Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Community and Confession
Josh Clayborn recently reprinted one of the more insightful pieces I have read:
In my work with young people, they seem very isolated. The phenomena seen in this piece seems very real to me. Which brings me to a second point. We tend to think of confession now as a therapeutic function, not a spiritual one. We don't confess at church, if we confess at all it is to the counselor. That is a mistake - it denies our essentially spiritual nature, it denies our imageness.
Our spiritual nature is not our good side. Our spiritual nature is broken along with the rest of us. We are just flat out fallen. We cannot segregate our good stuff to spirituality and our bad stuff to psychology. Only by allowing God to repair our spirituality can we find all the genuine good stuff.
It is time top restore confession to its proper role in our communal spiritual life.
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Now in a backwards attempt, all of our hiding, our demands for privacy, the covering over of ourselves, it is our way of staying close to people. We don't want them to reject us and run away from us, so we don't let them see us for who we really are. We do it in our dress and makeup - hoping to hide our blemishes, accentuate the acceptable parts. We do it in our dating relationships, putting the best foot forward until they have already become emotionally attached enough to stay with us once the ugliness starts to come out. We do it at work - it is encouraged, if not demanded in the workplace. We do in our marriages as the husband and wife express frustration, disappointment and disapproval with one another. I mean, even in our closest relationships, we hide and can often be overcome by loneliness.I have contended many times on the blog that intimacy is a lost art in our current world. Intimacy demands exposure, it demands that we reveal a bit of ourselves. Note that last sentence - loneliness in relationship - imagine! Obviously there is no intimacy. How do we overcome that?
Have you ever experienced the release of guilt before? Guilt and shame for something you did or said can weigh you down to the point that it seems like it weighs you down physically. But something happens. Maybe you confess it to someone. Maybe you are caught and punished, and the act of punishment frees you to let go. But the weight is released and there is lightness in your heart and spirit. I remember in high school when this happened. I had been living a hidden life from my mom, and then one day she found something in my coat. And there I was naked. I couldn't lie. I couldn't cover up. I was exposed. And she punished me, but she also poured her love on me. And the weirdest thing happened. I was grounded for a month, but I hadn't felt so happy and free for a long time.Confession, even if forced, is a powerful thing. It is that path to happiness and wholeness, to freedom and community. There simply is no way around it.
In my work with young people, they seem very isolated. The phenomena seen in this piece seems very real to me. Which brings me to a second point. We tend to think of confession now as a therapeutic function, not a spiritual one. We don't confess at church, if we confess at all it is to the counselor. That is a mistake - it denies our essentially spiritual nature, it denies our imageness.
Our spiritual nature is not our good side. Our spiritual nature is broken along with the rest of us. We are just flat out fallen. We cannot segregate our good stuff to spirituality and our bad stuff to psychology. Only by allowing God to repair our spirituality can we find all the genuine good stuff.
It is time top restore confession to its proper role in our communal spiritual life.
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