world-mothering air

be thou then, thou dear/ Mother, my atmosphere;

I had not been to confession for almost a year at this point.

“At this point” is this morning, at 11:20 AM Eastern.

Last fall, I had had a terrible enough experience in confession that I told the priest “I’ll pray for you,” as I was exiting the confessional.

The experience has given me a greater appreciation for those who decide to “leave the Church” —meaning ceasing to go to Mass—due to experiences of abuse.

I have come to see how it is possible to realize that you simply can’t expose yourself anymore to priests, who in themselves are good people and children of God, but, by virtue of their office, are damaging agents of a damaging system that doesn’t have much any sensitivity toward survivors of sex abuse and doesn’t have the ability as a community to look at itself clearly and solve the problem, but just wants to push everything under the rug and pretend its gone.

In the Church (as far as I have experienced), difficult realities (also known as sins!) are not engaged with, they are ignored.

In such an environment, the practice of examining of one’s conscience, confessing one’s sins, and seeking penance and absolution for the purpose of reconciliation honestly seems like a farce.

Not because I don’t believe in the sacraments, but because the men who officiate said sacrament are part of a system that reflects a sacramental reality like a brick wall reflects light.

So, that’s hard.

This is not a debate about the truth or value of sacraments, and I’m not resurrecting the donatist controversy, I’m just asking people to sit with the feeling of what it must feel like when the system that gives you access to God is the self-same system that is harming you. It’s a reality I have been pondering a great deal this year.

Since God is in all Creation, there is no part of Creation that is not suffused with the life of God, including in a particular way the human being, made in the image and likeness of Trinitarian love, and especially as we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and so become the Mystical Body of Christ, one realizes that those who depart from the institutional church are perhaps not the ones turning their back on Christ but it is perhaps a church hierarchy that neglects to correct its own sins and hypocrises who is the party turning their back on Christ.

It is just not possible to think it is better that one of these little ones should suffer rather than a single diocese go bankrupt and call that justice.

Christ is the wounded one. We find Christ by seeking the wounded one—“Jesus forsaken,” as Chiara Lubich would call him. To turn your back on the wounded one is to turn your back on Christ.

Just food for thought.

At no point this year did I say “confession is for the birds,” although I do have friends whom I greatly respect who believe this. At no point this year did I turn my back on a sacrament. At some points this year when I was behaving quite badly, I would indeed think: jeez, I should go to confession. Because I am, at heart, a mantilla-wearing grandmother holding perpetual and vaguely-superstitious vigil in front of St. Jude ringed by a candle moat.

But I didn’t go.

So, dear priests, please sit with that reality before you say, well, anything in a confessional.

Sheesh, you should go to confession again for how angry you are right now, lady, you think. Okay, so what’s a priest to say, Renée? We/they/I are only human. Can we/they/I say nothing right? you ask, annoyed at how goddamn critical I am.

First, yes, this is fact, we are all “only human.” But let’s not get this twisted: most humans don’t have free master degrees in philosophy and theology funded by a diocese or religious order. So if we have higher standards of behavior for priests—by definition, people in possession of free masters degrees about things of fundamental concerns—then I think that is right and just.

And, second, for most of the year, I didn’t have an answer to those questions.

But, today, like Herr Grinch, I had an idea. An aweful idea. I had a wonderful, aweful idea.

As all of Notre Dame’s campus swarmed to the Basilica for the Assumption, I geared myself up for confession. I walked into the confessional during the Kyrie Eleison and sat across from an elderly priest and he said: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and I said: Now, before we begin:

I explained that I had had a negative experience with the “advice” section of confession nearly a year ago. And, I said, I hadn’t been back since.

So, I said, what I’m going to ask you to do is, after I list all my sins, and before you assign me a penance or say the words of absolution, during the “advice” (scare quotes included) section, I’m going to ask that you limit your comments to a question. Can you do that?

He said he could do that.

He did not do that.

But he tried! He made a really good effort to limit his remarks to a question. But I don’t think he could either think of a question to ask me or a good reflection question that I could take away and ponder. Both would have been acceptable.

And you know what—angry and overly critical lady though I be—that’s fine. My request was working against over (at least) half a century of his formation and habits of confession-ministering. His remarks, instead of being formed in an interrogative clause, came out in approximately three lines of generalized regret and three lines of generalized affirmation. And—call it what it is—that’s a start.

So, there you have a little confession method that I am going to take with me and put in my confession toolkit and I invite you to as well, if you are the confession-going kind.

The “Advice section” of confession is kind of bonkers. It’s not canonically necessary. And it is subject to much abuse. It only seems to make sense in the context of a regular confessor or a spiritual director, which much of the confession-going public does not have.

Perhaps we should only go to confession with a regular confessor. That’s probably true. But, given that that’s not happening today, a question is a good compromise. A question that I can ask myself and roll around in my heart. Isn’t that the basis of good advice anyway? The problem is, both in those free masters degrees and from the pulpit, we are taught certainty. We are taught that certainty is authority. We forget to begin with questions.

It’s important to set reasonable boundaries in all areas of life, but particularly, in our metastasizingly clerical church, with members of the clergy. For our mutual betterment and for the sake of the common good. And setting boundaries around the wishy-washy advice section is helpful for everyone because confession, we recall, exists for the penitent, not the priest. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “The confessor is not the master of God's forgiveness, but its servant.” (§1466 for those keeping track).

And this little penitent got what she came for: a good penance. My penance was to rest in Mary, my more than meat and drink, so I did.

World-mothering air, air wild,

Wound with thee, in thee isled,

Fold home, fast fold thy child.

I do think we forget her, even on this her solemn feast day. So glumly called a holy day of obligation, as though there were anything begrudgingly obligatory about the body bearing Christ into the world being borne up into the love that moves the sun and every star.

We forget her, which is why we fall so far from being a Church that incarnates more immediately the Mystical Body of Christ. For she is the Church. She is the disciple who says: be it done to me according to thee. She is the epitome and paradigm of vocation: of the universal Christian mandate to bear God into creation.

So we look past her or through her and forget to see her as she wends around us, our atmosphere, as Gerard Manley Hopkins calls her. We forget that we are all called to stand where she stands today—in glory, with her cousin, in the world, in the heart of the Trinity—bearing Christ radiantly into Creation. And somehow, through bearing Christ, turning a bent, broken, originally-sinned, irrevocably-unjust reality into God. Into grace. Of which, she is full.

Hail, Mary.