Struggling to Confess

Okay, so I’m slowly, painstakingly working on the NFP book — there’s a bunch of personal stuff going on, and also I sprained my ankle and now everything is taking about twice as much energy as usually. So pray for me if you can. In the meantime, I wrote a piece for Aleteia about an experience that I had a number of years ago when I was really having trouble going back to Confession after my miscarriage.

It’s something that comes up a lot when I’m talking to people who are recovering from various types of spiritual hurt within the Church. At some point the idea of going into a small dark box where a stranger gets to sit in judgment over your actions is really daunting. And this is worse when the stranger represents an organization that has hurt you. It feels like you’re expected to go and apologize for any of the ways in which we might have reacted badly to being hurt. Whereas the Church, more often than not, offers no apologies or only offers them in a very hands-off, ass-covering kind of way. For people who are trying to recover, this can be triggering at best, retraumatizing at worst.

And yet, Reconciliation should be an arena where, you know, reconciliation takes place. It should be a place of healing, and it’s possible for it to be that. Anyway, this is my story. It’s a little on the cheesy-miraculous side but it is in fact what happened. And sometimes even jaded postmodernists need to acknowledge a little of the miraculous in life.

Read the piece at aleteia.org here.

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