Views From the Pews - No. 3 "Confession"

Having addressed two of the more pressing issues facing Prince of Peace (Finding a Seat and Length of Mass), I’ve decided to lighten things up a little bit. So this VFTP will focus on the highly overlooked sacrament of Confession…call it the “ugly duckling of the 7 Sacraments”. All the other sacraments come in the form of beautiful ceremonies and pageantry, while confession comes down to old fashioned soul searching and humbleness.
My oldest son, Alex, made his first Communion last year, and with that he first had to confess his 8+ years of backlogged sins. Due to the regulations of HIPAA and the patient/doctor privacy act, I have no knowledge as to how well this procedure went for Alex. However, I can tell you within 5 minutes of Penance the pressure of a clean slate was too much for him and he began a new list of sins the first chance he got.
So Lent rolled around this year, and my wife mentioned to me the importance of keeping Alex on a semi-regular Confession schedule. In other words, Alex’s Sin Tank was not full, but it might be a good idea to flush it clean before Easter. It seems the older kids get, the faster they find ways to fill that tank. So on a beautiful Spring Saturday morning with lots of wonderful temptations around us, my wife and I packed the kids in the car and headed to POP for some sort of “group therapy” intervention with dozens of Priests scattered throughout the church. I myself had planned to get caught up on the Saturday AJC in the parking lot while Alex went inside to face the music…poor kid. When suddenly my wife began strongly suggesting to me the importance of setting a good example for the kids by going to Confession with them. And she said all this with a straight face. In a sudden turn of events, she hopped out of the car with Alex and headed inside with him. The initial relief that Laurie had decided to “take one for the team” (instead of me) passed quickly. I knew in my heart, I also had to confess. I headed inside, and began trying to remember the last time I had been to confession. I had narrowed it down to sometime during the “Reagan Years”.
The scene inside the church that day reminded me of the New York Stock Exchange, only much quieter. With so many priests on hand acting as sin brokers, the sins were being traded at breakneck speed. It became impossible to decipher the casual conversations from the confessions, but like Wall St., the chaotic system seemed to be working.
Confession has changed somewhat since the Reagan Years…face-to-face dialog has replaced the closet with the identity-concealing black curtain. (This was news to me, though it’s probably been around since the Clinton years). I debated going to an unfamiliar priest with a short line, but I felt I needed more time to prepare my sins so I stood in a long line for one of our local priests. Waiting in line, the old familiar wave of panic began to fill my mind. What sins should I confess? How bad do I want to make myself look? I will avoid the candid (and sordid) details of my confession other than to say it started normal…you know, “Bless me Father for I have sinned…it’s been 4 Presidents since my last confession and some of those were 2-terms”. But by the end, it felt different than I had ever remembered. The face-to-face format helped make the process feel more like a conversation than a confession. I just had to remember to occasionally slip in a few of my shortcomings in the midst of our friendly chatting. The random insertion of sins made for unusual conversation twists and turns, but in the end it felt right.
All this got me thinking about my real shortcoming, my failure to go to confession more than once every 20 years. To take the blame off myself, I came up with a couple ideas the Catholic Church should consider in trying to appeal to the modern sinner. One is e-Confession. Drop your priest an e-mail listing all your sins and then sit back and wait for the response, “You’ve Got Penance!” This would be one surefire way to get teenagers excited about sinning again.
The more realistic idea is Drive-thru Confession. Americans hate getting out of their cars if they don’t have to. Set up a drive-thru lane that wraps around the church. The driver would speak into a speaker board listing the combo-penance value packs (ex: Combo 1 – 5 Our Father’s / 3 Hail Mary’s and a bottle of Holy Water). The priest on the other end would listen in, offer words of encouragement (that hopefully can be heard through those annoying drive-thru speakers), and then pick the appropriate combo-penance value pack. He would also ask if they would like to “super-size” their penance, or if they would like a hot apple pie at the window. This format would restore the “secret identity” confessionals many old-school Catholics seem to miss, at least until Father Fred begins recognizing and linking automobile models with families.
Until Vatican III convenes to discuss these possibilities, however, I have made it my personal goal to avoid sinning altogether. I also have a slightly more realistic goal of practicing the sacrament of confession more frequently than White House tenant changes. It really is a beautiful sacrament, and unlike the others, it’s not a one-time deal. Confession is available to us at all times.
But deep down I’m hoping it’s not too late for the Building Committee to configure our new church with a drive-thru lane.