I know that I promised I wouldn’t write any more about the Sacrament of Reconciliation on this blog for quite a while, but almost a year has passed, and I think I could get off with one small little post.
When I considered becoming Catholic, I felt about the same level of enthusiasm for going to Confession that a dog feels about having a bath. My dog doesn’t think that baths are necessary, and I thought that confession was one of these unnecessary things which Catholics had added to Christianity.
Suffice to say that by the time, I actually went to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, I had changed my views on this considerably. Father K told me that I should go to Confession once a year ‘or when I felt the need to go’. After the trauma of making my first confession, I appreciated that it was useful and necessary, but I couldn’t imagine ever actually feeling the need to go.
I have been proved wrong on that last count. Sometimes I have felt so far away from God, that I have begun to wonder if confession would help. The first time I felt like this, I asked a Catholic friend how you know if you need to go to confession and realised that if I was asking the question then I probably already knew the answer. I told our parish priest how I was feeling. Without putting any pressure on me, he told me that he would hear my confession the next day if I still felt the same way. My answer came in the peace and relief I felt when I knew that I could go and confess the things which were bothering me.
I haven’t felt the incredible feelings of peace which other people talk about experiencing after the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I think that I am resistant to being carried away by feelings. However, I have felt as if I have been unblocked spiritually and able to move on.
There is still a Protestant part of me which is extremely suspicious of things like confession. Recently I was puzzling over the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and trying to justify it to myself. An image drifted into my mind of a helium balloon, bobbing around in the air high above the ground. I was the balloon. The ground was a long way below, but I was tethered to it by a long string. Although I moved around in the air currents, I was reassured that I wasn’t going to be blown high into the atmosphere where I might burst, or be carried away to a far off place.
The long string was my faith and the ground was the ground of my soul, the deepest part of me where God dwells.
Sharp gusts of wind put a strain on the string and it snapped. I began to float away. The strains of life and the bad choices I had made had been too much for my faith and I had lost contact with the ground. I was high up in the sky, and I wasn’t able to retie the other end of the string on my own.
I realised that the Sacrament of Reconciliation was the help that I needed to retie that string and renew my relationship with God.
As I meditated on this, I looked down and saw that some people had grabbed the end of the string, and were smiling and waving up at me. I was too far away to see their faces, but I think that they were the saints, letting me know that I wasn’t alone and that they would help me not to drift away until I had a chance to restore the link of faith.
My very last thought on this was that every time the string breaks and is retied, it gets shorter. The balloon moves a little closer to the ground, and I move a little closer to God.
scotinprogress 