Join us for our Lenten Parish Penance Service on Thursday, March 10th from 6:30-8:00 PM.
This penance service will be open house style, meaning that you can come anytime between 6:30-8:00 PM (there will not be a formal begining or readings to start). We will have 6 priests availiable to hear confessions in the church. All Confession stations will be set up to offer a screen option or a face-to-face option.
The Sacrament of Confession
Execerpt from Fr. Nathan's Bulletin Article - 3.6.2022
One of my favorite ways to look at what the Sacrament of Confession is, is to think that Confession is when we go to a priest and tell them who we are not. In our theology, as Christians, we believe that sin makes us less of who we are. It creates a false self and warps the beauty God has placed in us into something that is less than what we are meant to be.
To give just a couple of examples of this. If a person starts to lie a lot, we refer to them as a “liar”. If a person begins to steal a lot, we refer to them as a “thief”. These identifiers that we use for people stuck in a life of sin are false parts of the person that actually change how people refer to them. The Sacrament of Confession allows us to have a place to divest our “false self” and walk away as our true self. St. Paul says this much in his letter to the Ephesians (4:22-24): “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through sin, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self,created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
We have all experienced times in our lives where we do not feel like ourselves and desperately want to come back into our right minds. We use adages like, “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed” or “I am just an ogre today” to depict the fact that there is a true self and a false self. Confession allows us to focus on who we are and who we are not, and opens up a space to allow grace an opportunity to reshape us.
I often hear people say “I don’t know what to confess”, and my challenge to such a thought process is to honestly look at the parts of your life that you don’t like about yourself. The things that cause you to be less the man or woman you desire to be. I have rarely, if ever, heard someone say, “I am perfect in every way”. Only narcissists or people living in delusion believe that they have no areas in their lives that can become better. Every single person has flashes of impatience with people, or thoughts about how someone else is behaving. We have all been neglectful of things, whether that is our prayer life, calling a friend when we are prompted to, even helping someone in need, or simply cleaning up after oneself are all things that we can be culpable for.
By recognizing and owning up to the areas in our lives that are not perfect, we give God a chance to bring us into a new way of living. Without getting rid of the old self we seriously do not have room for anything new.