God’s Soft Yet Insistent Voice Calls Us

By FATHER THEODORE BOOK, Special To The Bulletin

Published: November 6, 2003

It takes humility to utter the words “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.” It takes humility and it builds humility.

It takes great humility to confess one’s sins, but by the simple act of expressing them with the words of a contrite heart, they lose their power over us.

The evil one, who is always trying to seduce us into sin, clothes sin contemplated with a false sweetness and strives even harder to keep us from confessing the sin with which he has already entrapped us. He tells us by turns that our sin is too great to be forgiven, too embarrassing to reveal, or too ordinary to be important. He is wily in his seductions, eager to steal heaven from us by luring us into either presumption or despair, but if we are aware of his traps, they can help us to find the balanced path.

For it is when the evil one fights most strongly to keep us away from the sacrament, when we find ourselves least willing to go, that we should know that we are most in need of confession. Our resistance to the sacrament should become our prompting to hurry toward it—to hasten back to God.

As we confess each sin to the priest, one of the shackles that keep us from heaven is broken. Confession is a time for conversion; its efficacy is void without true repentance on our part, true desire to return to God.

All God asks from us in our lives is faithfulness to Him, the faithfulness that allows us to live the life of grace, to become one with Him, to enter heaven. In confession we profess anew our dedication to Him.

We must be careful, though, that our self-dedication to God in the sacrament is not false, that our words of contrition come from the heart and are not a mockery of God, hiding a heart that refuses to give itself to Him. If we try to hide some of our sins—how could we hide our sins from God?—then the sacrament will be of no use to us. Indeed, a false confession is a sacrilege, a blasphemy against God’s mercy. If we allow our pride to convince us that sins to which we have become attached are not sins at all, that our theft or dishonesty or contraception is somehow justified, our false confession only adds sin to sin and we will leave the confessional dry and without benefit.

But what joy is ours, by contrast, when we truly confess our sins, and with honest contrition receive God’s absolution at the hands of the priest! Especially if we have been long away from the sacrament, our joy will be like that of one raised from the dead. Indeed, our souls, which had been dead in sin, will truly be raised to new spiritual life. There is no joy like that which God offers to the sinner, freely pardoning all his guilt and giving him anew the prize of everlasting life.

Even as the very act of confessing sin lays the ax to the root of the tree of pride, it opens space for God’s forgiveness, and God’s saving radiance begins to shine within the soul. Our pride, carefully tended by the devil, tells us that we have no need of forgiveness, certainly not through the hands of a perhaps sinful priest, but God’s soft yet insistent voice calls us, and if we will stop and hear him, all goodness is ours.