They say that confession is good for the soul.
I have always admired the Catholicism for the seriousness about the role that confession plays in their traditions. That said, traditions that are void of any real substance getting bound up in RITUAL, rather than REALITY surely miss the mark (the definition of sin).
Ops!
I read somewhere that the most common Catholic confession was” Forgive me father for I have sinned by missing Mass.” You see, once people see and understand the SYSTEM, forgetting the true SYMPTOMS, it is GAME ON! It seems to me, as I have spent some 50+ years of my life in CHURCH (one half of that active in the ministry from the pulpit side) that the greatest individual and corporate sin is ARROGANCE.
Hold on a minute now before you judge.
I am talking about the know-it-all mentality. One of the best CONFESSIONS that we could make is, “I DO NOT KNOW“. There are so many dogmas and doctrines that we cling to, believing that they will save is. Be it Catholic traditions or Protestant inerrancy of the Bible, it’s the same principle. Until we confess that we might have some things WRONG, what in the world would cause us to question: question if what we think we know is indeed TRUTH.
Are you there?
As Anne Lamott once said, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty”.
Or, as Francis Bacon said, “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts: but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”