Confession (The Mystery of Repentance)

Everyone who has tried to follow Christ knows the problem confession answers: baptism washes away sin, and then we go on sinning. The Church has never treated this with either despair or a shrug. From the beginning she understood Christ to have given His apostles real authority on this point — "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them" (John 20:23) — and the mystery of repentance is that authority still at work. The tradition has called it a second baptism: not a new sacrament of initiation, but the grace of the first one recovered.

The word matters. What the mystery asks of us is not a mood of vague guilt but repentance — in Greek metanoia, a change of mind, a turning around. Confession is the moment that turning takes on flesh: the sin is spoken, renounced, and left behind. The Church is realistic about how unglamorous this usually is. Most confessions are short, repetitive, and humbling. That is not failure; that is the medicine working.

There is no booth and no screen. In most churches the penitent stands or kneels with the priest before an icon of Christ, or before the Gospel book and a cross on a stand — face to face with the Lord, side by side with His priest. In the Slavic books the priest begins with an exhortation that states the whole theology of the mystery in a few lines: "Behold, my child, Christ standeth here invisibly, and receiveth thy confession … I am but a witness, bearing testimony before him of all things which thou dost say to me." The confession is made to Christ; the priest hears it as the Church's witness and as a physician of souls.

The penitent then confesses in his own words — honestly, specifically, without excuses and without dramatics. The priest may ask a question or give brief counsel; occasionally he may give an epitimia, a penance such as a prayer rule or a period of preparation, which the tradition understands as medicine, never as payment. Then the penitent bows his head, the priest lays his stole (the epitrachelion) over it, and reads the prayer of absolution.

The wording of that prayer differs by use, and the difference is worth knowing. The Greek books cast the absolution as a prayer: the priest asks God to forgive and release the penitent. The Slavic books add a declarative form, in which the priest, having asked God's forgiveness for the penitent, says: "And I, his unworthy Priest, through the power given unto me by him, do forgive and absolve thee from all thy sins, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Both uses mean the same thing: forgiveness is God's alone, ministered through the Church.

The inquirer's honest question deserves an honest answer. God can and does forgive the prayer said alone in the dark — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins" (1 John 1:9). But sin thrives on secrecy, and the Church has learned over twenty centuries that a sin spoken aloud before a witness loses a grip that a sin admitted only inwardly keeps. Confession also restores what sin actually damages: not a private ledger, but communion — with God and with the Church, whose common life every sin wounds. So the mystery is personal but never merely private.

Everything said in confession is sealed. A priest may not reveal it, and the tradition treats this as absolute. Those preparing for the mystery in practice — what to examine, what to say, how often to come — should read preparing-for-confession and going-to-confession, and, for the rhythm of confession and communion together, how-often-to-confess-and-commune. A spiritual father often becomes the steady companion of this whole path.