The wife and I attended a reconciliation service last night. Both of us entertained, if only for moments, the thought of skipping out. We'd had a long, stressful day at the office and were both pretty pooped. Thankfully, most thankfully, we pushed those thoughts to the side.
A couple of weeks or so ago, I wrote:
There seems to be so much ugliness in the world right now.
So much pettiness and the division that results. So much stubbornness and small-mindedness that leads to a deepening spiral of dysfunction. So much ignorance and presumption that can only end in discord and disagreement. So much arrogance that sees vice while ignoring virtue in others. So much madness that ignores God's maxim to forgive. And, of course, so much of my own inclination to engage in this ugliness, to sink to these depths, to wallow in this muck.
It's all ugly. It's all wrong. It's all sin. It's dragging us down.
What I believe is needed to set things right, to replace all the ugly, if only for the moment, is beauty, tangible beauty.
Last night, the wife and I experienced indescribable beauty but rather than attempt to articulate what was experienced myself, I'm letting Simcha Fisher do it for me:
It's the one place that no one would ever go for normal, worldly reasons. No penitent goes to confession to get ahead in life, or to make money, or to get a full belly, or to impress anyone; and
no priest goes to confession to be amused or entertained. It's where we go to unload our miseries, to show our wounds and our infections, to take off the disguises that make us appear palatable to each other. So, not beautiful. No, not especially.
Or is it? If the ugliness, the squalor, the sordidness, and the running nose were all that happened inside a confessional, then it really would be an ugly place -- just a latrine, a ditch, a sewer. But of course, the part where we lay out our sins is only the first part.
What happens afterward is more obviously beautiful. The priest reaches out and picks up the ugly little load you've laid in front of him. And right then and there, he pours the living water over it until the parts that are worth saving are healthy and whole again, and the parts that cannot be salvaged have been washed away entirely. What is useless is gone; what was dead is alive again.
This is beautiful!
And the beauty of absolution does one of those neat Catholic tricks where eternal things reach back in time and impart beauty wherever they want, regardless of chronology. The beauty of absolution makes the confession itself beautiful. Even though my sins are ugly, the very fact that I'm bringing them into the confessional has something beautiful in it: the beauty of trust that I will be forgiven; the beauty of believing that something real and life-changing will happen; the beauty of being willing to accept forgiveness even though I know that I don't deserve it; and the beauty of knowing that, whoever's turn it is to sit behind the screen, it is really Christ who is waiting to meet me.
If that isn't beautiful, then nothing is.
More beauty at the link. Don't miss it.
You need beauty. We all do.