Confessions of a New Confessor

As a newly ordained priest, I get asked all kinds of questions to which the speaker already knows the answer, things like “What was it like being ordained?” (Indescribable), “How do you like your new parish?” (It’s great), or “How awesome is it to say Mass?” (Like, ridiculously awesome). But no one so far has guessed my answer to the question, “What’s your favorite part of being a priest?” To me, it’s obvious: confession.

Partly, it’s the whole incongruity of the situation. After all, I’m just some guy who has spent more years studying Japanese than studying theology, and suddenly I’ve become an instrument of God’s mercy. There’s no easy way of narrating how the different events in my life have led me to this place: they just have. I’m not uniquely holy or even particularly wise, but thanks to a mysterious thing that happened on May 22, 2015, when someone comes and tells me the personal history of pettiness and pain that has separated him from God, I can say “I absolve you from your sins,” and it really happens.

It’s also got something to do with my own experience of Catholicism. I was not raised Catholic, and in my Presbyterian childhood the notion of confessing my sins to a priest would have seemed outlandish and unnecessary if it had ever occurred to me, which, as far as I remember, it didn’t. Even after I converted (in junior year of high school, for the curious), it took me a while to cotton on to the fact that Catholics were serious about the whole confession thing, and that the requirement even applied to me. Only about six months after I was confirmed did I finally go to confession for the first time, making what had to be one of the lamest and least serious here’s-all-the-sins-of-my-life confessions in human history.

I’d love to say things got easier from there, but that would be a lie. Only years later in graduate school did I finally start going to confession with any regularity, largely as a result of finding myself in a leadership position I was rankly unqualified for; going to confession was the only thing that seemed to lighten the load a little, and even helped me avoid repeating some of the mistakes I didn’t realize I was making until too late. But even after I joined the Dominican Order, I can’t say I relished the idea of going to confession. Although I told others about the importance of it, I would find myself putting it off, one lazy week at a time (don’t tell my erstwhile formators!).

My ordination changed all that. I always assumed that I would find hearing confessions a terrifying and daunting burden; I had heard stories of first-time priests praying that no one show up for their confession hours, and I imagined I’d be in the same boat.

Happily—amazingly—that’s not how it turned out. Confession, I’ve discovered, is as easy as falling off a bike: all you have to do is let go for a moment and it’s all over, leaving you a little dazed but ready to start again.

And confession really is about letting go. I think a lot of us intuitively conceive of Christianity as a sort of high-stakes exercise program, where the cost of bad technique is not a slipped disc but eternal hellfire. I bet most Americans have found themselves thinking this way at some time or another, whether they admit it or not. We think we have to impress God with our spiritual and moral worthiness, so we throw ourselves into an endless series of prayer regimens, social justice projects, yoga exercises, meditation techniques, and on an on.

In this mental framework, the priest-confessor becomes a particularly grueling personal trainer, whose job is to scream at you for almost imaginary infractions and to guilt you into working harder at sculpting your spiritual physique into saintly perfection. And, like any fitness trainer, he’s unnecessary: he can’t help the really hopeless cases anyway, and the robust and savvy among us should be able to fix their own problems without him.

My experiences as a confessor have helped me to understand how completely wrongheaded this vision of Christian life is. Confession is the place where the Christian relinquishes control of his life. An honest confession begins with the acknowledgement that all of my efforts at perfection have amounted to nothing more than the same little pile of unromantic sins that everyone else confesses. That means, for those of us inclined to being morose, letting go of the conviction that there’s something about me and my legacy of failures that God can’t or won’t forgive. And for those of us inclined to overweening optimism, it means letting go of the conviction that I’m so close to perfection already that I don’t need God’s help getting over my last few peccadillos.

That brings us right back to the glorious incongruity of me hearing confessions. There’s the other person, admitting with shock, tears, confusion, or calm that he doesn’t have control over his own life. And then there’s me, who doesn’t know the other person from Adam and who doesn’t have a clue how to solve the other’s problems. He says some words and I say some words, I make the sign of the cross, and right at that moment he is re-formed by the love of the Trinity. That’s not him proving himself worthy of God, and it’s not me showing off my holy brilliance. It’s Jesus Christ, working prodigies of grace.

In a word, what I’ve discovered as a confessor is mercy. I’ve realized that all the reasons I used to fear and delay confession stemmed from my basic distrust of mercy, either the confessor’s or God’s: I thought that if I honestly admitted how I failed to make myself holy, the confessor would make fun of me, or be disgusted or disappointed or annoyed at me for wasting his time, and that it wasn’t worth making time to examine my conscience and confess because God wasn’t going to do much for me whether I went to confession or not.

In reality, a confessor isn’t going to be shocked or put out at what he hears—not here, in the confessional, where that sin is being offered at the foot of the Cross for the mercy of God. The sinner who finds himself pouring out his heart in confession is already being drawn by mercy to be set free from sin and transformed by grace, however often he has confessed those sins before, and however big or small they may seem. God, as it turns out, only seems unmerciful when I am refusing his mercy.

So, yes, my favorite part of being a priest is also one of the most hidden, most misunderstood, and most neglected parts of the Christian life. I know that my ability to appreciate the beauty of this great sacrament will ebb and flow over time, but happily even that basic psychological fact emphasizes the reality at hand: it is not I and my achievements that are at issue here, but God and his mercy. And his mercy endures forever.

Fr. Gabriel Torretta, O.P., is parochial vicar of St. Gertrude Parish in Cincinnati. This spring he was ordained to the priesthood and graduated from the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.  Before entering the Dominican Order, he studied pre-modern Japanese literature at Columbia University.