My experience as a confessor has had nothing to do with hearing juicy secrets. Most penitents I have had repeat formulas that they learned in second grade, and refer to their sins in formal categories. I have heard things like, 'I was unfaithful twenty-three times in deed, and about fifty times in thought'….

Eventually, those in charge changed the rite of confession. They added Scripture readings, encouraged a conversational style, introduced 'reconciliation rooms' that resembled a cheap psychologist's office. Priests studied 'counseling' and learned to modulate their voices supportively…

[But in my years as a priest, through all the changes], I have come to know this: Confession is not therapy, nor is it moral accounting. At its best, it is the affirmation that the ultimate truth of our interior life is our absolute poverty, our radical dependence, our unquenchable thirst, our desperate need to be loved…

Confessing even the most dramatic struggles, I have found, people reach for the simplest language, that of a child before a world too confusing to understand. …The language of the inner life is not the language of experts or of eloquent dramatists or of a mature and healthy self-acceptance. The language of the inner life is a serene silence, a deep hurt, a boundless desire, and, occasionally, a little laughter.

Looking for Confession
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 15, 2002

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned".

These are the words with which the Catholic rite of confession always began, at least when I was a child learning the old formulas. Even though I left Catholicism as a teenager, that old opening language stays with me and is still deeply evocative of the rituals and mystery of my childhood. It is evocative, in fact, all the way down to the smells of lingering incense from the Mass and the little knot of anxiety in my stomach as it became my turn to enter the closet-sized confessional. The door of the confessional would close behind me as the priest slid aside the cover on his side of the screen that separated us. Into the thin cloth that kept me anonymous I spoke those words in a scared little whisper: 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.'

I can't remember how old I was the last time I participated in the formal sacrament of confession -- probably twelve or thirteen. When I think back on it now and distance myself enough from my childhood self to think about the priest on the other side of the screen, I feel great sympathy. I wonder how many times a week he had to listen to children dutifully following the instructions and, like me, reciting lists to him: 'I yelled at my sister six times this week; I disobeyed my parents eight times; I said swear words twice'. I never heard him heave a sigh, but it must have been because of extraordinary personal discipline.

On Thursday of this past week I attended an interfaith clergy meeting, and during the brief social time waiting for the meeting to start I found myself in conversation with a Catholic priest. Since I had been mulling over my own thoughts about confession, I took the opportunity to ask him how things had changed in the thirty-five years since I'd entered a confessional.

He confirmed what Lorenzo Albacete writes in our reading this morning -- the change in tone and form toward therapy and away from the anonymity and mystery I remember. He told me that in what's now called the Reconciliation Room people have the option of sitting face-to-face with the priest or using the screen for anonymity, and he said the vast majority choose to visit face to face. But, he added, fewer and fewer people come to confess at all anymore, in the old sense, as a sacrament. He speculates that this is partly because of the rise in therapy as an option, and partly because even Catholics feel less need of a priest as intermediary than they once did -- they go to God in their own prayer life, and confess directly to him.

But somewhat to my surprise, my priest friend added that he thought the drop-off in confessions was also due to the priests. "I think as soon as Vatican II gave us permission, we de-emphasized it as a sacrament", he said. "We were all so tired of the pietism, the listing of so-called sins like swearing, or having an impure thought. To listen to such things, in a world so profoundly broken…" His voice trailed off and he sighed a little.

We were together in this meeting because of the labor struggles in which Yale University and the Yale Hospital are embroiled. His congregation is Spanish-speaking, filled with people who hold on financially by the barest skin of their teeth or who are already floundering out over the edge of real poverty. They work very hard. They can't make ends meet. They are getting angry. They probably do not need to confess how many times each week they swear.

When I left my Catholic childhood I meandered my way through some secular young adult years in which neither confession nor any other spiritual ritual crossed my mind. I then inched my way into Unitarian Universalism, a religious community in which none of what we practice together is called a sacrament, and very little is ritualized. In our modern communities of faith, even the language associated with an old-fashioned confession is rarely spoken: sin, repentance, penance. But I do find myself wondering: is confession entirely irrelevant now? Is it so unnecessary to us -- we modern folk, whether Catholics or Unitarian Universalists or secular fellow travelers?

I wonder if it might be instead that we simply have to grow up a little in our understanding -- that we have to look with a more mature eye at where our true failings lie, and consider with wiser hearts the ways in which we address those failings. If confession is not therapy, and if it is not a rote recitation of lists against which we tally ourselves in some perverse accounting exercise, then what might it be?

In an essay some years ago, another ex-Catholic writes, "When I was less than a teenager confession was coming out of church on a late Saturday afternoon having made a perfect Act of Contrition and having done my penance without a grudge and knowing with complete joy that should I be struck and killed by an automobile before I reached home I would go directly to Heaven, because God would find my soul beautiful. Now, at fifty, I think confession is telling who you are to someone who will not judge you a failure because you fail. To confess, to periodically relinquish privacy, to renounce solitude as an end in itself. It seems a rehearsal for friendship; a discipline for community."

The Jewish tradition has always known confession not only as a discipline for community, but a discipline of community. Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, the highest holy day on the Jewish calendar, compelling enough that even many of those who consider themselves secular Jews will find their way into a temple or synagogue for at least part of the day. The services are long, and accompanied by fasting, and confession will be central to the prayers that are said: We have sinned, we have failed, we have missed the mark. And maybe the reason this Holy Day retains its power, maybe the reason it can still speak to Jews across all the clutter and confusion of their busy secular lives and can speak even to a Catholic, a Unitarian or an atheist, is because of this recognition that confession is a discipline of community.

It's a discipline of community on the smallest communal level, the woven ties that bind one person to another, which can so easily fray and tear. In the Jewish tradition, those ties are mended by the simple courage and humility required of us in saying, directly to one we have wronged, 'I was in error. Forgive me.'

Throughout the long history of the solemn rituals around Yom Kippur, Jews were never given an easier out than this one: confessing in one's heart to God, or in anonymity to one's rabbi, didn't do the trick. Repentance meant speaking the truth about what had been done, speaking it if possible directly to the one who had been wronged, and then making amends if this were in one's power.

But as a discipline of community, this practice of the High Holy Days is rooted in a collective covenant, a collective soul-searching that goes beyond solitary failings and is, I think, the real reason why Yom Kippur retains such power. Our societies have never merely been random collections of individuals, with our kindness and cruelty binding or severing us like so many unthinking molecules. Our societies, both religious and secular, have identities of their own --creeds to follow, holy books to define our highest strivings, histories to live up to, flags to wave as symbols of who we think we are together. And so it is who we are together, and how we fail or succeed at realizing our collective image of ourselves, that is up for review in the practice of confession as it is known through Yom Kippur.

These last two years have been a time of wrenching pain for Jewish communities around the world, watching the suffering in Israel and Palestine and often being directly scalded by it. The pain is brought into high relief on the holy days, and it isn't an easy time to be a rabbi. I have found the internet full of anguished writings leading up to these holy days, as rabbis in particular struggle with what it means to lead, ethically and morally. They all serve communities that are torn between grief and fear, bewilderment and anger, a righteous hunger for revenge and the knowledge that there is guilt enough to go around.

Rabbi Arthur Green writes, "How do we live in a holy land in our time? How do we show the world what it is to live in a place that is holy? The answer is that we do so by sharing it with others….We have been placed among genuinely difficult neighbors, and we have not been such easy neighbors ourselves….But we who continue to think of [Israel] in terms of covenant or sacred trust believe that the purpose of [its] survival has to be more than just survival itself. We remain a kingdom of priests, devoted to a message about a single God and the creation of all humans in God's image. The ultimate victory of Israel lies in our ability to keep faith with our message and act upon it here in the real, tough world of interpersonal and political life."

And it seems to me that we neither have to be Jewish nor intimately linked to the struggles of Israel to find some meaning for ourselves in his words. 'How do we live in a holy land in our time' -- we who believe the whole earth is holy land?

I find myself wishing, as never before, that the practices and underlying ethos of Yom Kippur permeated our society. What an extraordinary gift it would be for us as a nation if it were our practice to stop everything, even if only once a year, and do a collective searching of our souls. What a powerful, even earth-shaking thing it would be if no one at all went about the normal routines tomorrow, but gathered in communities of reflection and silence, meditation and prayer, using all of the rituals we could devise to hold up a kind of mirror for ourselves. Is this how we want to be living on our earth? Is this how we want to live in order to be true to one another, true to our history and our values?

Bless me, for I have sinned.

Bless me, for I have failed myself on some of the paths I hold most dear. Bless me, for my heart is heavy with loss, some of which I have brought about. Bless me, for all the ways in which I see my own brokenness mirrored in my broken world. Bless me for my failures of courage, for my selfishness, for my willful pettiness, for laziness of the will in the face of wrongs I might have righted.

But better still would be the broader prayer we might whisper, not in our solitude, not in those secret closets of the heart where we hide our shame, but with one another, touching hands perhaps, hearing our hoarse voices strengthen one another.

Bless us, for we have sinned.

Bless us, for we still poison the air, eat more than our share, stifle our souls with too many things and turn our eyes from those who are starving. Bless us, for in our grief we have allowed grief to multiply, in our fear we are breeding fear, in our anger we have added to the world's rage. Bless us, for we are stumbling. Bless us. Help us learn better how to bless this world we love.

Confession has never been for confession's sake, not in any tradition. It is for the power it releases in us, the cleansing rush of a deep new breath as we try again to match our ideals by how we live out our days. There isn't any other way to be human together in this world of ours except by continually minding the threads that bind us to one another. And we mind them by seeing where and how they fray, where and how the mending is in our hands. This is how we live in a holy land, in the only holy land there has ever been -- the thin skin of this little planet where we must learn to walk with gentler step.

Bless us, for we are human.
Bless us, for we are trying.
AMEN.