily a university graduate, but a graduate of the spiritual
university, knowledgeable through his own spiritual struggles in how to
subdue the passions and overcome temptations. One doctor might prescribe
one medicine for an ailment and another might give you something else or
another might rely only on homeopathic medicines. It doesn’t matter what
each gives as long as the end result is the same. This is true of priests.
Not every priest gives the same advice, one will tell you to fast another
to read, another to make prostrations, and another will keep silent. There
is no fixed rule for which medicine to give. Each person is an individual
with different needs. If the spiritual doctor has known you for some time
then he will probably know from the beginning what would help you, but if
your first meeting is during the confession, he will prescribe a general
medicine like paracetamol, until he gets the results from your analysis.
This is the meaning of penances. They are not penalties imposed on someone
because they transgressed the divine law. They are medicinal to help the
sinner attain a better and deeper realization of the enormity of their sin
and to imbue in them a longing for virtue.
So now lets come to the question of why we confess.
WHY WE CONFESS OUR SINS
In
the sacrament of Baptism we receive either as children or adults, we are
mystically, and truly joined to Christ and to His Living Body - the Church
- through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit working in the
baptismal waters. In Christ’s own words “…unless one is born of water
and the Spirit, he cannot enter the
kingdom of God.”
(John 3:5) With the Sacrament of Baptism we are cleansed from all sins and
are spiritually reborn for righteous living. However, we still have the
predisposition towards sin, which is interwoven with our free will. As
time passes, we fall into sin due to careless ways of living,
inexperience, and different temptations. We become spiritually sick as it
were, but also our sins make a barrier between us and God, they restrict
us from progressing spiritually and to re-establish our relationship with
God and eternal life: we must cleanse ourselves of these barriers. If we
think of the Holy Spirit as a fragrant perfume we would not put this very
special and valuable perfume in a dirty bottle. We would wash the bottle
clean making sure to remove every speck of dirt from it before putting in
this valuable perfume. The bottle to put the Holy Spirit is the vessel of
our body. If it has accumulated all sorts of dirt through the many sins
that we have committed we should not expect the Holy Spirit to come and
abide in us unless we first cleanse it from all impurities and every bad
odour.
The sacrament of Confession works like a second baptism helping us to
cleanse ourselves from the sins that have accumulated since our baptism
and it allows the healing power of God to restore the broken relationship
between us and Him caused by our sin. In the Sacrament of Confession the
penitent Christian, in the presence of the spiritual confessor, opens to
God his darkened and sick heart and allows the heavenly light to enter,
cleanse and heal it. In Confession, as in Baptism, a rebirth takes place
and this is why after Confession we feel cleansed and renewed, as a newly
baptized infant. We obtain new strength to battle the evil within us and
to restart a righteous life.
PREPARING FOR CONFESSION
But
just like having Holy Communion, we must prepare ourselves for the
Sacrament of Confession. From a few days beforehand we should spend some
time alone in prayer and self-examination collecting our thoughts and
thoroughly examine our conscience. We must ask God to reveal to us those
things in our life which have become a barrier to our relationship with
Him. How did we offend him and how did we offend our neighbour? Try to
remember all the sinful events and their details. If it is our first
confession it is a good idea to look over our whole life so far and note
down on a piece of paper those major incidents for which over the years we
have felt guilty or which in some way still occupy our conscience. Then we
should look over our more recent life - the last few months, weeks and
days – more closely. Writing down our thoughts is a good way to remember
our sins and we can bring this paper with us when we go to confession, but
we should write things down in such a way that only we would understand
what they mean just in case we lose the paper and it is found by others.
In general we confess those sins
we remember, which are the grave sins and the very recent. As time passes
we tend to forget the majority of our sins because they are the same sins
that we have been doing for years and have become a habit, but with
regular confession and with a sincere Christian way of life, as we scrape
away the sins that are on the surface, the Holy Spirit works within us and
slowly brings to the surface other sins we have forgotten. There are
pamphlets that help you remember, which ask you a thousand and one
questions like have you done this or have you done that etc. Personally I
am against these lists of sins as they tend to make the Sacrament very
mechanical. To give you an idea of these lists listen to the following:
Have you attended Church services regularly? When in Church, have you been
inattentive, laughed or talked unnecessarily? Have you used the name of
the Lord in swearing or in a joking way? Have you sworn or murmured
against God? Have you been ashamed to make the sign of the Cross in front
of others? Have you attended parties, movies, etc. during the hours of
Church services? Have you failed to keep the fast or other rules of the
Church? Have you believed in astrology, superstitions, fortune-tellers or
the like? Have you strayed from the teachings of the Church by unbelief or
indifference to the Faith? Have you? Have you? Have you? This is no way to
confess even though there are many who say that these lists help in
preparation. There are other lists than certain Priest use and ask the
penitent during confession if they have committed this or that. Again I am
against the priest asking questions: that is not his job: he is there to
listen and if need be then advice and say the prayer of absolution.
During confession we should confess clearly so that the priest understands
the sin, but without mentioning others and without going into too many
details. Giving a long detailed account of a sin is like trying to justify
ourselves for what we did and very often it involves mentioning and
blaming others for our weakness. God already know the details and the
priest is not there as a judge, but as a physician. If someone is admitted
into hospital after a car crash, the doctor needs to see the injuries, he
doesn’t need to be told that you were at a party and got drunk, then
driving home with your friend you got into a fight and one thing lead to
another and before you realized you went straight into the lamppost. Also
when confessing sins of a sexual nature, the priest doesn’t want to hear
the details of these acts. Priests are also human with passions: too many
details can make images in our minds. As a rule what goes on in a married
couple’s bedroom is a private thing, and as the prayer during the service
of Marriage says: “The marriage bed is undefiled”. There are of course
times when married couples need to open this door if it involves unnatural
behaviour, but this if possible should be done in a very discreet way. The
experienced priest will understand. If the priest tries to enter this
bedroom by asking questions and details then get up and walk out because
he has no right to be there.
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Chapter 12
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