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In the name of the Father  and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Happy is he whose fault is taken away, whose sin is covered. Happy is the man to whom the Lord imputes not guilt, in whose spirit there is no guile. As long as I would not speak my bones wasted away with my groaning all the day, for day and night Your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was dried out as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to You; my guilt I covered not. I said ‘I confess my faults to the Lord’, and You took away the guilt of my sin. For this shall every faithful man pray to You in time of stress; though deep waters overflow they shall not reach him, You are my shelter. From distress You will preserve me. With glad cries of freedom You will bring me round, I will instruct you and show you the way you should walk. I will counsel you, keeping my eye on you. Be not senseless like horses or mules, with bit and bridle their temper must be curved, else they will not come near you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but kindness surrounds him who trusts in the Lord. Be glad in the Lord and rejoice you just, exult you are bright apart.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I mentioned last week as I closed our part one, that I would talk about Saint Theresa of Liseux for just a few moments. As you know we are celebrating the centenary of her death and her being raised to the title of Doctor of the Church. By being proclaimed this the Church proclaims that her teaching is applicable to every Christian; that it is for every Christian, and that it’s fruitful for all of us.
She died at the age of twenty four, and not too long before her death Our Lord raised her to the very heights of prayer where it was difficult to tell her soul from the heart of Jesus. Where the one heart left off and the other began, it was difficult to tell. Our Lord had introduced her into the mystical marriage, which is really the highest state of prayer and mystical life that is possible for us here on this earth.
One day while she was in de midst of all this light of prayer, this great joy and peace that came from the Lord and her union with Him. She began to feel a darkness, and where the thought of heaven gave her great joy, began to give her great torment. And our Lord came to her in a sense, in the midst of that light turn to darkness and said: ‘Theresa, my beloved, will you let me sit you at table with sinners?’  The words sound puzzling, but what our Lord had done in Theresa by lifting her up to this high level of prayer was to show her what is possible for a soul without sin; this intense union with God. And then, the opposite of that; the horror for a soul without sin that is in the midst of sin. And so our Lord says: "Would you let me take you from the light that I have allowed you to bask in, and would you let Me put you at table with sinners", in other words, to reproduce the effect of sin in your soul, even though you haven’t sin. Would you let me give you the darkness as if you had." And this is what she says in her autobiography, describing the time before our Lord speaks: "At that time I enjoyed a faith so living and so clear that the thought of Heaven formed all my happiness, and I could scarcely believe that there was anyone so foolish as to reject this belief. But in the festival days after Easter, Jesus caused me to understand that there really are souls without faith. People who through the abuse of God’s grace have lost this great treasure. The only source of the only joy that is pure and true."
Theresa was such an innocent soul that she up until this time didn’t understand what sin was. She didn’t think it was possible for a soul to reject God. She didn’t think it was possible for someone to live in the darkness. That she thought that if people sinned, what it was, was turning away from the God that they knew to be true. She didn’t believe it was possible for someone to turn from God entirely. She couldn’t imagine what that would be like. For a soul to turn from God it would be less possible for her to imagine that, than for a blind person try to imagine light, and color, and the sunshine. So she goes on: "He allowed my soul to be invaded by the deepest darkness; a person must actually make the journey through this dark tunnel in order to understand its blackness." Our Lord is showing her the state of someone who is in great sin; the blackness that is in a person’s life who is far from the Lord. She who could not imagine it, and she certainly didn’t deserve it. Our Lord gave it to her, and then she praise: "Oh Lord, your daughter has understood the Divine light, she begs You to forgive her unbelieving brothers. She accepts to share the bread of sorrow for as long a time as You wish." She does not ask to rise from this bitter table at which poor sinners eat, ‘until the time that You’ve decided’. In her own name, and in the name of this name of her brothers she simply asks : "Have mercy on us Lord, for we are poor sinners." Her prayer in the middle of the darkness becomes only one thing. She doesn’t say ‘Lord take away the darkness’; she simply says ‘Lord, if my eating at table with sinners will save a soul, then Your will be done."
Towards the end of her life she writes and she says: "Dear Mother,"  talking about her spiritual mother in the convent, "Our Lord has not seen yet to lift the darkness, and to lead me back into the light." And those are some of the last words she ever wrote. Our Lord led her to the light, and then said ‘would you let Me plunge you into the darkness? So that experience may save souls’. Our Lord showed her the consequence of sin, and in doing so He uses her as a living victim for the healing of sin.
Truly remarkable. Let us ask that our Lord will give to us the generosity of offering whatever sorrows, whatever darkness is in our lives for the healing of the ugliness of sin in our world and in ourselves.

Let me just do a quick re-cap from last week.
God desires to give to each one of us an awareness of sin. He does this not to make our lives miserable, but in order to free us. God wants us to be very aware of our sinfulness. Not so that our religion is this heavy burden in our shoulders, pressing us down and making us stooped. Our Lord wants us to be aware of sin so that it can be healed, and healed powerfully; and that we can be lead from the darkness of sinners into the light of God’s grace.
God wants us to be aware clearly and honestly of the terrible effects of sin in our lives. You and I, when we are faced with our sin, we can react in three possible ways. We can become dulled, or deaden to sin to such a point that we can just stop going ahead to sin in good conscience. We can reach a point where we deny the reality of sin in our lives to such an extent that we pretend that sin doesn’t exist. Or if it does exist, it doesn’t matter a great deal. I think a lot of the New Age movement would be in this; the only sin possible is if I harm the potential that this cosmic consciousness has for me. If somehow I harm my potential, that is the only real great sin that I can commit. The whole notion of a moral evil, an evil that would damage another person, the whole idea of a moral evil, that is evil in itself does not occur to many who are whole caught in the New Age movement. Sin I believe, simply seems to be for them failure to realize potential. It’s very selfish really. And I think it is something that we are seeing fairly frequently. Simply the denial of an objective reality of sin.
There are many more people who feel a thorn of sin, they feel a thorn inside of themselves when they do wrong. They know that what we are doing is sinful but they don’t know about the Sacrament of Confession. The world is filled with people who recognize that they do sin; and they feel the thorn of that sin within their side, but they don’t know about the Sacrament of Confession; or they are not convinced that the Lord has intended that Sacrament for them. And boy, that describes a lot of people in the Church, doesn’t it? People who know intellectually that there is a Sacrament of Confession, but they aren’t convinced that the Lord has intended that Sacrament for them. I think if everyone in our city recognized -every Catholic- that the Lord intends that Sacrament for them, and they felt the thorn of sin, the lines for my confessional would go out the door and all the way around the parking lot, right? So, the second class of people are those who recognize they’ve sinned, but they have written off the Sacrament of Confession.
So, what do they do with their guilt? What they might try to do is confess their guilt to someone. We’ve always known of people like this, they’ll come up to us and they’ll tell us what’s wrong in their lives; and what they want us to do is to say: ‘It’s OK, you’ve got a great excuse, everything is allright’. You know what I mean? People come to us and they’ll say: ‘Ah, you know I’m unfaithful to my husband/I’m unfaithful to my wife’  you know, and they really want somebody to say: ‘Ah, it’s OK, you know, it’s almost impossible nowadays to remain faithful; it’s OK’. You know, or a parent who says: ‘You know I really don’t give much time to my children, you know I’m working so much.’ And they really want someone to say to them: ‘It’s OK, it a tough world, your economic realities being as they are, you know if you want that second car, well you really got to work; it’s OK that your children are second place.’ You know what I mean? There is that constant desire; we are aware that something is wrong, is that thorn of sin. And so we look to other people for absolution. We look to somebody else to say is OK, don’t worry too much...don’t worry.
The problem is that this is an endless circle; is an endless circle. And they even may go to the Lord and say: "Dear Lord I’m sorry!" But somehow there is not a finality to that. Is not concrete. And so they never get to the end of their confession. They never feel the definitiveness of the Lord’s forgiveness offered through the Church. They never hear the word: "You are forgiven. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." And so this is an endless circle of looking for absolution.
And then there is the sinner who recognizes their guilt, and they fly to the one place where there is a definitive healing and a definitive resolution to their sin. In the face of Jesus, present through the office of the priest there is a tremendous clarity; there is a tremendous definitveness. This clarity doesn’t lay within me, coming to the Church for forgiveness; but this clarity is given to the Church by the Lord. So that when I hear the words "I am forgiven", there is a tremendous clarity, there is a closure; there is a sense of what I have done has been healed and it lays behind me, it’s guilt. The consequences may remain, and I have to face those consequences of what I’ve done wrong. But the guilt is gone; and I know it for certain. And there is a clarity in that; and that allows me to face the consequences. When the burden of the guilt is lifted I can face the consequences, I can face the reality of purgatory in the next life; and the reality of being a converted sinner, a healed sinner in this life. As long as the guilt is gone, I can face that.
I think of Saint Paul; we don’t know how many Christians he killed. Before he approached the Church the guilt of his sin was unbearable; after the guilt is removed, because he comes to the Lord in the Church, then he can face the consequences of what he’s done. But the guilt has been borne by the Lord.
So, confession is the Lords legacy; it is the Lord’s gift to us. It is a legacy of the Lord that has been given to us. Confession was instituted on Easter, on the day of our Lords resurrection, He faces the apostles and He tells them: "What sins you forgive on earth shall be forgiven in heaven, what sins you hold bound on earth shall be bound in heaven." The Sacrament is instituted on Easter, three days after the cross, confession is revealed as the fruit of the cross. It comes from the tree of the redeemer. He commands confession, and absolution is given by the authority of the Lord. Our Lord at that Easter Sunday in granting this authority to the apostles is saying: ‘This is to be used’; confession is commanded and absolution is given in the Church by the authority of the risen Lord. The risen Lord bestows confession as a gift of redemption on His Church; the Church herself is to bind, and she is to lose, and she is to administer this redemption of the Lord. Isn’t that amazing? The Church administers the redemption given by the Lord. He gives to her this gift of redemption, of forgiveness of sins, the fruit of the cross of the Lord. And He gives this Sacrament to her, and He fixes it by the words of institution. Just as the Mass has words of institution: ‘This is My body, this is My blood’, and those words were spoken on a specific date, the night before our Lord’s death. So this Sacrament has words of institution, and they are spoken on Easter Sunday.
So the Sacrament is fixed in the Church by these words of institution of the Lord. And then the Lord leaves it to her, to the Church to carry out the concrete and practical development of this Sacrament.
Let me compare that to the Mass. On Holy Thursday by the words of institution, the Lord gives to the Church the Sacrament of salvation, of the body and blood of the Lord. He institutes it on the last supper; He then leaves to the Church, through the course of the centuries the practical implementing of that Sacrament. The words that will be used, the language that will be used, the gestures, the vestments, the vessels; all of the practical things about the Mass the Lord leaves to the Church to implement. And so with the Sacrament of Confession. Our Lord’s words of institution fixes it the life of the Church. Confession is to be a reality for Christians, and how that is celebrated, the details of it are left to the Church which enjoys the constant consolation of the Holy Spirit.
This Sacrament is the fruit of Jesus’ life, and He wants it to bear fruit to us. He builds through this  Sacrament a path leading to Him from sin; there is a path that leads from sin to the Father, and that path goes right through the heart of confession.
Sin would no longer be a hindrance separating us from the Father when we recognize that Jesus bears sin for us and that through the Sacrament of the Church instituted on Easter,  you and I have received a path that leads from sin to the Father.
The more profoundly we become aware of our weakness and sinfulness, the more closely we resemble the humiliated Son of Man. The more radiantly the resurrection and absolution reveal themselves. The penitent who receives the Sacrament of the fruit of the cross who stands naked and exposed before the Father must thirst for absolution and for the nearness to God that he has lost through sin. And that kind of summarizes what I talked about last week.
Now I want to get more practical. What are the steps to a good confession? These steps come from a wonderful book entitled "Confession" by Adrian Von Spire. Is really a wonderful book.
So I’m going to shamelessly steal from her. And she has seven steps to a good confession; and this is what they are, and I’ll go through them step by step. There’s a lot of them here; but you see they all make sense, one falls from the next. Preparation or examination of conscience is the first step; then contrition or sorrow; the third is resolution, a concrete plan of life; fourth, confession, the actual confessing of our sins before a priest; the fifth step is the words the priest says to us, the exhortation; the sixth is absolution, the words, the Sacrament that our Lord instituted at Easter; and then seventh, the penance that we do. She says that’s actually part of confession, the penance that we do afterwards.
So, preparation, contrition, resolution, confession, exhortation, absolution and then the penance. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But you see all flows from one to the next. So let me just go through those steps to make a good confession.

The first step which is so critical on making a good confession, of coming before the Lord Who in all of His power desires to heal us. And He desires that healing to be total, and He desires that forgiveness to be profoundly transforming. The first step that must be present is an honest examination of conscience, a preparation. This is what she says: "The sinner who goes to confession is homesick for God", isn’t that a wonderful phrase? "The sinner who goes to confession is homesick for God, he is living in banishment and loneliness. Although he is a sinner among sinners, he senses no communion; only absolution will give him a feeling of communion again. Of the communion of Saints, and of being at home with God. And this new feeling awakens in him an understanding for those who are still banished, distant, searching and without communion. You and I, we are ready to make a searching examination of conscience when we are aware ‘Dear Lord Jesus I have sinned and I am homesick for God, and I recognize my sin has placed me into the darkness’. There must be preparation for so great a Sacrament. Jesus spent all of eternity preparing to be the incarnate Son of the Father; Jesus spends all of eternity preparing to come to earth; and then He spends thirty years of preparation hidden to prepare for the cross. Our Lord Himself prepares for the work of our salvation. And so we must prepare, and the critical preparation we do is by examining our conscience, what have we done wrong? How have we failed the Lord? What have we done? What have we failed to do for the Lord? We prepare by measuring ourselves against the Lord’s will for us; we prepare ourselves by honestly examining the distance between myself and the will of God for me. I compare myself to our Good Lord, and the distance that I see I bring to Him in confession. I ask myself, how have I progressed since my last confession. We must see our sins as sharply as possible and place them under the light of truth. We must be relentless with ourselves if we are to be useful in His service; we must be relentlessly honest with ourselves. We must recognize the acid of our sin. If we try to excuse ourselves we block God’s grace. Let’s leave the absolution of our sins to the Lord rather than to ourselves. How do you and I make a good examination of conscience? One way of course is, I think always, we must make a good examination of conscience by using Sacred Scripture. Sacred Scripture is the means by which we make a good examination of conscience; two ways, the ten commandments; we examine our lives in light of the ten commandments. And there is also the beautiful way of examining our conscience by the Gospels; by simply looking at the life of our Lord in the Gospels; that is a beautiful examination of conscience for me. We cannot prepare ourselves for confession without a living relationship to the Holy Scriptures which contain the life of the Lord and interpret His intentions. Jesus’ entire existence is love for the Father, prayer to the Father and service of the Father. We examine our lives in this light and we see the signs of death instead of light, of coldness instead of the passion of Jesus’ love. We examine the Gospels and that clearly casts light upon our own lives, and we ask ourselves, do we, like Christ Jesus our Lord, how have we loved the Father since our last confession? How have we prayed to the Father, and how have we served the Father? We become so familiar with the life of Our Lord Jesus in the Holy Gospels that we begin by looking at our Lord, He makes so clear our own sin. Our Lord Jesus in the Holy Gospel, His entire mind, heart and will is focused upon the Father; and so we ask ‘dear Lord, are You the central focus?’ Our Lord spends the night in prayer, and we ask ourselves ‘Oh Lord, do I come to You in prayer, as I ought?’ Our Lord’s one joy is in service of the Father. In the garden of Getsemani the desire of service to the Father overcomes any sweat of blood and tears. And so we ask ‘Dear Lord, do I place Your service above my joys’. In the light of the Gospel we see that our sins make us so different from the Lord Jesus; that causes us sorrow, we see the distance between Him and myself and we desire that to be healed. Our preparation for confession demands that we be strict with ourselves. We face honestly the fact of what we have done. When we examine our conscience, we try to avoid two dangers. The first one is that our examination of conscience is bringing to mind a bunch of trivialities; what we end up doing is confessing little trivial things, and we never allow our Lord to show us what lies beneath them. Sometimes people would come in and they would confess for example: ‘I don’t know if this is a sin or not...’ Their examination of conscience has never gone below just the very surface of things. What our Lord is asking us to say is: "What dear Lord is the very root cause of what I have done."
The other danger that we must be careful of is psychologyzing our sins, in other words,  rationalizing what it is that we have done. "I can’t help but lie because of the childhood that I had" you know the kind of examples like that "I can not help this because of this that is happened to me", "I can not help that because of  the poverty..." or whatever it may be, we psychologyze away; we are aware of the sin, but immediately we say, ah! But it is because of this...And we are really trying to heal our own sins. Whoever wishes to form himself to a new, living relationship to the Lord should consider that the Lord always spend a great deal of time reflecting upon the Father, but none in reflecting upon Himself. The object of contemplation is always God, never oneself. So you and I, we are careful simply to be honest, to let the light of the Gospel shine upon our lives, to let it illuminate the facts of our sins. We don’t try to trivialize them away, we don’t try to psychologize them or explain them away; we simply let the light of the Gospel shine upon our failings; and we seek to look upon the Father and how are lives are not in accord to His will; rather than reflecting excessively upon ourselves. Does that make sense?
Once you and I have examined our conscience through the ten commandments, by examining the life of our Lord, looking at our life beside the life of our Lord. Once we have examined our conscience, then we move to the second stage of a good confession which is contrition; which is sorrow. Examination of conscience gathers all the facts together; is like going on a fact finding mission. We find the facts, we examine the facts of our lives and our sins; we let the light of the Gospels go as deeply as possible, not just to the surface trivialities, but as deeply as possible as we examine our conscience. Examination of conscience collects the facts; we must be objective, we must be honest and humble as we look upon the sins we have committed and what we have failed to do. And only then does contrition or sorrow come to us.
Have you ever been puzzled when you go to confession and there doesn’t seem to be any sorrow before you enter the confessional, did you ever have that experience? You go to confession because you know is time to go, you know it’s been longer than it should be; and so you spend a few moments examining your conscience, you come in the door and you see there’s only one or two people in line and you say ‘before the line gets too much longer I better get in it myself’, and so we just have a few minutes for examination of conscience and we come in and confess, but we are puzzled because is not a real depth of sorrow, and we may even ask "Lord why don’t I feel sorrow for what I’ve done? Why don’t I feel sorry for what I’ve done?" And I think that lack of sorrow is because we have short circuit it, we have shortcut the first step; the examination of conscience. The more I searchingly look at my life in light of the Lord Jesus’ life, the more I spend time. An examination of conscience should really begin perhaps in the days before going to confession. Is a searching look at our lives; I think the more we look at our lives, the more that the fruit of that searching becomes a real sorrow. And sometimes when with the Lord’s grace we unearth (our sins) and what we’ve done is brought to light we almost feel a wince from recalling what we’ve done, did you ever have that experience? We recall what we have done wrong, our failure before the Lord, and we almost wince as we recall it; and we say "Dear Lord, how could I have done that? How could I have been so foolish? How could I have been so blind?" And the recalling of that brings a sorrow. And that is the second stage of the preparation for confession; a contrition, a sorrow, of being contrite for what has happened; what I have failed to do.
When I have objective and honest and humble before the Lord, and let the Lord’s light shine deeply into my life, then there is sorrow.
Contrition means that we are horrified at the degree of alienation between ourselves and God because of our sins. Contrition is the exact opposite of making excuses. If we make excuses we are saying: "It is OK because of this..." Sorrow just simply says: "Oh Lord, I have sinned and fallen short of Your will for me", and I think we must really pray that the Lord gives us that sorrow, our sorrow for failures.
It was Saint Dominic Savio, who had that horror for sin; who prayed: "Oh Lord, may I die before I sin." His motto was "Death before sin." There was a hatred and a sorrow for any sin. And you and I, we ask the Lord to melt the hardness of our hearts that keeps that sorrow at a distance. We ask that He melt the hardness of our heart, so that our sin might bring us a sorrow, and that sorrow will be the cause of our fleeing to the heart of Jesus the Lord. Before we can experience this sorrow, this contrition; we must squarely face the facts that we are sinners and that we are guilty. And we don’t try to justify or excuse ourselves. Contrition should be painful; as we are in line for confession, Lord willing, there is sort of a pain there; there is a burden there. There is a sorrow because as we stand in that line right before confession we say: "Dear Lord Jesus I am one of Your lost sheep; dear Lord I am lost and without You I’ll never find the way to the Father." Would that you and I have examined our conscience with enough depth and enough honesty and clarity that from that bears the fruit of sorrow. And as we await our turn for confession, that there is this realization "Oh Lord I am one of Your lost sheep"; and that sorrow immediately brings a confidence. "But You oh Lord delight in taking Your lost sheep, in placing them upon Your shoulder and bringing them home to Yourself".
The pain should be in our heart; in the place where our heart should have loved and did not. The sorrow comes from the realization that we have insulted God to His face by our sins. We did not turn our back on God when we sinned, we actually sinned before His face, because you can’t turn your back on God; we sin before His face. And so this contrition is the realization of what it means to have insulted God to His face by our sin.
There is the old distinction between perfect contrition and imperfect contrition. A contrition that is perfect and one that is less so, that is imperfect. And I think that a perfect contrition, what we desire, an imperfect contrition would be a fear of hell, a recognition that we have sinned and our attention is upon the consequences to us of our sin. A more perfect contrition is focused upon the Lord instead of ourselves. When you and I pray the act of contrition and we say that we fear the pains of hell, that is an imperfect contrition, and the prayer goes on, ‘but most of all because I have offended Thee o Lord Who Art all Good and deserving of all my love.’ I go from an imperfect fear of punishment, and our Lord through contrition leads me to examine the face of the Lord Whom I have insulted by my sin. And I look upon the face of our Lord, and that sorrow is a more perfect contrition. A perfect contrition allows us to forget ourselves and to focus on the Father as Jesus has showed us how to do. A perfect contrition, instead of saying ‘my sin has caused me sorrow’, ‘my sin has caused me to become sick’, ‘my sin has caused misfortune to me’. Perfect contrition allows us to say ‘my sin has offended the One Whom most of all deserves to be loved because He loves perfectly’. My contrition is a perfect one when I realize that I have forgotten the One Who never forgets me when I have turned my back on the One who died for me, and my gaze is upon the Lord, Whom I have offended. That is the contrition our Lord desires for us, and through this we experience great sorrow for having offended the Lord.
This sorrow is very important in our relationship with the Lord; you and I are aware that in a marriage we can approach our spouse, whom we have offended, in a number of ways. If I approach my spouse, whom I have offended, that I have sinned against, and if I realize that my sin against my spouse has caused damage, and I recognize that I was wrong, and that what I have done has wounded our relationship. The result of all of this is that the relationship will grow deeper. I have offended the one I love, I am sorry for it, I ask forgiveness, and I am convinced and convicted of the need to change. Then there will be a greater depth to that marriage. But if I am aware that I have sinned against the one I love and I’m not very particularly sorry for the hurt that I have caused, and I just want things to go on as they have before; then I offer an apology, but there is not really much desire for amendment, not much real sorrow; then that relationship will be damaged and it will never will be quite the same as it was before, or even worse, if I have sinned, if I feel badly that something has happened but I don’t really desire to make any change, then expecting that somehow it’ll all blow over and all will be well, then that relationship will really be damaged. In a marriage for example, if a sin of infidelity is committed and it comes out into the open, and the one spouse sees that their husband for example, who has been unfaithful to them, does everything possible to heal and to make certain that that will never happen again, that is a sin that can be forgiven, and there could be a healing. But if you see your spouse being unfaithful to you and they don’t really make much change, there’s going to be a wound that will be lasting; and if even worse they are unfaithful and they don’t bother to make much excuse for it but simply expect you to forgive it; that marriage is going to be in such a great danger; what hope would there really be? And so with our Lord. This examination of conscience, this sorrow for what we’ve done, and the desire to amend is absolutely critical to our relationship with the Lord, if it is not there, we will eventually kill the relationship that we have with God.
And then once we have examined our conscience, once we have allowed the Lord to show us the awful consequences of our sin and the sorrow and the darkness that is come to us from our sin, then comes the third stage, the third step of our confession, and that is a resolution, a plan of action, when you and I, with the Lord’s grace make a concrete step to not allow what has happened to take place again.
God is never the One who terminates our relationship with Him. He is always there ready to take us back. However if we do not resolve to mend the friendship, it becomes harder and harder for us to be reconciled. Just as in a human relationship, if we hurt a friend long enough and do not use every hurtful occasion to build back the relationship, the friendship, then we lose touch with that person. And in the end we do not even speak anymore. We must resolve not to sin, so that the Son and the Father may take pleasure in us. We know that it is the Holy Spirit that brings us back to the Son and to the Father Who shows us the path we must take in order to grow into this divine friendship once again. Because we do not want to fall into sin again we must take concrete measures. And we should do this before we enter into the confessional. Let us not leave it to the priest to help us. You and I, with the Lord’s grace, before we enter the confessional, we have examined our conscience, we have allowed the Lord to bring the sorrow of what we have done to our mind and heart, and with the Lord’s grace we say ‘Dear Lord what must I do to avoid this sin in the future?’ Before I ever enter in the confessional, if I am a gossip, and there is certain people that I tend to gossip with, I have with the Lord’s grace asked ‘Lord what concretely am I going to do to avoid this sin?’ You may even have to talk to those people and say ‘we got to cut this out’, or occasionally some friendship may not be healthy. What is the definition of friendship? Someone who leads us to the Lord. If a friendship doesn’t do that, then it is not of the Lord’s will for us. A friend is someone who help us to be holy, not one who causes us to sin.
If we have problems with sexual sins, before we even enter the confessional, that sorrow finds a concrete expression by saying ‘Oh Lord what with your grace must I do to help avoid this sin?’ There’s a real concrete plan of action.
All the while we are doing this we realize that by our own strength we’ll never have enough not to sin, but with our strength united to the grace of the Lord, He can help us. The best plan of action in the world will not keep us from sinning if by ourselves, if we do not turn to the Lord. And it is His grace that is strong and enables our resolution to bear fruit.
Because we do not want to fall into sin again we must take concrete measures. We resolve to be watchful over our actions and to thank God when we are successful in avoiding sin.
So you and I, when we go to confession, we try to tackle one thing at a time, we try to go before our Lord before we ever receive forgiveness and say ‘dear Lord with Your grace this is what I will do to avoid sin’.
It is a good thing each day for us to examine our conscience and to ask at the end of each day ‘dear Lord how have I cooperated with You in loving, serving and praying to You. And Lord, how have I failed.’ And then each day, with the examination of conscience, I’m examining ‘how Dear Lord am I living up to the resolution that I have made?’
So you and I, the sorrow for our sins, should have a concrete expression in some plan of concrete action. Something that we will avoid, something that we will do that could be a help to us in avoiding this sin that we are aware of.
And then we come to the fourth step of making a good confession; and that is walking through that door, walking through the confessional door. That’s the fourth step, not the first step; not the first but the fourth. All of these things have taken place, Lord willing, before we enter confession. We really need to let there be a time to examine our conscience, for a sorrow, for the concrete plan of action. And then we enter into the confessional. Does that make sense? There must be the preparation that the Lord does; the tilling of the soil that makes ready our hearts for the reception or our Lord’s forgiveness.
Confession is the last step, not the first step in our attempt to be reconciled with the Lord. When we go to confession, we remember what it cost Jesus to give this Sacrament to us. As we walk into the confessional we say ‘dear Lord, by Your blood you are about to forgive me’. We confess as members of a community, not as individuals standing alone. The Church dispenses the Sacrament, rightfully so in the Church. Not in our private homes, not usually through private appointments, but with the schedule of the Church, in the place of the Church. The lines in which we wait are a part themselves of the Sacrament of Confession.
We have sinned publicly against the Lord, and so we come to a public place to confess our sins. It makes sense; by our sins we have separated ourselves from the community of the Church. We seek healing by coming to the Church; and even the fact that we have to summit our schedule to the schedule of the Church is a real humility. Our waiting in long lines is a sense we are doing a penance and we acknowledge the consequences of what we have done.
Some times people by the time they get into confession (the long line), they’re pretty frazzled, they’ve waited sometimes over an hour. But see that time of waiting, see that as the patience in this forbearance of waiting as a penance in itself.  Confessing in this way cost us something, the lines that we wait in are part of the humility that goes along with recognition of our sins. Now with fewer priests, the lines are getting longer.
And so, see the line itself as an honest humbling of ourselves before the Lord.
When we go into confession we should confess our sins with as little fuss as possible. It really shouldn’t take a great deal of time, unless it’s been a long time since your last confession; confession should not take a great, great deal of time.
Adrian VonSpire says this: "One should confess with as little fuss as possible only the naked sins". And so what she’s saying is, we avoid the danger of getting a long explanation... "This happened, and this happened and this happened so this." Sometimes it will be a minute or two before somebody gets to the sin that lays underneath all the explanation leading up to it. And so, what is important is that we have examine our conscience. Our Lord’s grace has allowed us to distill into a really relatively few words the depth of what it is we have done, of what we have failed to do before the Lord; and in simple, honest, straightforward words we place before the Lord what we have done. We must never absolve ourselves by finding excuses; we speak simply, and we let the Lord do the absolving. And that’s something that we have to be careful about; when we start using lots and lots of words to describe our sins, the danger is that we are then seeking to find excuses for what we have done.
What Adrian VonSpire is saying is "We speak simply", we don’t try to absolve ourselves, we let the Lord do the absolving. And so the actual act of confession is so simple; we come into the confessional either kneeling or sitting, and in a simple way place before the Lord with as much depth as we can what we have done and what we have failed to do. And all of that we say is a fruit of our contemplation of the Lord; looking at our Lord’s life and how ours is so different from His, and how particularly it is different.
And then we come to the fifth part of the Sacrament, and that is the priest’s words to us; the exhortation from the priest. And sometimes we tend to overlook that, and sometimes the priest’s words aren’t particularly enlightening, they don’t seem, but what Adrian VonSpire is saying is: "It’s important that we listen carefully to the words of the priest, and despite whatever his human weaknesses are, those words are the words that the Lord has for us." That those are words that the Lord is giving to us through the grace of the Holy Spirit; and we listen carefully to them, letting the Lord give whatever fruit possible to us through the words of the priest.
And then the sixth part of the sacrament is the absolution that we receive at the words and the actions of the priest. The priest says the words, the most important of which are "I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" and with an outstretched hand, so like the outstretched hand of the Lord upon those whom He healed and those whom He forgave, the Lord through the office of the priest, the sign of the cross, absolves our sins.
You and I then, we listen with great longing for the words of the Lords forgiveness that come to us through the office of the priest. It seems impossible that a priest can forgive sins; he does so through the office of the priesthood of Christ. We receive this words with confidence that comes from the institution of the Sacrament on Easter, the day of our Lord’s resurrection.
We must be careful that we do not receive the words of absolution in a presumptuous way, where we find ourselves thinking ‘Well I’ve already gone through the line, I’ve done all the waiting, the sins are forgiven’. No, we wait with humility for the forgiveness of the Lord through the Church.
We are also careful to avoid scrupulosity. Being scrupulous, where even after the words are spoken we are convinced somehow that we are not forgiven; that we are not worthy of being forgiven. That somehow the Lord won’t forgive us. There is a subtle form of selfishness in that; because our attention is upon ‘me’, rather than on the Lord. When I’m convinced that I am not forgiven, or I am not worthy of being forgiven, it is a subtle temptation to focus upon myself and all of my failings rather than to be focused upon the Lord who has forgiven me.
And then lastly there is a performance of our penance, the doing of a penance. And we do that as quickly as we can; and the penance that we do is usually very light, unless is a ‘mean’ priest, usually the penance is very light. Usually its an Our Father and three Hail Mary’s, or praying of a decade of the Rosary or something quite light. Every so often the priest will give a heavier penance, but usually its a very light penance. And some times I think people almost think ‘well what’s the purpose of this? Isn’t this kind of a silly ritual? Here I have confessed all of these sins and the priest tells me to say an Our Father and a Hail Mary; what is the purpose of that?’ It really is wonderful actually; because when we sin, there must be a punishment. When we sin there must be a punishment; every parent raising a child knows that, right? If their child does something wrong, if you are a loving parent there’s some punishment; its a way of teaching, its a way of raising your children. And so, there is always a consequence to your child’s sin; there is something that happens, and they’ll remember it the next time. And so, the penance that you are given is a punishment; and you may say ‘well, an Our Father and a Hail Mary, that’s not much of a punishment for what we’ve done’, and that’s exactly the point. Because is Christ Jesus the Lord that carries the burden; it is He who has paid the punishment. And the very lightness of the punishment we receive in the face of what we have done shows that the Lord is carrying the burden for us. It’s really an amazing reality behind that, when you and I do a penance that seems so absurdly light in comparison with what we have done. You and I, we say the penance, we do the punishment realizing ‘dear Lord, you have made all this so easy because you have borne the burden in the heat of the battle and the day’.
There’s the story of the Cure d’ Ars, I think I told you this last week, about how people came to him for confession from all over France, and he was criticized for giving such a light penances; and the Cure of Ars said: "That’s OK, I do their penances for them at night, so that they don’t have the heavy burden." He performed very heavy penances upon himself and he said "I do this so that their burden can be a lighter one." In other words he did the penances for them. In a sense, our Lord, by the lightness of our penance, we look upon the cross and we say "Dear Lord, You have borne the burden, you’ve borne the burden."
How often do you and I go to confession? How often should we go. We know that the minimum for every Catholic is once a year; for all practical purposes is minimal once a year. The teaching of the Church is that if you are aware of great sin you must go at least once a year. And as I’ve often said, I can’t imagine myself going a whole year without a grave sin; so I think that for me binds me to go in at least once a year. But I think for the serious Christian, once a month is a good norm for us. If we go less than once a month it becomes difficult for us to examine our conscience in real depth; it becomes difficult for us to let that sorrow and the resolutions that we made to avoid sin to really bear fruit. Sometimes we’re just so overwhelmed by the amount of time, the amount of what has happened that it becomes difficult for us. I thing if we go once a month, the examination of conscience, the sorrow is frequent enough there’s able to be very concrete examination of conscience, real concrete resolutions that we make.
I think there’s a danger sometimes when people can go too often. Some times people will get in the habit of going weekly or even some times even more frequently. I think there is some danger there, because sometimes those confessions it’s difficult when it’s that often for there to be the adequate examination of conscience and sorrow that needs to be present. So I think once a month is a good norm for us.
If we are aware of a mortal sin, or grave sin, then by all means, we go as soon as we possibly can; we let no time pass when we are aware of a grave dangerous sin that we have committed.
So you and I, I hope this has been some help to you, the steps of going to confession, the examination of conscience, from that the fruit of sorrow; that sorrow expresses itself on a concrete resolution to avoid sin.
Oh Lord, death before sin. I then come into confession, I state simply but with depth what needs to be forgiven by the Lord, I listen humbly to the words of the priest, expecting the Holy Spirit to speak to me through him; I then receive the words of absolution, with absolute conviction that because of the gift of the Lord to the Church in this Sacrament, the whole cycle of sin and doubt and guilt comes to an end and I stand forgiven before the Lord; and then  I perform a penance which is so ridiculously light in light of what I’ve done,  so that  I look upon the cross upon the Lord who has borne the burden for me.