Forgiveness and our Civil Life

As I asked in my last post, how do we move beyond a life of civil engagement informed by resentment? The recently Archpastoral Message of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah for Sanctity of Life Sunday offers us the beginning of an answer. His Beatitude writes:

Our life as human beings is not given to us to live autonomously and independently. This, however, is the great temptation: to deny our personhood, by the depersonalization of those around us, seeing them only as objects that are useful and give us pleasure, or are obstacles to be removed or overcome. This is the essence of our fallenness, our brokenness. With this comes the denial of God, and loss of spiritual consciousness. It has resulted in profound alienation and loneliness, a society plummeting into the abyss of nihilism and despair. There can be no sanctity of life when nothing is sacred, nothing is holy. Nor can there be any respect for persons in a society that accepts only autonomous individualism: there can be no love, only selfish gratification. This, of course, is delusion. We are mutually interdependent.

Rooted as it is in pride and self-aggrandizement, is a symptom of my fallenness, of my futile and self-defeating attempts to live a life of radical autonomy and independence (what Robert Bellah somewhat more precisely calls "ontological individualism"). When I reduce my neighbor to the harm he has done me I also reduce myself to the harm that I have suffered. Resentment is a false ontology by which I only disallow my neighbor to be anything other than my enemy and myself to be anything other than a victim.

Resentment, as with "All the sins against humanity, abortion, euthanasia, war, violence, and victimization of all kinds, are the results of depersonalization" Metropolitan Jonah argues. His Beatitude continues,

Whether it is "the unwanted pregnancy", or worse, "the fetus" rather than "my son" or "my daughter;" whether it is "the enemy" rather than Joe or Harry (maybe Ahmed or Mohammed), the same depersonalization allows us to fulfill our own selfishness against the obstacle to my will. How many of our elderly, our parents and grandparents, live forgotten in isolation and loneliness? How many Afghan, Iraqi, Palestinian and American youths will we sacrifice to agonizing injuries and deaths for the sake of our political will? They are called "soldiers," or "enemy combatants" or "civilian casualties" or any variety of other euphemisms to deny their personhood. But ask their parents or children! Pro-war is NOT pro-life! God weeps for our callousness.

Moving from the spiritual life to our life of civic engagement, I think it is important to understand that the absence of resentment, our own personal struggles against the evils of ontological individualism and the depersonalization of self and others are not policy decisions. They are rather a precondition for our virtuous involvement in the civil realm.

Let me go further, whether we are taking political leadership or a leadership role in the home, the work place, or the Church, all demand from me that I first confront my own bitterness and resentment. Only then are we able to find "forgiveness for those who have hurt us," and live "free from the rage that binds us in despair."Whether we are engaging the social world around us as a citizen, a worker, a parent or a minister of the Gospel of Christ, as Christians we know that our work must begin in repentance. "Repentance is not about beating ourselves up for our errors and feeling guilty; that is a sin in and of itself!" as Metropolitan Jonah remind us. Such an approach only engenders guilt and that "keeps us entombed in self-pity. All sin is some form of self-centeredness, selfishness." Real repentance "is the transformation of our minds and hearts as we turn away from our sin, and turn to God, and to one another."

Repentance means to forgive. Forgiveness does not mean to justify someone's sin against us. When we resent and hold a grudge, we objectify the person who hurt us according to their action, and erect a barrier between us and them. And, we continue to beat ourselves up with their sin. To forgive means to overcome that barrier, and see that there is a person who, just like us, is hurt and broken, and to overlook the sin and embrace him or her in love. When we live in a state of repentance and reconciliation, we live in a communion of love, and overcome all the barriers that prevented us from fulfilling our own personhood.

Reflecting on what I've read these last few days about the new presidential administration I worry that whether or not people agree with the policy of the new president, there seems to be a noticeable absence of forgiveness. Both from the political left and right, even when I hear things that agree with the Gospel, I hear an echo of resentment, of old grudges and remembrances of past injustices committed against the speaker or his or her own cause.

While matters of public policy are important, they are secondary. I need to look first to my own heart and only then, in the measure of my own repentance and willingness to forgive those who have harmed me, proceed in the civil realm.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Resentment and our Civic Life

Needless to say, the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44^th president of the United States has generated a good amount of interest in both in the US and overseas. Some of what has been said or written about President Obama has been laudatory, other things less so.

Reading through the different viewpoints about our new president, it is difficult for me to escape the sense that—whatever else people think about the new administration—much of what is said is fueled by a sense of resentment.

In the spiritual life, and our civic life as well, resentment is a dangerous emotion to which to give in. This is especially the case when there is some justice, some truth, to our resentment.

The danger of resentment is that it parodies repentance, of the sober self-examination that is at the heart of the spiritual life. When I give in to resentment I see the fault as wholly in you, but not in myself. Resentment is a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) form of self-aggrandizement. Or, in a word, pride.

St Maximos the Confessor, whose memory the Orthodox Church celebrates today, warns us that whatever we might think, resentment reflects not my neighbor's failure, but my own. My neighbor's fault, he says, is what I use "to justify the evil hatred" that has taken hold of me. The saint continues and tells his monastic readers:

even if you are held by resentment, persist in your praises, and then you will easily return to the same salutary love. Do not, because of your hidden resentment, adulterate your usual praise of your brother in your conversations with the other brethren, surreptitiously intermingling your words with [references to his] shortcomings and condemnation. Instead, make use of unmixed praise and genuinely pray for him, as if you were praying for yourself, and thus you will quickly be delivered from this destructive hatred.

In the context of his own work, Maximos is dealing with gossip and back biting in a monastic community not the life of a citizen in a democracy, much less the increasingly complex world of national and international affairs. Taking his different context into consideration, however, I think that the psychology that underlies St Maximos's teaching is nevertheless applicable not only our spiritual lives, but also the civic realm as well.

Let me explain.

At its core, resentment is not the pain of caused by injustice. Rather, resentment is the unwillingness on my part to see you EXCEPT in terms of how you've hurt me. Not only that, whether the harm is great or small, real or imagined, resentment is also the unwillingness on my part to see myself in any terms other than in the lose I've suffered. The defining characteristic of resent then is the reduction of self and other to the harm done by a moral failure.

None of this is to say that the harm done me is (necessarily) insignificant or unreal. Nor do I mean to imply that the harm should simply be ignored or minimized. But to my resentful heart, the harm becomes if not the whole of the story, the one, indisputable and undeniable fact of my relation with my neighbor, with God and my self.

So what then shall we do? I will attempt an answer in my next post.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

More Thoughts on Trust and Obedience

Roger Dooley, president of Dooley Direct, LLC. has an interesting on the psychology and biochemistry of trust. The post I think bears directly on our conversation here on the role of obedience in confession and spiritual direction. While not always immediately applicable, his blog, which combines "knowledge of emerging phenomena like neuromarketing and social networking with decades of hands-on marketing experience" brings an helpful perspective to pastoral work.

Dooley asks, "Want your customers to trust you?" Well, if you do, "Demonstrate that you trust THEM!" While the immediate concern in the post is with marketing, it is based on sound science and so, I think anyway, it is applicable to pastoral life as well.

As I argued earlier, obedience is the fruit of trust. If this is the case, then (as Dooley work argues) clergy can foster a healthy and appropriate form of obedience in a parish context by our willingness to first demonstrate that we trust our parishioners to be responsible for their own spiritual formation and direction.

I was first introduced to the idea of spiritual self-direction in the writing of the late Fr Adrian van Kaam. In one of his earlier works, Dynamics of Spiritual Self Direction, van Kaam argues that necessarily all spiritual direction must embrace an element of spiritual self-direction. Like it or not, I cannot live a spiritual life for someone else nor can they live it for me. I can pray for you certainly. But I cannot pray for you in the sense of praying in place of you praying.

Practically this means that if I hope to offer any direction to someone, I have to trust them to make their own decisions, to live their own life. And so again, if I want you to trust me, I have to first demonstrate by my words and deeds that I trust you.

"This may seem counterintuitive," Dooley argues, "but there's sound neuromarketing reasoning behind it." His argument is based in what he characterizes as the function of the "seemingly magical neurochemical, oxytocin, which is a key factor in forming trust relationships." Dooley quotes the work of "Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University and unofficial oxytocin evangelist."

As a young man, Zak "was the victim of a small-scale swindle. He now concludes that a key factor in getting him to fall for the con was that the swindler demonstrated that he trusted Zak." He quotes Zak that

The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable… the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. "I need your help" is a potent stimulus for action. [From The Moral Molecule - How to Run a Con.]

According to Zak the biochemical basis of trust is found in what he calls "THOMAS - The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System." He continues:

THOMAS' effects are modulated by our large prefrontal cortex that houses the "executive" regions of the brain. THOMAS is all emotion, while the prefrontal cortex is deliberative… THOMAS causes us to empathize with others, the key to building social relationships.

Sales (Dooley's concern) and pastoral care (our concern here) are "NOT a con game" and any salesperson (and spiritual director or priest for that matter), "who treats it as one is unlikely to be successful for very long." It might sound unimaginable, not to say offensive, to suggest that any spiritual director or priest might see his or her work as a con game, it is not unheard of that some do betray the trust put in them by spiritual children and parishioners. (The literature on clerical misconduct refers to the misconduct on a great sin against the trust people place in them. But I leave this for any other time.) In both sales and pastoral care "building trust IS an essential part of the . . . process, and anything that we can do to foster that will pay dividends" in whether or concern is financial or spiritual.

So how can we build trust?

Based on Zak's work, Dooley suggest that we can do this first and foremost by "behaving in a transparent and trustworthy manner." From the point of view of developmental psychology, a child develops a sense of trust in their parents through the parent's consistent, demonstrated willingness and ability to meet the child's physical and emotional needs. And so, we can say that a key to behaving in a trustworthy manner is consistency in manner and expectations for those who are entrusted to our care. In many parishes, to take only one example, Liturgy more often than not does not start on time. Or, and more significantly, in some communities there might be clearly different expectations for different groups in the parish. For example, "converts" are expected to fast and come to confession, but the vast majority of the parish who were baptized as infants are not.

Ironically, the problem with holding one group in the parish to relatively minimal standards is not simply that it divides the parish into factions, but that the priest does not extend that liberality to all. Liberality, it is important to stress, is not an end in itself. Part of fostering trust is not only leaving people free, but doing so intentionally and with a clearly and publicly articulated explanation of what is being done and that this is being done because the priest trusts his parishioners to direct their own spiritual lives.

A conversation about the role of trust in spiritual direction and confession is also a conversation about leadership. While I will have to leave a fuller discussion for another day, effective leadership emerges out of a sense of vocation (personal & communal). At a minimum, vocation or calling is the idea that my life is part of a larger story that is told primarily--though not exclusively--by God. Viewed vocationally, the story of my life, embraces not only me, but you, the whole human family and all creation.

In order to foster trust between us, I must trust you and to do this means that I must come to see that this larger story isn't simply something of which I am a part, like a character in a story. Yes, I find myself, my vocation, in this larger story (again, like a character in a novel) BUT I also find this larger story being told in the small details of my own life. In other words, trust requires that I am come to see myself both a character in the story, and the story itself.

So much of the violence that we see in human life, and in the life of the Church, is I think because we live lives absence a sense of our own vocation--absent any tangible sense of a call that orders my life (both from outside AND within), what else can I do but impose what is inside me on what is outside of me?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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More thoughts on Spiritual Direction & Confession: Trust & Obedience

My original post went up at 5.00 am and, well, needed a good proofreading and edit (I pray well enough in the early morning, but I'm not much of an editor at the best of times!).

My apologizes for any lack of clarity. The revised text starts after my signature.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Obedience in a monastic setting presupposes a shared life characterized not only by mutual respect and trust but also a willingness to share in the consequences of any and all decisions made. When the abbot or an elder in the monastery gives an obedience to a novice, he share with the monk the consequences of both the monk’s success and failure. If the meal is poorly prepared, for example, it isn’t simply the novice is suffers a bad dinner but the abbot and the whole community as well. As a friend of mine puts it, the elder has "skin in the game.” Or to use more formal language, obedience in a monastic setting reflects the in investment of both the elder and the novice in the outcome of any direction that's given.

Unfortunately many Orthodox Christians do not understand what I would call the human or lived context of monastic obedience. Many have a very abstract and mechanistic understanding of obedience. Frequently, to illustrate my point, I hear of a parish priest giving an obedience to a parishioner. My objection to this is not with the concept of obedience per se, but that the priest does not, and cannot, share tangibly in the consequences of the parishioner’s potential failure. Because he is largely insulated from the consequences of his advice, a priest (whether married or monastic) is not in a position to require obedience from a parishioner the way an elder can in a monastery. Absent this personal share in the other’s failure, the application of a monastic understanding of obedience is simply inappropriate; at a minimum it is immature and fanciful, at its worse, it is abusive and a gateway to all manner of pastoral misconduct.

Whatever might be its other strengths, parish life is not a shared life in the sense that life is shared in the monastic community. This difference is of critical importance, because there can be, or so I would argue, no real obedience apart from a shared life. Put another way, obedience is the fruit of a life of mutual trust and respect, and requires from the one who asks for obedience a shared acceptance of the immediate and long term consequences of directives that are given.

Let me put that a slightly different way.

Obedience is only possible to the degree that there is trust born of real interdependence. Absent this interdependence, absence this mutual dependence of one upon the other, there can be no real obedience.

So now, what does this have to do with confession and spiritual direction?

However a valuable to the spiritual life, obedience is not sui generis. Rather it presupposes a very particular set of social circumstances that are not (and cannot be) fully present in a parish setting. Monastic obedience is the fruit of a life of shared respect and trust in which all parties see themselves as responsible to, and for, each other and share practically in the consequences of decisions.

As a said a moment ago, I often hear of priests, and sometimes parishioners, trying to duplicate monastic obedience in a parochial setting. But doing this (or so it seems to me) is wrongheaded. The reason, and again as I said above, is that we do not share the direct consequences for each other's behavior in the parish in the way in which monastics do in a monastery. When, for example, an abbot gives an obedience to a monk participate in all the liturgical services to be celebrated on a given day at the monastery, he does so with the awareness that it is not possible for the monk to do manual labor for those hours that he is in church. But the work still needs to be done and so a brother who prays eight hours a day in church needs to be replaced by a monk who is able to work of some or all of those eight hours. If this exchange is not made, then the work remains undone and all suffer the consequences.

This is admittedly a crude example but I think it makes the point. In a parish setting or with non-monastic spiritual children, the spiritual father (whether a monastic or parish priest) does not have this kind of an investment in the person to whom he is ministering that an abbot has with a monk of his monastery. Nor, for that matter, does the penitent have that kind of investment in the priest that a novice has in his abbot or elder. And maybe most important of all, the members of parish do not have the kind of investment in the priest (or each other), that the monks in a monastery have one in their abort or one another.

Simply put, in the parish, we all go home, but for the monk the monastery is his home. If life gets too hard for us in a particular parish, or we don’t get along with our parish priest, we can (usually anyway) go to another parish without suffering nearly the dislocation that a monk would in transferring to another monastery.

In my own pastoral praxis, I ask not for obedience but deference, which is to say, I ask simply to be given the benefit of the doubt in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Of necessity this means that I must accept that my decisions, my guidance, my suggestions, are all open to criticism, disagreement, revision, and yes even rejection. More importantly though, none of this is (necessarily) the result of bad will on the part of those involved in the conversation; disagreement is not disobedience.

Does this mean that we do away with obedience in an absolute sense? No of course not. What it does mean, however, is that we need to understand that there are limits to obedience. The limit to obedience is our mutual investment, in our ability and willingness to bear the consequences of our own decisions and the decisions of others.

Obedience can never be asked for, much less demanded. Like trust, of which it is the fruit, obedience can only be itself when it is freely offered and freely received. In one sense, obedience is trust in work clothes—obedience is the less glamorous, more practical, side of trust (and for that matter, respect and love). If as a confessor or spiritual father, I lose sight of the priority of trust, mutual respect and love, I undermine my ministry regardless of the theological orthodoxy of my counsel.

In the Creed, we profess faith in the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” We often, and rightly, think of the Church in institutional terms, as something objective and in a sense external to ourselves. But this is only half the mystery. I am also a part of the Church, and the Church a part of me. I cannot therefore have faith in the institutional aspect of the Church unless, or so it seems to me, I understand that faith in the Church also includes a faith or trust in the members of the Church who are first and foremost my brothers and sisters in Christ. Faith in the Church is a matter of trust in bishops and clergy; it is also a matter of my having trust in my brothers and sisters in Christ and a relative trust in myself. These three elements are not opposed to each other, rather they presuppose and reinforce each other. I would suggest that the ministries of confession and spiritual direction, and in fact in all the Church’s ministries, that we work by God’s grace and our own efforts are in the service fostering this expansive view of trust in self and others.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Some Thoughts on Spiritual Direction & Holy Confession

One of the regular commentators on this blog, Sr. Macrina, in response to my earlier posts on confession asks a number of very interesting questions about the relationship between spiritual direction and Holy Confession:

If you have time, could you say something about the relationship (both in Orthodoxy generally and in how you see it) between spiritual fatherhood / motherhood / direction that is not necessarily an ordained role, and confession.

Related to this, do you have any comments on the differences between spiritual fatherhood in an Orthodox (and also earlier western) context and contemporary western approaches to spiritual direction?

In this blog post, I would like to respond to the first of Sister's to questions, the relationship between spiritual fatherhood and confession. Later, I would like to respond more specifically to the question of spiritual fatherhood and spiritual motherhood in relation to confession. This second question, as well as the whole notion of lay spiritual directors, I think raises a number of very interesting pastoral issues especially as they pertain to the unique vocation of men and women in Christ. A comparison between spiritual fatherhood in an Orthodox context and contemporary western approaches to spiritual direction, will have to wait for another time.

First let me try and clarify the human foundations of confession as a moment of spiritual direction. In this I will focus primarily on what seems to me to be the importance of priest and penitent having some degree shared life that transcends a mere mutual affirmation of the tradition of the Church. Subsequent to this analysis, I want to look at spiritual direction as a lay ministry within the church. But first let's look at confession.

What I often hear from Orthodox laypeople when we talk about confession is that sometimes they'll be told by the priest in confession that confession is not spiritual direction. The sacrament of confession there told is the time when you repent of your sins. If you want spiritual direction, if they want to know who to live their life in Christ, they're told to come back at another time.

Given the many demands that are often made of the parish priest this is not wholly an unreasonable response. Having in the week before Christmas, just to take one example from my own experience, I heard some 20 confessions, I can certainly sympathize with a priest not having the energy, much less time, that spiritual direction requires.

That said however I think it would be good for us to try to understand historically the relationship between what we now call spiritual direction and the sacrament of confession. Since this is a blog post I'm going to need to ask the readers indulgence as I make some rather broad exegetical and historical leaps. Insofar as I'm able to do so I tried to keep my posts under a 1,000mwords. While it helpful discipline for me as a writer, it does not leave me a great deal of time to indulge in exegetical and historical analysis.

Historically, the sacrament confession as we have it today developed out of the monastic practice of the novice on a daily basis revealing his thoughts to his abbot or spiritual elder. As more and more it became the custom of the church to ordained monastics to the episcopate, this monastic practice of confession of thoughts was integrated into the pastoral life of the Church. In other words, personal spiritual direction grounded in a trusting relationship between a spiritual father and his spiritual child, is the context out of which the contemporary practice of confession develops.

One of the things that strikes me as interesting about the relationship between spiritual father and spiritual child in a monastic setting is that the participants shared a common life. By this I mean they shared a regular life of not only of communal prayer and fasting, but manual labor a common table and dependence on one and other for their daily lives. Their relationship in other words was not purely formal but rather we might say domestic. This life of everyday intimacy demanded from the participants a fairly high degree of trust. Yes certainly the novice was dependent upon the elder for spiritual guidance and instruction and so had to trust him.

But the elder was also in a way dependent upon the novice. What I mean by this is nothing particularly extraordinary, nothing that anyone in a family doesn't know already. Food must be prepared, chores must be done, and then there are all the hundreds of ordinary activity that makes up a common life, all of this is a tangible expression of how elder and novice depend one on the other.. And so again, their life was a shared life.

Remember, the model for Orthodox monasticism (and the Catholic monasticism as well for that matter) is the family. Much as in a family, so to in a monastery, a new child changes everything.

Thinking about this relationship of mutual dependence let us turn our attention now to the sacrament of confession.

We tend to think of the sacrament of confession is being more or less unidirectional with regard to self revelation. The penitent comes to the priest and tells the priests his sins and the priest, for his part, is assumed to not be self revelatory.

But is this really the case?

As I said in an earlier post with regard to what it means to hear confessions, the confessor's interaction with the penitent comes out of his own spiritual experience. St. Nicodemus is really very clear about this in his manual of confession. To recap what I said in an earlier post, the saint argues that the confessor cannot heal a sin that he himself has not been healed. Or, to use a more popular American expression, you can't give what you don't got.

This means that as the penitent is revealing himself to the confessor, the confessor is revealing himself to the penitent. Granted the self revelation of the confessor is not the primary point of confession but the fact remains that this is not primary does not mean that the self revelation is absent. And now back briefly to the situation in the monastery.

A common life, a shared life, is only possible with mutual respect and trust. It is out of this shared life of mutual respect and trust that the sacrament of confession grows. And it is the absence of this shared life of mutual respect and trust grounded in holy tradition and a personal encounter, that undermines confession as an event of spiritual direction or formation.

I will in my next post, speak more about the relationship of mutual trust and respect between priest and penitent.

In Christ,

+ Father Gregory

It Is Your Confession, But It Is My Sin—Part II

Taking the saints advice to heart, and thinking about my own earlier work as a therapist, I think it is when he is confronted with "new" sins (or at least sins new to him), that the character, natural talents and spiritual gifts of the confessor are put to the test. It is because of moments such as these that, I at least, have come to appreciate more and more the sacrifice made by soldiers who train for, and participate in, combat.

The soldier trains for war; he learns how to kill his neighbor efficiently. And he learns his art (ideally at least) with a fairly high degree of dispassion and self-possession, that is he learns to fight and kill without anger because he has fostered in himself the virtue of courage.

All this the soldier does not as an end in itself but on behalf of others, his nation, his family and friends, and for those who he will never met and who will in some cases even resent his sacrifice.

The warrior's sacrifice's his life for his nation. Even if he never goes to war, but certainly if he does, he comes to see himself in new ways, as one able and willing to kill. This carries with it a great, almost unimaginable, moral risk. And it is bearing this moral risk that is the heart of his sacrifice.

As with the warrior trained for battle, likewise with the confessor.

When he encounters in others sins that are unknown to him he most find in himself some understanding, some point of convergence between himself, his own struggles and failures, and the life, struggles and failures of the penitent. And he must do this without himself succumbing to the sin that he has newly come to see as a possibility for him. The attentive, self-aware confessor, like the warrior, is only able to do the task set before him by imagining a horror as a possibility for him.

And again, like the warrior, the confessor in each and every confession must proceed in a dispassionate and courageous fashion to face a temptation that he may never before have imagined as possible.

Speaking to the spiritual father, St Nicodemus summarizes the matter in this way:

Next, you must respond to many dangerous subjects in confession. You will hear so many shameful sins of people and so many disgraces and pollutions on account of their passions. Therefore it is necessary that you are either like an impasible sun, which when passing through filthy places remains unspotted, or like that pure dove of Noah, which when passing over so many grimy bodies of those drowned from the flood did not perch upon any of them, or like a silver or gold wash basin, which washes and cleans the dirtiness of others while none of the dirt sticks to it. (Exomologetarion, p. 74)

It is here that the importance of the confessor's own spiritual life, his own life of daily prayer and frequent communion. And it is here that we begin to see the importance of the confessor's willingness to go and prostrate himself as penitent to the very place where, only a moment before, he stood as a witness to God's mercy.

I tell my own spiritual children and parishioners, that the work of confession—like the work of marriage—is first and foremost a personal encounter. To use the language of the old Latin manuals in sacramental theology, the trust between confessor and penitent is the matter of the sacrament of confession. While trust, to be trust, must be mutual, the weight of that trust is bore by the confessor. It is his obligation not simply to root out sin in his own life, but (having entrusted himself first and foremost to Christ our True God), travel in empathy and compassion with the penitent to those areas of the penitent's life where sin and shame have a hold.

The ascetical struggle of the confessor is, however, not simply to see the depths of human shame—this after all is hardly something unknown to the secular therapist. No the confessor's task, his calling and that which is the teleos of his own ascetical struggles is to point out that it is there, in the darkest place of the penitent's life, that the redeeming, forgiving, and healing Light of Christ is to be found.

The confessor, St John of Krondstat reminds me, is a witness to divine mercy. This requires, as I said above, not only that the confessor root out his own sin but that he recognize that no sin is alien to him since all sin is but itself only a symptom of our common and personal estrangement from God. It is the reality this common estrangement in his own life that the confessor must confront and struggle against again and again each time he hears confession. And it is only in this way, to return to St Nicodemus' advice, that he can hope to heal the penitent's sin.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

It Is Your Confession, But It Is My Sin—Part I

As I promised, here is the last installment of my series on Holy Confession. In this section I want to reflect with you on the challenges of the sacrament of confession for the confessor. The more I confessions I've heard, the more I have come to appreciate how each confession is not only about the penitent's sin but also my own.

This all became clear for me when I sat down to read the Exomologetarion: A Manual of Confession, St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. Toward the beginning of the work the saint has an interesting observation about why a confessor is unable to heal a particular sin. Whether he is too gentle or too harsh, to willing to excuse or to too hold someone accountable, the reason is the same: the confessor has not himself repented of the sin being confessed. Or, as the saint himself says to the spiritual father you

must have the passions healed and conquered, because if you unjustly seek to heal the passions of others before you have healed your own passions, you will hear the words, "Physician, heal thyself" (Lk 4.23), and: "A physician of others, himself full of sores," the reason being, if you truly wish to be an enlightener and perfector of others, you must first be enlightened and perfected yourself, so as to be able to also enlighten and perfect others. In short, you must first have and then afterwards give to others. (p. 73)

Let me say first off, I don't think that the Exomologetarion is a particularly helpful book for lay people looking for spiritual reading. While some of what St Nicodemus has to say, especially his anthropological observations about the inner life, is certainly useful, the text itself is meant more priest confessors and not a lay audience.

That said, as I have thought about St Nicodemus' advice, I see the wisdom of what he says. Certainly I see its importance in my own ministry hearing confessions: I am powerless as a confessor when I am confronted with sin in your life that I have not rooted out in my own heart. At a minimum, I must at least be struggling against the sin the penitent confesses if I am to be of any value. This is not to deny the grace of the sacrament. But the reality is—and again St Nicodemus makes this point—I can undermine your repentance by the lack of my own struggle against the very sin you confess.

What Nicodemus tells me is of unquestionable value not only for my work as a confessor, but also as a preacher and a therapist. Too often, in the case of preachers, a priest or minister will preach about which he has no personal experience. Worse still, it is not uncommon to hear a man preach against a sin that he has neither rooted out from his own heart or is even struggling against. When this happens, the best that can happen is that the sermon falls flat and fails to touch anyone. At worst the preacher uses the truth of the Gospel like a whip and his words wound without healing the hearts of his listeners.

In a counseling relationship as well Nicodemus offers us some insight. The antipsychiatric writer Thomas Szasz argues in his work that diagnostic terminology often serves to marginalize the patient. Taken to the all too common extreme, diagnostic categories facilitate my dehumanizing the patient and allow me to imagine that we do not share a common humanity, a common struggle for happiness.

As I said, there is no question that Nicodemus offers the confessor rich insight into the kind of spiritual life and ascetical struggle that is essential to his ministry as a confessor. But his work leaves me with a problem: What about those sins which I have not committed or toward which I am not attracted?

Unlike St Nicodemus I, as with many Orthodox and Catholic priests especially here in the States, are often called upon to serve communities that are highly diverse. We typically don't have the degree of cultural, social and linguistic homogeneity that Nicodemus seems to take for granted both for himself and his readers. Without going into the details, even coming to the priesthood with some professional experience in community mental health, I have some times heard, how shall I put this discretely, "new information."

The problem then is this: Yes, I know I can only heal sins that I have rooted out or at least am actively struggling against. But what about those sins that are alien to the confessor, what is he, what do I, do with then?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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•  Five Rules for a Spiritual Father - Vultus Christi
  
• Confession and Evangelism: The Indifferent Penitent
  
• Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: the Regretful Penitent
• Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Confessing the Angry Penitent
• Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Understanding the Angry Penitent
  
  

Five Rules for a Spiritual Father - Vultus Christi

Since we've been taking about confession the last few post, I thought these words from Father Mark's (a Roman Catholic priest in the Tulsa, OK diocese) blog Vultus Christi would be of interest. Orthodox readers might take pause slightly at Father's reference to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but (that aside) his advice is very and should be the baseline for what is expected of priests.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory


1. Before meeting anyone for spiritual counsel, humble yourself profoundly before God, acknowledging your inability to do the least good for souls without Him. "Separated from me," says the Lord, "you have no power to do anything" (Jn 15:5). "We have a treasure, then, in our keeping, but its shell is of perishable earthenware; it must be God, and not anything in ourselves, that gives it its sovereign power" (2 Cor 4:7).

2. Offer this spiritual work as an act of love to Our Lord Who says: "Believe me, when you did it to one of the least of my brethren here, you did it to me" (Mt 25:40).

3. Efface yourself as much as possible so that Christ alone may act. You are but the humble friend and servant of the Divine Bridegroom. "The bride," that is the soul, "is for the Bridegroom; but the bridegroom's friend, who stands by and listens to Him, rejoices too, rejoices at hearing the Bridegroom's voice . . . . He must become more and more, I must become less and less" (Jn 3:29-30).

Talk and act in the name of Jesus Christ and in utter dependence on His Spirit. "If any man speak, let him speak, as one who utters oracles of God. If any man minister, let him do it by the power, which God supplies: that in all things God may be honoured through Jesus Christ" (1 P 4:11).

4. Seek not to attach souls to yourself. Beware of hidden motives of a self-serving natural order. Trusting in the grace of the Holy Spirit, orient those who come to you ad Patrem, towards the Father alone, Who reveals Himself in the Eucharistic Face and in the Heart of Jesus Christ.

5. Consecrate each and every soul who comes to you to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Mother of Mercy and Mediatrix of All Graces. Exercise your spiritual paternity in synergy with her motherhood. "And His Mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever He tells you'" (Jn 2:6).

Confession and Evangelism: The Indifferent Penitent

Now that the All-American Council is behind me and before I need to focus on the Called & Gifted Workshop my parish is hosting the Friday and Saturday, let me return to my thoughts on the role of Holy Confession and the evangelism of the faithful.

Though not without their own challenges, I find ministering to the regretful penitent and the angry penitent easier—and frankly less frustrating—than the indifferent penitent. That said, let me put aside my own personal struggles and ask you to reflect with me on the experience of being indifferent.

A bit of cliché (often heard in youth and young adult ministry) though it is, it is true I think that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. To nurture indifference for someone is not to hate them, but rather to invalidate them. We are mistaken if we imagine indifference—either in others or in ourselves—as neutrality or passivity. Indifference is rather an active refusal to see the good, the true, or the beautiful in something or someone. Remember, simply because something is, it is good and so calls me to transcend my plans and preoccupations.

An indifferent response to the Gospel is certainly related to indifference in the general sense. Especially in confession though there is an added quality that the priest ought not to overlook in either the penitent or himself. Specifically, indifference embodies a rupture in the delicate, and dynamic, relationship between the subjective and objective dimensions of life.

Culture, tradition, language, are the tools that help me to first discover and then express myself. Self-knowledge and self-expression, in other words, are always both personal and social. Or, as one of my altar boys told me one Sunday when I asked him why he dyed his hair jet black, "I wanted to be an individual like all my friends."

In my experience, the indifferent penitent does not see the Gospel or the Tradition of the Church as being in the service of their own self-discovery and self-expression. Not only that, they often see these as in opposition to their own self-discovery and expression.

The confessor must help the person find the natural place of conversion between the person and the Gospel. To paraphrase James Fowler (a psychologists who studies faith development), the confessor must help the indifferent penitent find his own personal story in the larger Christian story AND find that larger Christian story as it is written in the smaller story of his own life.

Let me explain.

It is hard for me to read the Psalms, which I do most mornings and evenings, without recognizing myself, my own experiences and struggles, in the words of King David. Reading the Psalms I discover the story of my life in words that Jews and Christians have been praying for centuries. This means that Psalms are not foreign to me. Yes, they are David's story. And yes as in traditional Orthodox biblical hermeneutics, the Psalms I can see in them the prayers of Christ, it is He Who referred to in Psalm 1 for example, as the "blessed" Man Who follows not the counsel of the wicked. But they are also my story, the express my feelings, my thoughts in times of sorrow and persecution and joy.

Not only that though. In time I come to see the Psalms in me. The Psalms are also a part of me—I realize that the great struggles of David and Jesus are also played out in my life.

Through his questions and observations this is what the confessor needs to help the indifferent penitent come to see. This is not telling the person that that he must conform to the Gospel (which is unlikely to be received well if the penitent see the Gospel as foreign to his experience) as to some external norm. Rather, the confessor must listen carefully to the themes in the person's confession (scant though information might be) until he (the confessor) can hear the points of convergence between the penitent and the Gospel.

Clearly this requires more than a little skill and insight on the part of the confessor. Next week, after my parish's Called and Gifted Workshop this weekend, I will conclude this series by offering some thoughts about what qualities and skills the priest might bring to the prophetic ministry of Holy Confession.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Confessing the Angry Penitent

The confessor, I think, has to bear in mind that anger is not simply rooted developmentally in earlier vices but in a profound shift in the penitent's self-understanding. To put the matter simply, the penitent had a relatively narrow, but functional, vision of himself that has now proven to be false. This sudden shift in awareness is frightening and in evokes in the person a profound and radically unsettling sense of betrayal. "The person I always thought I was," so a more self-aware penitent might say, "has now proven itself to be false. I am not who I thought I was. I don't know who I am. All I know is that I have been lying to myself about who I am. My life is a lie."

We ought not to underestimate the terror that the person feels as his accustomed frame of reference for himself as well as the world of persons, events and things, is shattered by a confrontation with the Gospel. It is a psychologically and spiritually simplistic of us not to hear the real sense of existential disruption embodied in St Paul's words in Ephesians:

This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. (4:17-24)

The change that Paul alludes to here is not like learning how to operate a new camera or trying to comprehend a difficult idea. No, Paul's words point to a radical transformation of how I view not only myself, but also God, my neighbor and creation. I am no longer in control, the world of persons, events and things are revealed as radically NOT at my disposal and NOT subjected to my own self-centered desires.

Or, to put it more simply, anger is my response to the realization that I am not God.

It is precisely this conflict that the proclamation of the Gospel provokes. And it is this conflict that the spiritual father must respond to in confession. How might he do this?

Again, Paul offers us an idea.

Therefore, putting away lying, "Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," for we are members of one another. "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. (4:25-32)

The confessor, as he does with the regretful penitent, needs to attend to the traces of grace in the penitent's life. With the angry penitent, however, this means (1) pointing out as Paul does the comforting presence of God in the person's life and (2) being willing in word and deed to model with the penitent God's comforting response to his fear.

It is tempting simply to respond to penitent's anger and overlook the concrete fears that inspire the anger. But this, I think, is a mistake. Confessors have a unique opportunity to help people give voice to their fears. More than that though, we have the great calling of giving voice to God's comforting presence in life of the fearful person not only though sentimental sermonizing, but by embodying in word and deed a kind and gentle presence at that moment in a person's life when he least believes kindness and gentleness are possible for him.

In my next post, I want to reflect with you on what is for me the most challenging person to minister to, the indifferent penitent.

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Understanding the Angry Penitent

You may be wondering why it is important to consider how spiritual fathers minister to different classes of penitents in confession. While it might be useful for clergy, why would lay people care?

The simple answer is this: Confession is an essential part of the spiritual life of the all the faithful—laity and clergy. While we ought not to reduce the spiritual life to our participation as penitents in confession, it is important to keep in mind that confession is one very important part of what we are preparing to do. Confession is in a real sense a goal or teleos of all of the Church evangelistic and educational ministry. We are forming people not simply for various ministry, but for confession. In fact I would argue that as an essential part of the Church's prophetic ministry confession is the ordinary context within which we all of us come to understand ever more fully what the Father in Christ and through the Holy has called us to do.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the angry penitent.

We are accustomed to thinking of anger in terms of affect, of emotion. But in the Church's spiritual anthropology, and I'm thinking here especially of St John Cassian, affect is only one possible manifestation of anger.

Before it is emotion, it is according to Cassian a vice, a habit of thought and action that he describes as a "somber disorder" in the soul. Just as "regret" is the absence of gratitude (and specifically, gratitude to God for one's life), anger (again according to Cassian) is the absence of "discernment of what is for our own good, . . . [ and of] spiritual knowledge." ("Eight Vices," Philokalia, vol I, p. 82)

When gripped by anger we unable to "fulfill our good intentions, nor [can we] participate" in divine life. All of is rooted in a blinded intellect that has become "impervious to the contemplation of the true, divine light." (p. 82)

The angry person then is not only ineffectual in his attempts to do good, he behaves in a manner that is ultimately, and sometimes proximately and even immediately, self-destructive. And all of this because "No matter what provokes it, anger blinds the soul's eyes, preventing it from seeing the Sun of Righteousness." The saint continues,

Leaves, whether of gold or lead, placed over the eyes obstruct the sight equally, for the value of gold does not effects the blindness it produces. . . . [Anger] whether reasonable or unreasonable, obstructs our spiritual vision." (p. 83)

As well as a description of anger, Cassian offers us an understanding of both its developmental roots and consequences. Cassian, as with many of the writers found in the Philokalia, holds to a dynamic understanding of the human person that anticipates in broad strokes the later finds of developmental psychology.

In "Eight Vices," we learn that anger is the rooted in gluttony, unchastity and avarice. Of these three, it is gluttony which is the developmental origin of anger. In a nutshell, what is for the infant a virtue, or at least a necessity is for the adult a vice. And it is from anger that there develops other, increasingly more serious vices: dejection, listlessness, self-esteem (less in the modern sense and more in the sense of autarkic self-aggrandizement of pathological narcissism or even sociopathy), and pride.

But it is anger I think that is the lynchpin between the (relatively) minor sins gluttony, unchastity and avarice and the increasingly more deadly sins which follow. At its core anger arise when the person's desires are frustrated. Anger is the announcement that I have encountered, and rebelled against, the limits of my own life and most now decide either to accept the limits imposed upon me or withdrawn into a life of increasingly deadly and death deal fantasy.

In my next post, I want to reflect with you briefly on how as a confessor I respond to the angry penitent (at least in my better, more grace-filled moments).

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: the Regretful Penitent

My last post spoke about the place of education in the evangelism of the faithful. I argued that in the pastoral life of the Church education is not merely intellectual, but at the service of helping people see the outlines of the Gospel in their own hearts. This in turn can lead to a moment of crisis that typically leads in turn to in one of three ways: regret (a global sorrow for one's life), anger (a spiritual blindness or some other negative emotion often directed at the spiritual father, and ultimately God), and indifference (in which the person ignores or minimizes what is heard). I also said that these three responses are, or at least can be, grist for the mill in Holy Confession. In this and the following two posts, I want to look briefly at how I handle each response as a confessor.

Again, just remind people, my response will not involve what people have told me in confession. And again as I said last time, I do not think that the information I will offer is only for priests. People are often better able to approach confession with a open heart, more trust and less anxiety if they have some sense of what is, and is not, expected of them. Especially when people first come to me for confession I will tell them what is going to happen and the "ground rules." Chief among these ground rules is that they are free not to answer any question I ask them and not act on any advice I might may offer. I respect the freedom of the penitent to reveal as much, or a little, of his or her struggle as they wish. But I address the character of the confessor in a later post.

Now, to regret…

The regretful penitent comes to confession lamenting his or her past. Note that what I said here was "past" and not simply "sins." Merely looking back on one's life with sorrow is not the same as repentance though it is certainly may be a part of repentance. But a global regret for one's past is (I think) fundamentally unhealthy.

In both the East and the West the final morning service is the Office of Lauds—of the praise of God. The Church's liturgical tradition embodies what is I think a rather wise point of spiritual psychology. Repentance, as distinct from simple regret, bears fruit in the praise of God. The ability and willingness to praise and thank God sincerely is one of the key signs that the penitent has repented from his or her sins.

The fruit of repentance is gratitude, joy, and a lively awareness of God grace and mercy even in the darkest moments of one's life.

Likewise, the absence of gratitude toward God and an unwillingness, or even hostility, to considering the hidden mercy of God in the midst of one's sinfulness is a sign that the penitent has come to confession not with repentance for healing but mere regret.

My understanding and subsequent response to the regretful individual—and make no mistake, regret is always part of living as an individual, living not in communion with God and neighbor but within a world of one's own making—is guided by something I read by St John of Kronstadt.

The saint reminds the priest, that when hearing confessions he is not a judge but a witness to God's mercy. This means that both in word and deed, the priest most first remind the person, as St John writes in his own preparation for confession, of "the abundance of the Mercy of God." The harshness, the lack of gratitude (and the fear that typically accompanies it) reflects a more fundamental lack of an awareness of God's mercy. It is this lack that the confessor is called to respond to by his own gentleness.

But why is this gentle witness necessary?

For better or worse, people draw their view of God from their experience of the priest. For person whose self-image is framed by regret, the priest, by his kindness and acknowledgement of the goodness of the person, offers to the penitent the possibility of a new way of understand not only God, but also self and others. The confessor is called to model in confession what it means to love God and neighbor with one's whole heart and mind.

Even when correction is necessary it is important that it be given gently and with a clear and sincere indication on the part of the confessor that what is offered is offered not to shame the person but to comfort and heal. It is important as well that the priest makes clear that the penitent is free to act or not on the advice. Advice, like an epitimia (penance), is best offered rather than imposed.

But the witness to mercy must be more.

Any witness in the Church is necessarily prophetic. It is here where I think that confession becomes most challenge for confessor and penitent. As a witness of mercy the confessor is called by God is called to discern the presence of divine mercy in the life of the penitent. Building on what I said a moment ago, this means going beyond merely reminding the person that God is merciful. Bearing witness to God's mercy builds on, but necessarily transcends, the confessor being kind and gentle.

With the regretful penitent, I listen carefully to the life story that is told in confession. What I am listening for are those moments in the person's life where they may have overlooked the mercy of God for them. (As an aside, and without prejudice to "divine grace, which always heals that which is infirm and completes that which is lacking," I think my own training in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis has been a great help. After all, what is the unconscious but all that which is in our experience and yet, paradoxically, unknown to us?)

Bearing witness to the hidden presence of God and His mercy in the life of the penitent not only helps the person move from regret to repentance, it is also I think (to return to our more general topic) essential for the evangelism of the faithful. While education, or rather the lack of education, is a problem in the pastoral life of the Church, as I argued yesterday this is much more than simply an absence of information about God. The regretful penitent makes it clear to me that I (and all of us) suffer from is the lack of awareness of the mercy of God for me (God pro me, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has it) in the concrete circumstance of my life.

In and through confession the discerning confessor, leaning as he does on the grace of ordination and his own personal talents and gifts, is called to give voice to the presence of mercy. Failure to do so in any confession, but especially in the case of the merely regretful penitent, leaves the penitent just outside the gates to the Kingdom of God.

It also robs the confessor of what I have found to be one of the great joys of priestly ministry—the transformation of mere regret into repentance (metanoia or a Godly sorrow) in which regret becomes thanksgiving for the gift of life and this not only in the penitent's heart but also my own.

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory