Confession is Good for the Soul

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

September 23, 2007

Reading:

Barbara Kingsolver, from Small Wonder

My great-aunt Zelda went to Japan and took an abacus, a bathysphere, a conundrum. That was a game we used to play. All you had to do was remember everything.

Then I grew up and went to Japan myself. It was 1992. I was warned to expect a modern place. People said, "Take appliances, battery packs, cellular technology," but I arrived in Kyoto an utter foreigner, unprepared. Yes, there are electric street cars; Also golden pagodas and more invisible guidelines for politeness than I could fathom. When I stepped on a street car, a full head taller than everyone, I became an awkward giant. I took up too much space. I bumped into people. I crossed my arms when I listened, which it turns out is brazen. I didn't know how to eat noodle soup with chopsticks and I did it wrong. I never expected in the sweltering heat that a woman should wear stockings, but every woman in Kyoto wore nylon stockings. Coeds in shorts on the tennis court wore stockings. I wore skirts and sandals; people averted their eyes.

When I went to Japan I took my attitude, my bare naked legs, my callous foreign ways. I was mortified. The Japanese language accommodates no insults, only infinite degrees of apology. I memorized the direst one. "Sumimasen." It means, "I wish I were dead!" I needed this word. When I touched a palace wall, curious to know its substance, I set off screeching alarms. "Sumimasen! I wish I were dead!" In the public bath I couldn't get the hang of showering with a hand-held nozzle while sitting fourteen inches from a stranger. I sprayed my elderly neighbor with cold water. In the face. "Sumimasen!" She just stared, dismayed by the foreign menace.

I visited a Japanese friend, and in her small, perfect house I spewed my misery. "Everything I do is wrong!" I wailed like a child. "I'm a blight on your country."

"Oh no," she said calmly. "To forgive, for us, is the highest satisfaction. to forgive a foreigner, ah! Even better. You have probably made many people happy."

When I went to Japan, I took my abject good will, my baleful excuses, my cringing remorse. I couldn't remember everything so I gave myself away, evidently a kind of public service. I prepared to leave feeling empty-handed.

On the runway in Osaka Airport we sat in a typhoon, waiting to leave for Los Angeles. Suddenly, our flight was canceled. Air-traffic control had been struck by lightning. No flight possible until the following day. "We are sorry," the pilot said. "You will be taken to a hotel, fed, brought back tomorrow." Disembarking, we found an airline official posted in the exit port for the sole purpose of saying to each and every passenger, "Terrible, Terrible. Sumimasen." Other travelers nodded with indifference, but not me. I took the startled gentleman by the hands and practically kissed him. "You have no idea," I said, "how thoroughly I forgive you."

Sermon:

As a young boy brought up in the Catholic church, the confessional always scared me. St. Mary's church was an old, gothic cathedral, with cold grey pillars and dark wooden pews. When you entered through the heavy wood doors, it seemed as if the only source of light were the votive candles lit by the faithful. Statues of Mary and Jesus and the other saints peered down at you from on high, and to my young eyes this building might as well have been the massive structure of Notre Dame or Chartres. Once a month our CCD class would be brought to the church by the nuns and corralled into the pews at the back of the church. There we sat, rigidly awaiting our turn to enter the confessional booth, straining mightily not to fidget, going over our list of the month's misdeeds in our minds.

When my turn came to step through the curtain, I'd take a deep breath because there was absolutely no oxygen inside the booth, and then I'd plunge inside. Kneeling down, I'd hear the door slide open, signaling it was time to begin. "BlessmefatherforIhavesinnedithasbeenfourweekssincemylastconfession." I would blurt this out, just like that, as if that one month's truancy was a sin in and of itself. And from there I'd launch into the laundry list of my weekly transgressions. My litany was always the same from month to month, as I'm sure it was for all the other boys and girls filing through the booth. I disobeyed my parents. I teased my sisters. I used bad language with my friends. I talked back to a teacher. You would, of course, be too scared of what might happen to actually tell the priest anything really bad that you'd done. Then I'd recite the Act of Contrition, the words by which I stated I was sorry for my sins, for they offended God, and begged His forgiveness, and promised to be better in the future.

At this point, I'd literally be holding my breath, waiting for the priest to hand down his judgment on my heinous acts, the punishments to fit the crimes. "Say three Our Father's and four Hail Mary's," he would instruct. You'd want to get more Hail Mary's than Our Father's, because you could recite the Hail Mary's a lot faster. If the priest thought you'd been particularly bad, or maybe if he was just feeling grumpy that day, he'd really load you up with Our Father's. And then he'd say the magic words: "I absolve you of your sins. Go and sin no more." Then the sliding door would slam shut, my signal to bolt from the booth, where I would emerge taking great gulps of fresh air. I think it's safe to say that the significance of the Sacrament of Penance evaded this young sinner's soul.

The Catholic Sacrament of Penance was formally instituted by the Council of Trent in 1551, and is based on the words of Jesus found in the Book of John. In chapter 20, Jesus is with his disciples after his resurrection, and it is here that he endows the men with priestly powers. According to John, "Jesus said to them, 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.' When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." (John 20:21-23) Priests of the Catholic church, as direct descendants of the apostles, have inherited this same power to absolve one of sins and to reconcile the sinner to God, provided he or she is appropriately contrite and desires reconciliation.

Confession, contrition and reconciliation, or forgiveness, are religious practices that cross all theological boundaries. Yesterday at sunset the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonements, came to a close. Yom Kippur, perhaps the most important day on the Jewish calendar, is a day to "afflict the soul," to confess and atone for the sins of the past year. On this day, God seals the Book of Life for the year to come, and as one author writes, it "is, essentially, your last appeal, your last chance to change the judgment, to demonstrate your repentance and make amends."^[1] The Day of Atonement is the most personal, solemn and moving of the Days of Awe, that period stretching from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. Following days of personal introspection, on Yom Kippur, Jews engage in a communal confession of sins: One of the Yom Kippur prayers reads, in part: "We are guilt laden, we have been faithless, we have robbed…we have counseled evil, scoffed, revolted, blasphemed…" and it is followed by the act of contrition: "Nothing is concealed from You or hidden from Your eyes. May it therefore be your will to forgive us our sins, to pardon us for our iniquities, to grant remission for our transgressions…" In his essay on Judaism, Jacob Neusner writes: "The Days of Awe speak to the heart of the individual, telling a story of judgment and atonement. The individual Jew stands before God, possessing no merits yet hopeful of God's love and compassion…The power of the Days of Awe derives from the sentiments and emotions aroused by the theme of those days. And that theme runs: What is happening to me? Where am I going?"^[2]

Every religious tradition recognizes the importance of assessing one's life, of making mid-course corrections, and of seeking and granting forgiveness. Even the various 12-step addiction treatment groups require members to make a list of all those they have harmed, to make amends to them when doing so won't cause harm to them, and to continue to take a personal inventory and admit when they are wrong. Confession. Contrition. Reconciliation.

Whether we yearn for reconciliation with God or forgiveness from someone we've injured, or if we seek to find it in our hearts to forgive someone who has wronged us, the process of moving from where we are to where we want to be begins internally. To give or to receive forgiveness, to reconcile with someone who is estranged from us, cannot happen without us first discovering within us the spark of desire for it. We must first yearn for an end to the hostilities, and discern within us a longing to transform our current way of being. It requires a letting go of old ways, of long-held grudges, of disappointments and hurts that may have become familiar friends. That wise old sage Anonymous once said that "forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past for the hope of a better future."

Compare, if you will, the process the Allied Forces used after World War II to prosecute the perpetrators of the Holocaust, with the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. In the former instance, the desire was for justice, which meant prosecution, punishment, and retribution. If there is an unforgivable act, it surely is participating in genocide, right? But look at what happened in South Africa. When Bishop Desmond Tutu and others, struggling to unite a country torn apart by decades of racial strife, sought not just an accounting for crimes committed, but a lasting reconciliation between the races. As chairman of the Commission, it was Tutu's job to sit and listen as more than 21,000 witnesses described the systematic rape, torture, murder and other human rights abuses suffered by blacks under decades of apartheid rule. His mandate, however, and the mandate of his Commission, was to forgive the perpetrators and to foster healing of the racial divide. Years later, Tutu explained: "Forgiveness is not cheap. And reconciliation is not easy. But with forgiveness, we open the door for someone. Someone who might have been shackled to the past, to break loose the shackles, to walk back through the door and into a new future."^[3]

The first step toward reconciliation, then, is to recognize our desire for things to be other than they are. The second step is the process of truth-telling. I'm not talking about the kind of truth-telling that points fingers and assigns blame, but the truth-telling that peels away the layers of the onion, each step revealing new data, new perspectives, new realities. This is the confessional part of the process. Here, we must take a fearless moral inventory of ourselves, our actions, and the actions of others. We must be able to admit our own failures and to acknowledge, without judgment, the places where others have let us down. A good example of how not to engage in this type of truth-telling is the way our politicians are debating the course of the war in Iraq. How different might the debate become, if both the Republicans and the Democrats were to seek reconciliation rather than persisting in playing the "blame game?" Imagine what might happen if the White House admitted that it led us into this war on faulty and perhaps contrived intelligence? And, at the same time, Congress owned up to the fact that it failed to live up to its responsibility to verify the Administration's assertions and that it gave President Bush the green light? Instead, we are mired in a conflict with no end in sight, as parties point fingers at each other up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.

What might your own fearless inventory look like? How might you have fallen short during the past year in your relationships with your partner, your children, the people you work with? What have you done or said that you're not particularly proud of? When did you find yourself more obsessed with winning than with understanding? What slights, both great and small, have you dealt out in the past year? Where, in short, did your actions not measure up to your intentions? Where did you miss the mark? Answering these questions, truthfully, is deep spiritual work. It is the work of Yom Kippur and the Catholic confessional.

As Unitarian Universalists, we tend to have a pretty high opinion of ourselves. After all, we are the inheritors of the legacy of Thomas Starr King, who famously said that "Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, and that Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned." We UU's like to believe that we are on a path that takes the high moral ground at each turn. After all, we sign petitions to limit the sale of handguns, make spaghetti for the homeless shelter, and, by God, we pay our annual dues to National Public Radio! The reality, of course, is that we're all good people, but we're still just people - flawed and imperfect like everyone else. And because our faith does not observe a set time of year like the Days of Awe or an established ritual such as the Sacrament of Penance for such things, we are granted the freedom - and the responsibility -- to create our own Yom Kippur, our own confessionals. Jews set aside ten days a year for this, and Catholics practice it regularly before receiving communion. I wonder where we might fit it in? In a few minutes I will lead us in a moment of communal confession that may give you a glimpse into how you might develop your own personal practice of confession.

Of course, our task is not complete once we've taken our moral and ethical temperature, is it? To complete the process of confession, contrition and reconciliation, we must make amends. For what good does it do to admit to ourselves that we've harmed another if we're not truly sorry and we don't communicate that to those whom we've hurt? I'm not sure which is harder, to grant forgiveness or to ask for it. Both, though, require a discovery of deeper truths that lie beneath old behaviors. My colleague Rev. Suzelle Lynch writes that "it takes courage to take responsibility for errors we have made, even small ones that may not matter to anyone but ourselves. But responsibility is what this process is all about - response-ability. We practice moving from and acting from our deeper understanding of what is right, not from the excuses that lie on our surface."

In his book Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, Rabbi Irwin Kula describes three types of forgiveness. The first type of forgiveness is called mechila. Rabbi Kula writes that mechila is "a relinquishing of a claim or debt: you don't owe me anything for the wrong you have done. It's not the forgiveness most of us yearn for, but the sages taught that it was enough."^[4] If your household is anything like mine, this type of forgiveness happens every day. When our spouse forgives us for finishing the milk she was going to put in her coffee. When our child forgives us for missing her soccer game because our meeting ran late. When we forgive our partner for signing us up for ballroom dance lessons without asking us first. It's not that what happened is okay, that our thoughtlessness didn't create a hurt. And it doesn't mean that we don't need to seek mechila, because it's important to let the injured party know that we know that we messed up, and that we're sorry. But mechila is forgiveness easily given and received.

The second form of forgiveness is called selicha" This, Rabbi Kula writes, "is a forgiveness born of a heartfelt empathy for the transgressor, and an ability to see the widest possible context, even the positive outcome of the conflict."^[5] Selicha requires a generous and open heart, as well as a presence of mind to place the conflict within the grand scheme of our human endeavors. It is the forgiveness we seek when we have deeply, even mortally, harmed another and that we may choose to give when we have suffered grievous harm. This, I think, is the type of forgiveness that was exercised by black South Africans through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Selicha is the reaching out we saw last year after the Nickel Mines School tragedy, when members of the Amish community showed compassion toward the wife of the man who attacked their children. It is the plea for mercy from a murder victim's spouse in the sentencing of the criminal. Selicha is forgiveness borne out of love and an understanding of the universal human condition, and it is the forgiveness that we can choose to grant or to withhold from those who have harmed us most deeply. It is forgiveness in the face of the unforgiveable.

The third and final mode of forgiveness is called kappara. This is the reconciliation that can be neither earned nor granted by us alone. Christians call this kind of forgiveness "grace." When we receive kappara, we experience a deep connection between ourselves and others, between us and the rest of the world. Kappara, when it happens, enlightens us. It both makes the load we are carrying feel lighter, and it shines a light on the reality of our own existence. Rabbi Kula writes that "it's an inner experience of return, of feeling whole again. We are able to integrate our transgression into a more expanded self. And we literally have a sense of expansion, of tremendous relief and elevation."^[6] Now, just because kappara, grace, is unearned and, perhaps, undeserved, does not mean that we do not need to move through the process of confession, contrition and reconciliation. In fact, it makes that process all the more immediate and meaningful when we neither expect nor anticipate forgiveness. And kappara is not temporally linked to the work of forgiveness either. It may be months, years, even a lifetime before it arrives. Kappara is something we yearn for, and toward which we must strive, but which no amount of work alone can achieve.

It is on occasions such as Yom Kippur, when we stand witness to ancient traditions that move and inspire us, that Unitarian Universalism can seem such a difficult faith to practice. Because it calls each of us to find the practice that works best for us. Even if our most heartfelt yearning is to confess our transgressions and to begin the process of healing and reconciliation, what do we do? How do we begin? The good news is that there is help, and it's right there in your hands. I mentioned earlier that I was going to offer up a practice that might inspire you to walk the path of confession, contrition and reconciliation. Let us now enter into a time of communal confession, understanding that it is but a first step on that path. Please open your hymnals to reading number 637, and join me in "A Litany of Atonement."

…We forgive ourselves. We forgive each other. We begin again in love. May it be so.

Closing Words

We have been privileged to help to heal a wounded people, though we ourselves have been, in Henri Nouwen's profound and felicitous phrase, 'wounded healers'. When we look around us at some of the conflict areas of the world, it becomes increasingly clear that there is not much of a future for them without forgiveness, without reconciliation. God has blessed us richly so that we might be a blessing to others. Quite improbably, we as South Africans have become a beacon of hope to others locked in deadly conflict that peace, that a just resolution, is possible. If it could happen in South Africa, then it can certainly happen anywhere else. Such is the exquisite divine sense of humour.

--Bishop Desmond Tutu

Footnotes:

^[1] Jewish Virtual Library
^[2] Jacob Neusner in Our Religions, p. 345.
^[3] Victor Chan, The Wisdom of Forgiveness, p. 67.
^[4] Irwin Kula, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, p. 169.
^[5] Kula, p. 167.
^[6] Kula, p. 176

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