Jim Cogley: Reflections Tues 17th Oct – Mon 23rd Oct
Confession…
Tue 17th Oct – Confession – Yesterday and Today
It is very rare to come across a ‘thinking’ Catholic who doesn’t have a problem with Confession. The days of queues outside of confession boxes are long gone and vast numbers have voted with their feet. With the current shortage of priests the availability of confessors is also a factor, but the problem goes much deeper. I would suggest that for the vast majority it simply was not working and that is not in any way to take from the efficacy of the sacrament. Personally, I believe wholeheartedly in the value and need for confession. However, not in the manner in which it was taught and practiced, since further back than I can remember. In the vast majority of confessions there was a distinct disconnection between the content of what was spoken about and what was really happening in that person’s life. Often knowing the person, and the real issues he or she was struggling with, one would expect at least some of those to be given an airing. Again and again this failed to happen, where confessing one’s so called ‘sins’ was easier than to be honest about one’s life.
Wed 18th Oct – Contributing to our Culture of Secrecy
Today the idea of going into a dark box is fast losing favour and especially among priests. Very few would dream of having children making their first confession in such a box. Nearly fifty years ago a predecessor in a particular church declared the confession box obsolete. He said that before his arrival a rumour had been circulating that the confession box was haunted. ‘Yet in all my time,’ he said, ‘I have never seen anyone dead or alive in it.’ My own belief is that the box contributed to a closed mentality and a closed society where important issues that needed to be exposed to the light could paradoxically be only spoken about in the darkness. This created a culture of secrecy whereby many had difficulty being real and talking about painful everyday realities. Having had the experience of working with different kinds of groups over the years I have noticed that the level of openness and honesty in mostly non-church going groups would far surpass those with a strong ‘catholic’ mentality.
Thurs 19th Oct – The Grace of an Honest Conversation
Back in the days when regular confession was far more common than it is today a young girl made a remark that has always remained with me. She said, ‘I need to be honest and admit that I experience far more redemption in a good honest and deep conversation about my life, with someone I can trust, that I do in the confessional.’ My response was to assure her that she had just expressed the essence of what the Sacrament of Confession was all about. Unfortunately, such an understanding is something very few seem to have grasped and when one priest was asked what his experience in the confession box was he described it graphically as ‘mostly being stoned to death with popcorn’. Asked to elaborate he said that most people simply carry forward a variegation of the same shopping list of sins they had while in primary school and that it had no relevance to the reality of their adult life.
Fri 20th Oct – Remembering with Gratitude
One Thursday not so long ago at precisely 3pm I received a phone call from a lady made out of sheer gratitude. She remembered that it was on that day, at that time, forty years earlier, she had come to my door needing to make a serious confession. It was from there that day her life had changed dramatically and she had never looked back. Her life had been a mess and it was truly an honest life review where we looked, not just at what was happening, but also why it had been that way. After tumbling out her story, she knew that it was as important to forgive herself, as it was to receive God’s forgiveness. Those few moments of grace and tears were like a key that unlocked her blocked potential, and from there she set out on a great adventure of faith. On the way out she met her closest friend and said, ‘I told him everything’. The woman was aghast and said, ‘My God, if you did, we can no longer be friends’. Three days later there was another knock on the door and this time it was the friend!
Sat 21st Oct – Exposing our Blind Spots
Until relatively recent times the focus in Confession was on the number and kind of sins that were committed. For those with a scrupulous nature this became a big problem, wondering if everything was covered. The idea was not to satisfy the curiosity of the priest, but rather to reflect on recurring patterns of behaviour in order to identify root causes. Much earlier in the tradition this was understood to be more the norm, where if you went to a truly good confessor, he would help you to grow in understanding in relation to your behaviour. As a man of Spirit, he would also exercise his own gifts of discernment whereby he could reveal areas that were your blind spots. For example, if you were guilty of stealing something he might gently lead you into the awareness of where you had suffered a bereavement and something precious had been taken from you, or how you were still carrying the effects of some trauma. This essential relationship between unacceptable behaviour, and where it was coming from, became largely lost, and rarely formed part of the traditional confession experience.
Sun 22nd Oct – Mission Sunday
“God Is Like a Large Baobab Tree”
The following story is told by a Fr Healey, a missionary who spent many years in Tanzania:
‘One day my pickup truck broke down on the road from Maswa to Bariadi in western Tanzania. After I had waited for a half-hour a big Coca-Cola truck came by and the driver named Musa kindly towed my vehicle to the next town, a common occurrence of friendship and mutual help on our poor dirt roads. Part of the time I sat in his big cab and we talked about, of all things, religion. Musa was a Muslim who belonged to the Nyamwezi Ethnic Group from Tabora. In commenting on the tensions between Christians and Muslims in Tanzania he told me: “There is only one God. God is like one large tree with different branches that represent the different religions of Islam, Christianity, African Religion and so forth. These branches are part of the same family of God, so we should work together.” Simply put, Musa taught me an African metaphor of world religions and interreligious dialogue.’
Mon 23rd Oct – An Absence of Reality
In trying to understand why Confession has in the main not been working, we might be drawn to the conclusion that a big contributing factor was that moral evil became equated with the breach of petty manmade laws and regulations. These would include things like specific fast times before reception of Holy Communion, church attendance and other observances. At a time when moral evil in the form of cruelty, neglect, abuse and malnutrition were rife in many religious institutions, I doubt if any of the confessions heard in such places would ever have featured such dreadful ill-treatment. I strongly suspect that even the confessions of the very worst offenders would have been more along the lines of ‘being distracted at my prayers’, ‘being late for Mass’ or ‘failing to say part of my daily Office.’
Jim, reading you with flashbacks (!) to the monk who showed his petulance when I interrupted his collecting of the offerings at the candles shrines, to ask for the blessings of the Sacrament.
To the story in this part of the Island, of the one overheard in the pub telling of the stroke he had pulled. When a bystander enquired, did I not see you coming out of the confessional last Saturday, the stroker replied, ‘the way it is I tell the priest me sins not me business’.
The synoptic Gospels record that right at the start of his ministry Jesus rejected the offer of the kingdoms of the world and the opportunity to climb to the very top of the Temple pyramid of his own Jewish religion.
When are we ever told in Lent that this was a turning away from the sin of covetousness, clearly defined, in the 9th and 10th commandments of the decalogue, as wanting ANYTHING our neighbour has?
Clearly the vast historical beam in the clerical eye over covetousness was inserted by Constantine in 313, whose covetousness for sole control of the Roman empire was the obvious cause of his final battle with Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, but had to be overlooked. That same disease was the source of the rivalries that had plagued the old Roman republic in the century before Jesus was born – culminating in the elevation of Octavian as Imperator, the first Roman Emperor, Augustus.
We’ll not dally long here on e.g. Henry II’s invasion of Ireland in 1171. We can take it as read that he had very good religious and moral reasons for crashing his mace on the heads of the Irish back then?
Fast forward so to 1914 when four conflicting ‘Christian’ emperors began the final disgracing of Christendom in World War I, by claiming the Christian God to be on their side. A close look at just one of them, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, underlines the warning of Psalm 146 never to put our trust in princes – but so far, although Pope Francis has indeed told us that Christendom is ‘over’, there has been no recognition that a total clerical self-blinding to covetousness ever occurred.
Rene Girard (d. 2015) has revealed all this to us but so far the magisterium is still officially oblivious: the implications for the church are still too vast to calculate. An attempt by me to get to grips with those, in an article for the Furrow in 2003, ‘The Lost Sin’ – went nowhere, as far as I know. It is a trope of clerical conversation that the laity have lost the plot on sin generally, so my news was never the sensation I had hoped for.
https://www.seanoconaill.com/2003/09/06/the-lost-sin/
That we derive our desires from whatever our neighbours have is now as obvious, and dangerous, as climate change. That the parish priest always ‘needed’ an imposing carriage and residence, ‘like’ the gentry, is obvious too. And all of this time the Gospel accounts of the temptations in the desert have been read in Lent – and ‘retreats’ held – bemoaning our sins, sorely concentrated (at least until recent years) on commandment number 6.
We want what our neighbour has because we are fundamentally doubtful of our own value as we are – and are chronically subject to shame by comparison with others – as recorded in e.g. Genesis to start with. Where else would the dash for Botox or the iPhone nn have come from?
Even ordination to the priesthood could once be seen as a solution to this problem: couldn’t a priest even become the pope? Now the thing to be is an ‘influencer’, like the Kardashians, or a ‘disruptor’ like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk – and seminaries struggle to survive.
The complete imitation of the one who did not imitate Julius Caesar, or anyone else of his time, is a challenge still a-begging, for all of us – with a planet to save. Christendom has shown us the pitfalls, so why is ‘synodality’ in Ireland now stuck fast on pause?
Don’t we all have a helluva lot to confess to one another?