Ritual Confession

In many traditions there is a religious leader or priest who receives confessions and a prescribed procedure for performing it. The believers see this as valuable. First, the sinner has “gotten it off his chest,” and usually feels much better for it. Secondly, usually the confessor then assigns a penalty or penance, some means of making things right again. This is becoming much less common in Western countries than it once was, and there is a very good reason for that. People have come to realize that there is often something formal and arbitrary about the proceedings. It feels made-up. Even if it does “good,” it does not feel entirely authentic. Nothing has really been changed or made right.

First, it leads to a mindset of listing sins. There’s a certain list of rules and regulations which one must “keep.” A person keeps a mental tally of how many of these they “break” and goes on a regular basis to the confessor to list these breakings. There may even be a division of sins into less-bad and more-bad categories. A person is led to think, “It’s not so bad—I only did two minor sins this week.”

Secondly, this system usually makes no real connection between the sin and the penalty. For your two venial (not-so-bad) sins, you have to say a certain prayer or set of prayers a certain number of times. Then all is squared again with the universe. That wasn’t so bad. Now you can go blithely out and continue the same behaviors as before, knowing you can “pay up” again next week.

An American visitor in Myanmar (Burma) was watching the local people pass out rice to the Buddhist monks. Some gave as little as one grain of rice to each of many monks. When the visitor asked someone why this was so, it was explained to him that each feeding of a monk counted as one good deed, and off set one bad deed. If you gave out one grain of rice at a time, you could parlay one small bowl into many good deeds, thus, presumably, forgiving many bad deeds. Whether this is a true teaching of Buddhism is beside the point. No doubt many Catholic priests don’t want their flock to get the idea that they can sin all they want and just say enough Hail Mary’s to cover for them, either.

Which brings us to the worst feature of ritualistic confession: one pays for one’s own sins by some sort of punishment. And the truth is most Western (ostensibly Christian) societies have the same idea. The thief, arsonist, or rapist, having either been caught and confessed, must “pay the penalty” for his sin by spending a number of years in prison, a number to be determined by how bad a particular judge thinks the sin was. In prison, rather than learning anything about himself or his temptations or how to deal with them, he will likely learn new and better ways to sin. But he’ll be “suitably punished.” That’s assuming conditions in the prison are bad enough. Any attempt to make life bearable or even educational will be seen as “being soft on crime.” No, this reprobate must be made as miserable as possible so that “justice will be served.”

Once he finishes his sentence he will be set loose. Those who wanted him to be miserable have no illusions of his becoming a new, productive member of society. Those who would like to think he has, and want to give him a second chance are likely to talk of his having “paid his debt to society.” He’s paid up. Leave him alone to get on with his life.

Where did this begin? With the five-year-old who is taught to confess, that is, admit wrongdoing and face up to whatever punishment is meted out, in the hopes of not repeating it. Maybe. If the punishment is bad enough that the child doesn’t want to face it again. Is this what God means by confession?

The various systems of confessing to someone trustworthy, such as the shepherd of the flock, were set up for the best of reasons; to follow Biblical teaching and to give a penitent and probably confused and anxious person a listening ear, preferably that of someone who knows and cares personally for the individual. There really is some value in this. The trouble is that every time God says “Do this …” some well-intentioned human turns it into a blueprint for success, with graduated steps and flow charts and if-then clauses and rules.