Devotion to the sacraments: why confess? sin a little understood reality

In our times there is the disaffection of Christians towards confession. It is one of the signs of the crisis of faith that many are going through. We are moving from a religious compactness of the past to a more personal, conscious and convinced religious adhesion.

To explain this disaffection towards confession it is not enough to bring the fact of the general process of de-Christianization of our society. It is necessary to identify more particular and specific causes.

Our confession often boils down to a mechanical list of sins that highlight only the surface of the person's moral experience and do not reach the depths of the soul.

Confessed sins are always the same, they repeat themselves with maddening monotony throughout life. And so you can no longer see the usefulness and seriousness of a sacramental celebration that has become monotonous and annoying. The priests themselves sometimes seem to doubt the practical efficacy of their ministry in the confessional and desert this monotonous and arduous work. The bad quality of our practice has its weight in the disaffection towards confession. But at the base of everything there is often something even more negative: an inadequate or wrong knowledge of the reality of Christian reconciliation, and a misunderstanding about the true reality of sin and conversion, considered in the light of faith.

This misunderstanding is largely due to the fact that many faithful have only a few memories of childhood catechesis, necessarily partial and simplified, moreover transmitted in a language that is no longer that of our culture.

The sacrament of reconciliation is in itself one of the most difficult and provocative experiences of the life of faith. This is why it must be presented well in order to understand it well.

Inadequate conceptions of sin

It is said that we no longer have a sense of sin, and in part it is true. There is no longer a sense of sin to the extent that there is no sense of God. But even further upstream, there is no longer a sense of sin because there is not enough sense of responsibility.

Our culture tends to hide from individuals the bonds of solidarity that bind their good and bad choices to their own destiny and that of others. Political ideologies tend to convince individuals and groups that it is always the fault of others. More and more is promised and one does not have the courage to appeal to the responsibility of individuals towards the general good. In a culture of non-responsibility, the predominantly legalistic conception of sin, transmitted to us by the catechesis of the past, loses all meaning and ends up falling. In the legalistic conception, sin is considered essentially as disobedience to the law of God, therefore as a refusal to submit to its dominion. In a world like ours in which freedom is exalted, obedience is no longer considered a virtue and therefore disobedience is not considered bad, but a form of emancipation that makes man free and restores his dignity.

In the legalistic conception of sin, the violation of the divine command offends God and creates a debt of ours towards him: the debt of those who offend another and owe him compensation, or of those who have committed a crime and must be punished. Justice would demand that man pay all his debt and expiate his guilt. But Christ has already paid for everyone. It is enough to repent and recognize one's debt for it to be forgiven.

Alongside this legalistic conception of sin there is another - which is also inadequate - which we call fatalistic. Sin would be reduced to the inevitable gap that exists and will always exist between the demands of God's holiness and the unsurpassed limits of man, who in this way finds himself in an incurable situation with regard to God's plan.

Since this situation is unsurpassed, it is an opportunity for God to reveal all his mercy. According to this conception of sin, God would not consider man's sins, but would simply remove man's incurable misery from his gaze. Man should only blindly entrust himself to this mercy without worrying too much about his sins, because God saves him, despite the fact that he remains a sinner.

This conception of sin is not the authentic Christian vision of the reality of sin. If sin were such a negligible thing, it would not be possible to understand why Christ died on the cross to save us from sin.

Sin is disobedience to God, it concerns God and affects God. But in order to understand the terrible seriousness of sin, man must begin to consider its reality from its human side, realizing that sin is man's evil.

Sin is the evil of man

Before being a disobedience and an offense to God, sin is the evil of man, it is a failure, a destruction of what makes man man. Sin is a mysterious reality that tragically affects man. The terribleness of sin is difficult to understand: it is fully visible only in the light of faith and the word of God. But something of its terribleness already appears even to a human gaze, if we consider the devastating effects it produces in the world of man. Just think of all the wars and hatreds that have bloodied the world, all the slavery of vice, the stupidity and personal and collective irrationality that have caused so much known and unknown suffering. The history of man is a slaughterhouse!

All these forms of failure, of tragedy, of suffering, arise in some way from sin and are linked to sin. It is therefore possible to discover a real connection between man's selfishness, cowardice, inertia and greed and these individual and collective evils which are the unequivocal manifestation of sin.

The Christian's first task is to acquire for himself a sense of responsibility, discovering the bond that unites his free choices as a man to the evils of the world. And this is because sin takes shape in the reality of my life and in the reality of the world.

It takes shape in the psychology of man, it becomes the set of his bad habits, his sinful tendencies, his destructive desires, which become stronger and stronger as a result of sin.

But it also takes shape in the structures of society making them unjust and oppressive; it takes shape in the media, making it an instrument of lies and moral disorder; takes shape in the negative behaviors of parents, educators ... who with wrong teachings and bad examples introduce elements of deformation and moral disorder in the souls of children and pupils, depositing in them a seed of evil that will continue to germinate throughout life and perhaps it will be passed on to still others.

The evil produced by sin gets out of hand and causes a spiral of disorder, destruction and suffering, which extends far beyond what we thought and wanted. If we were more used to reflecting on the consequences of good and evil that our choices will produce in us and in others, we would be much more responsible. If, for example, the bureaucrat, the politician, the doctor ... could see the suffering they cause to so many people with their absenteeism, their corruption, their individual and group selfishness, they would feel the weight of these attitudes that perhaps they do not feel at all. What we lack is therefore the awareness of responsibility, which would allow us to see first of all the human negativity of sin, its load of suffering and destruction.

Sin is God's evil

We must not forget that sin is also God's evil precisely because it is man's evil. God is touched by man's evil, because he wants man's good.

When we speak of the law of God we must not think of a series of arbitrary commands with which he affirms his dominion, but rather of a series of signaling indications on the path of our human fulfillment. God's commandments do not express so much his rulership as his concern. Inside every commandment of God is written this commandment: Become yourself. He realizes the life possibilities that I have given you. I want for you nothing but your fullness of life and happiness.

This fullness of life and happiness is realized only in the love of God and of the brothers. Now sin is the refusal to love and to let oneself be loved. In fact, God is wounded by man's sin, because sin wounds the man he loves. He is wounded in his love for him, not in his honor.

But sin affects God not only because it disappoints his love. God wants to weave with man a personal relationship of love and life which is everything for man: true fullness of existence and joy. Instead, sin is a rejection of this vital communion. Man, loved freely by God, refuses to love filially the Father who loved him so much that he gave his only Son for him (Jn 3,16:XNUMX).

This is the deepest and most mysterious reality of sin, which can only be understood in the light of faith. This rejection is the soul of sin as opposed to the body of sin which is constituted by the ascertainable destruction of humanity that it produces. Sin is an evil that arises from human freedom and is expressed in a free no to God's love. This no (mortal sin) detaches man from God who is the source of life and happiness. It is by its nature something definitive and irreparable. Only God can re-establish the relationships of life and bridge the abyss that sin has dug between man and him. And when reconciliation occurs it is not a generic adjustment of relationships: it is an act of love even greater, more generous and free than the one with which God created us. Reconciliation is a new birth that makes us new creatures.