Some thoughts on confession

Ritualized confession—it can be and rarely escapes being somehow a ‘compartment’ with a ‘conductor,’ sort of like an ‘elevator’ with an ‘operator’ taking you up... or maybe down. It all depends on the ‘operator.’

There’s always at least just a little bit of the priest’s ego showing, and his self-consciousness about it, that even the best confessor barely escapes. Father Jim was my best, most real confessor. I haven’t had one like him since he left for a parish in California about five years ago. With him, confession was not a sacrament—a religious exercise—but instead, it was what it is, a mystírion of the Church, a moment of kairós, ‘acceptable time,’ a place where the astrapí, the ‘lightning flash of Divinity’ earths itself in one’s stony heart, to shatter it and transform it into good soil, into humus.

The attitude about confession in Orthodoxy where I live has been: they tell you to do it, then make it too inconvenient for you to try to do it but, if you manage to go around all that and insist on obeying them they treat you like a pest, “Why do you keep coming?” in not so many words.

It hasn’t always been like this, of course, but often that’s how it can be now. Hypocrisy, flagrant and sanctimonious, or call it whatever you like. That’s how it’s been for some time in the episcopalianized Greek Church. The local OCA (American Orthodox) churches generally aren’t like this, but instead, they preserve the relationship of priest and penitent in confession as it used to be and should be... one friend unburdening his or her heart to an intimate and faithful friend. In getting prayed for and being covered by the priest’s cape you feel like two kids playing confession under a big cozy blanket (except it’s real). That’s confession ‘in church’ at its best.

For me, the best confession is the impromptu unburdening of my heart to a Christian brother during prayer or fellowship times, sometimes just me to him, or just him to me, sometimes both of us to each other. I was taught by my preceptors in the Greek Church, one of them being Father Jim (a cradle Greek Orthodox priest, not a convert), that this qualifies as confession, even though it is not ritualized. I believed him then, and I believe him now. That’s why it doesn’t bother me to receive communion without formal confession. My whole life is actually a running round of confessions, some more formal than others, and if a priest insisted on me confessing my sins to him, I’d do it at the drop of my hat, without qualms and hiding nothing. It’s just that many priests hide out like highway bandits when they see you coming and only appear when they can see something valuable in your hands.

Read more about what real confession is from an Orthodox priest here.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20