PARADOXICAL

My experience with confessing to many different priests has brought me face-to-face with contrasting pictures of God. There’s one picture which looks like a conservative, stern and strict high school principal. There’s another picture which looks more like an empathetic guidance counselor.

I’ve had my days with both fatherly and strict-principal type of confessors. All in all, they both got me disturbed. They have dispensed almost similar penance but it’s their sermons that were strikingly different. Where one preferred lecturing near the top of his voice, another preferred hypnotic whispers.

It took me sometime to realize that I needed both kinds of confessors. Of course the ideal would be one who possesses both skills at the right mix and with the right timing. After all, both compassion and justice are attributes of the same God. It’s us who know best whether we need a stern warning or words of encouragement on a given time. Besides, don’t we have the responsibility to give a full disclosure of our state of sinfulness so that the poor priest would know at what level he should meet us? (Too bad we’re too ashamed for it. But come to think of it, we really have nothing to offer God but our shame.)

“Baby” Christians certainly need a little more compassion than usual while old-timers perhaps need a little more admonition than the rest. The same thing goes for followers versus leaders. The same thing goes for followers versus leaders. For habitual sinners or people with special weaknesses (don’t we all have one?), I am not so sure which works best. I leave the problems to priests, really.

I don’t think ideal confessors exist. I have accepted that for the most part, I will have to deal with individual personalities as all priests have to do the same with every individual penitent. After all, priests are also humans, with certain quirks just like us.

If there’s such a thing as an ideal confessor, it can only be God. In the face of God as confessor, all the penitent has to do is be sincerely penitent. There are no explanations needed. He knows. He knows everything, especially what is left unsaid. He’s one hundred percent fool-proof.

Now if only God would ask us just one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Glory Be. God may be the ideal confessor but he may also be more demanding. Since He knows whether it’s time to be compassionate or whether it’s time to be more stern, we are always meted out what He thinks is fair, I mean who can argue with God?

8.19.2001

posted by Resty Odon  # 7:52 PM