Reconciling Confession

Note: This post is adapted from a talk I gave several years ago at a retreat. Every time I go to Confession, I sit in the pews, trying to convince myself that I’m miserable because I’m examining the darkest corners of my conscience and should be miserable because of what a horrible sinner I am, and not at all because my mind is wandering while asking myself why I came here.

We confess to our sinfulness every Mass in the penitential rite. We admit, “I am not worthy to receive you” every consecration.  So why do we have to go sit down in a formalized one-on-one with a priest.  What’s so different about the Sacrament?   Couldn’t God just give us the grace at Mass? And He does! He forgives venial sins every time we take the Eucharist.  So why does the Church say we should go to confession every month?  I’d like to think the Church doesn’t assume I commit a mortal sin each and every month.

During Reconciliation, I’m unavoidably alone with God.  It’s me and Him. I can’t keep my sins locked away inside, and saying them aloud makes them somehow more real.  But no longer do I have everyone else around me so I can say, “at least I don’t do that.“ No one else can tell me it’s all okay, because “we’re all human, after all.”  No one’s there to justify and give a dozen reasons why it’s not my fault. It’s me and Him. 

And when I look up and see Him on the cross, my justifications can only fall silent.  What am I going to say—he’s asking too much?

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “That I might not become too elated, a thorn in my flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ “

In confession, we confront our sins, our weaknesses.  We have no strength to fight this battle.  We must face the countercultural fact that without God, we are nothing.  It is to God’s glory that He turns even our sin—our intentional rejection of Him—to an expression of humility, of faith, and of love.  And that’s why I go to confession.   It is in confession that His glory is revealed in a personal love too powerful to imagine.  A love that can transcend my brokenness and my weakness.  A love that can conquer, and will make me whole.

No wonder, when I leave, I always know I’ll be back.

The Christian who cried Wolf

I recently saw this video.

A thought immediately came into mind: “The Christian who cried wolf.” 

I spend a lot of my time—especially around law school in Boston—around people who are simply not religious.  As much as we don’t like to face it, Church attendance is shrinking, not growing, and we have to learn to function in a society that is becoming less Christian.

It’s difficult to be taken seriously, in a society of growing skepticism, when one uses arguments for public policy whose past invocations include anti-semitism, slavery, and the crusades.

It’s difficult to taken seriously, in a society of growing skepticism, while constantly decrying the “spirit of this age,” and a generation later frantically back-pedaling attempting to show how the Church’s morality is actually “up-to-date."

It’s difficult to be taken seriously, in any society, while constantly crying wolf.

I hope we can begin to get past the thought that the amazing thing about Christianity is its timelessness—how, no matter the historical context, Christians never have to question as new events unfold and new knowledge is revealed.    

I hope we can show the world that the amazing thing about Christianity is its timelessness—not in the sense of willful blindness, but in the sense that it brings a wisdom collected throughout over 2,000 years of a very human history to provide a new challenge in every age.

Transitional Faith

Visiting Duke this week was glorious.  I was able to see many of my friends and spend three straight days of non-stop catching up with people.  I was back in a community I spent years building, and it was so comfortable.  As much as I am really loving law school, I wouldn’t call it comfortable.

A lot of it’s just that I’m a horrendously bad transitioner.  It took three, if not four, years for me to finally feel established and comfortable at Duke.  Almost as soon as I felt comfortable, suddenly I’m in Boston, with a completely new set of people, communities, classes, and challenges.  Sure, new places are exciting, but I have to admit I really like having friends to come home to, people I can text when the thought crosses my mind, and can get a hug from when stress crops up. 

But even if I loved visiting for a break, deep down, I knew college isn’t where I’m supposed to be anymore.  I’m meant to be in law school.  See, faith doesn’t promise us comfort. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, proof of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1).  Sure, the “substance of things hoped for” might be nice, but if I’m hoping for a job to pay off my debts, I want an actual job—not its “substance” (whatever that is).

As nice as it would be, faith doesn’t promise us that job—that comfort.  Catholic mystics have taught that when you’re getting comfortable, God does something to unsettle you, to make you think and pray.  Get too comfortable, and our faith becomes tepid—lukewarm.  God has some pretty strong words against a tepid faith (Revelations 3:16).  God’s solution?  Remember St. Paul’s thorn (2 Corinthians 12:8)?  Despite his pleas for relief, God’s response is not comfort and bliss, but an assurance to faith—“My grace is enough.” 

As we enter the Year of Faith the Pope has called in honor of the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II, I hope we are able to separate comfort and faith.  I pray we are able to look at darkness and fear, and know that for God “darkness and light are but one” (Psalms 139:12).  That we never forget, the “visible came into being through the visible” (Hebrews 11:3), and that it is through darkness and discomfort—not comfort—that God’s grace enters our lives and changes our world.

Privilege on the Cross

I am privileged.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked hard to get where I am.  There are countless times I would have loved to cuddle up with a book or television show or go out on a Friday or Saturday that I spent in the Engineering Quad with my work on a Saturday night after the library had closed.  I will spend the next three years of my life reading countless legal texts to try and

But, thinking again, what a privilege that I could, in complete safety, swipe in to a beautiful computer lab, and work as much or as little as I wanted in a quiet place with constant access to caffeine that I could buy on a prepaid food plan.  

No one likes to talk about privilege, and that makes sense, but the mere fact that I was raised in a loving family willing to sacrifice for my sake, that I have had an education and other resources that so many lack. I did nothing to deserve that, and I have only my family’s generosity to thank.  

What privilege.

What grace. 

But that’s okay, because there is nothing wrong with privilege.  Nothing wrong with grace.  My accomplishments are not diminished by my privilege, by me having “built that” through grace I did nothing to deserve.  However, there is something wrong with me denying that privilege is there, or using that privilege improperly.  I cannot say a token prayer of “thanks, God” and using that grace merely to “get ahead” and “be successful” without appropriating for my own what simply isn’t mine.  For every luxury I was given, there are countless others who undeservedly did not receive the same privilege, the same grace, and have nothing.

Using my gifts to get myself ahead is no better than the servant who buried the talents his master gave him instead of using them for his master’s greater glory (Matthew 25).  That is not the way of the Cross. In words reminiscent Uncle Ben, the more grace I was given, the greater responsibility I have.  Indeed, it is written that the disciples decided “according to ability, each should send relief” to other believers in a time of famine (Acts 11:29).

This is the Cross: God empting himself, “taking the form of a slave,” and humbling himself “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).  The Cross is the subjugation of power to the powerless.  It is Bryan Stevenson turning down a $160,000 annual salary starting salary at a big law firm to defend the lepers of our society—those we deem so irredeemable we condemn them to death.

This perhaps seems unreasonable for anyone to ask.  Our society allows us to put ourselves first, no matter how many more resources we have. But, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18).  

Christ does not teach us to be ashamed of privilege.  Indeed, Christ had the greatest privilege of all—divine privilege.  Christ’s life shows us the ultimate purpose of this privilege.  His ultimate privilege—divinity—was fulfilled in becoming the most limited slave, subjugating himself to sinners who tortured him to death, in order to grace us all with equally undeserved salvation.

It is only on the Cross that privilege can be transformed from arbitrary reward into a vehicle for God’s love and redemption.  It on the Cross that privilege becomes grace.