My little girl is making her first Reconciliation tomorrow night. For some reason, she is nervous and I can’t get out of her why. I guess we all should be as nervous as we go about cleansing our souls.
In any case, last night, she and I were talking about the sacrament and its meaning. Why we do it; why Christ gave us the sacrament; why we should do it eagerly and often.
I was struggling to come up with a simple way to explain the results of the sacrament, when I came up with the following -
In our life, we have a balloon that we carry around with us. The bigger it gets, the more we are separated from God and off the path that Christ wants us to walk. The balloon only gets bigger when we sin. If we do little sins, then little puffs of air go into the balloon. If we do big sins, then bigger puffs of air shoot into the balloon.
Most of us do the little sins. We try to do good but we screw up from time to time. We forget or we give in to temptation. But even these minor sins blow air into the balloon. After a while, it’s these little puffs that have caused the balloon to grow bigger over time. All of a sudden we realize that the balloon has gotten rather large and we find ourselves separated from God.
We have to find a way to pop the balloon; but we find that we can’t do it ourselves.
The good news is that Christ has given us the Sacrament of Reconciliation. We can go to a priest and confess our sins. Sitting in the place of Christ, he will forgive our sins and pop the balloon. We are made clean and we can start anew. We are no longer separated from God and can go about doing Christ’s work.
When the balloon gets some air in it again, we can go to confession and have it popped again. The trick, of course, is to make sure the balloon doesn’t get too big; by living a good life and by going to confession often.
After I finished, my little girl seemed to understand. Even if she didn’t, I’m feel blessed that she cares so much about what she is going to do tomorrow.
And I guess we all need to remember that Advent is a season of conversion in preparation for the coming of Christ. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is indispensable to this conversion.
Go to confession in the next week; even if you haven’t been in a decade; even if you are as nervous as my little girl. If it’s been awhile, just tell the priest. He’ll be glad you are back and will walk you through it.
(Trust me, I started going again four years ago after having been away for 15 years. I remembered nothing and Father just led me without question or reproach; just like the Good Shepherd.)
Pop the balloon; get straightened out with Christ. It will make Christmas that much sweeter.
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When we're baptized, we are given a white garment (seems to look something like a fairly-small scarf these days) called the pall. In the early Church, my understanding is that the newly baptized folks (baptized at Easter) would wear the pall until Pentecost. After 50 days of wear in a not-entirely-clean environment, you have to wonder whether the pall was white any more!
The pall returns at burial, draped on the casket. In that sense, we go to meet our Judge clothed in the garment from our baptism.
I tend to understand confession as a way of washing that baptismal pall, returning it to the original whiteness we were given in baptism. It doesn't matter whether what you're cleaning off is big spills or the little dirt of day-to-day living; we get the thing dirty, and we need to get it clean. In this sense, then, confession can be thought of as a sort of laundry service for the spiritual life; we bring our moral stains to Christ in the person of the priest, and he cleans us up so that we can go to Judgment wearing clean clothes.
As for how often you go to confession—well, how long do you want to let the dirty laundry sit?
For what it's worth…
Peace,
–Peter
I had the same problem with my first girl. She was worried about what she was going to say in confession. She really hadn't done anything THAT WRONG, and she was afraid that if she only mentioned small things that the priest would think she was hiding something really big. She even considered making something up. Fortunately, she didn't, and in the actual event everything worked out fine. It was only years later that she told me this.