I spent many Saturday afternoons in Ozone Park, Queens, baking brownies and while they cooked, I amused myself in the Catholic Church on the corner -- St. Mary Gate of Heaven. Sometimes they had weddings and I could easily observe two or three brides come and go. If not, I would watch people arrive for confession, an even better show for my 9 year old self. I was not raised Catholic so the idea of confession both intimidated and fascinated me. What did it feel like to go into a dark booth and whisper your sins to a priest sitting behind a screen? What did it feel like to be absolved, at the price of ten Hail Mary’s or the rosary? I watched people go into those wooden chambers, a little nervously perhaps, and I watched them come out, kneel down and after a while get up and leave the church behind. It had an air of mystery about it. We Episcopalians did not do confession in that manner and so the Catholic way seemed strange. Indeed, I grew up making a general prayer of confession, out loud, with everyone else in the congregation. We allowed that we were sinners and accepted the general absolution offered by the priest. This too seemed strange to me.

I didn’t like taking as a given that I was essentially flawed from birth and neither the fact that I shared such flawings with all other human beings nor the grace of God’s love, however freely and generously given, could mitigate my discomfort with that premise. My 9 and 10 year old self was too tender to bear such unworthiness. This was neither arrogance nor denial. Admitting wrongdoing and admitting basic unworthiness were, and are, two very different things for me.

Secondly, I questioned why the priest, Catholic or Episcopal, had the power, derived from God, to absolve us from our sins, with or without the Hail Mary’s. What about each other? If I spread rumors about a girl in class I didn’t like, why would I tell a priest or obliquely refer to it in a general confession? Why wouldn’t I be asked to speak to the girl I slandered and apologize? If someone harmed me, his/her confession to a priest or in a general prayer remained unknown to me. The residue of damage remained. The confessions of my church somehow skirted the relational, human to human interactions and as such, they felt incomplete and unreal.

Looking back on this today I think I must have missed something. I must have missed the point of these confessions. I only recently learned that confession requires true contrition for one’s sins, full disclosure of them, and the firm intention not to repeat them. You have to truly feel sorry and not want to do it ever again in order to obtain God’s forgiveness. Maybe I never trusted God to love me through to transformation because my unworthiness felt so hopeless and intransigent.

So here I am thinking about confession. This grows out of a sermon on prayer that I gave some months back. I examined four aspects of prayer: thanks, awe and wonder, requests and confession. I noted how in our service we have moments of thanks and awe and requests, but not much confession. I’m grappling with the place of confession in our lives, and its particular relation to forgiveness.

Confession, from the Latin, means to acknowledge together. Thus my question looks for the relationship between acknowledgement and forgiveness. Acknowledgement means to recognize as valid and recognition means to admit what has happened, noting the consequences of our actions, allowing space for the feelings that arise. Most of us probably know how much harder it is to forgive, or achieve any real reconciliation, when we never receive acknowledgement from the other person. When we never make acknowledgement to ourselves. Often recognition prompts us to make atonement to the ones whom our actions have hurt, when it will not cause further harm. Often recognition teaches us something about ourselves and our effects on others and we become more able to make adjustments in what we say and do rather than repeat the same behavior over and over and face the same unhappy consequences of it. Recognition makes it possible for us, not only to express the desire not to cause harm again, but actually to become empowered to change.

All together then, confession, or acknowledgement, can promote reconciliation and growth. Or if not reconciliation, it at least allows us to move on with our lives. Confession, acknowledgement, is a useful practice. (No wonder it happened all the time in my childhood churches!) What might a 21st century, Unitarian Universalist form of confession look like? Maybe the term confession carries too many connotations. What if we use the word acknowledgement? We’ll take it piece by piece.

Acknowledging what happened. Why is it so hard to say “I blew it; I messed up; I’m sorry?” Lots of factors get in the way of our ability to acknowledge what happened. Many of us hold an investment in our identities as good people. We want and we need to believe that we live ethical lives and that we do not go around harming others. This is a good thing in general, but it can hinder our capacity to acknowledge the consequences of our actions. If I have too much invested in myself as a “good” person, then, when I do something that is not ideal, I have trouble admitting it because it contradicts my self-constructed identity. If I was really a good person, I wouldn’t have hurt anyone else. So if I have spoken harshly or shown impatience or not fulfilled a promise, or taken it out on the dog, it means I’m not as good as I think I am. I’m not as good as I need to think I am. How could that be?

Such dissonance20gives rise to anxiety. In order to cope with actions that belie the ways in which we define ourselves, some of us create a shadow. Everything we don’t like about ourselves goes into the shadows and we don’t own it as ours. We sort of don’t look at it, but, as a shadow, it goes everywhere with us. Sometimes we can project our shadows onto someone else. We see behaviors in others that really belong to us. If one has a tendency to exaggerate, or even lie, one might project this onto others and find ourselves regularly accusing people of lying. Often the tendencies we most dislike about others are those we have buried in our own shadows.

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves what we mean by good. How good is good? Is a good person a perfect person? Can an ethical person ever do something unethical? Forgiveness and reconciliation require a tolerance for mistakes. How much tolerance for mistakes do we have? Can we allow our mistakes and still claim our identities as good people? Unitarian Universalism would say yes because UU’ism asserts the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We are not fatally flawed; we have worthiness and value. More, UU’s assert that human relations require justice, compassion and equity. Are we worthy? Yes. Are we perfect? No. We are compassionate.

Sometimes the harshest judge lives within us. If we do not have a firm trust in our own value and inherent worth, then our words and deeds which cause suffering can send us into a tailspin. I can understand now how helpful it might be for some of us to hear a priest tell us that God forgives us and seal it with something concrete to do, like prayers. When left to our own judgment, we can become filled with guilt, or shame, or self-doubt and blame. Or we can blame someone else for our own actions. Or deny them; or ignore them. Anything but acknowledge them.

Because acknowledging them means we’d have to view ourselves differently. Let’s do it. Let’s trust in our inherent worthiness and at the same time acknowledge that we make mistakes. Mistakes which can bring about suffering. Let’s offer compassion and understanding to ourselves. We’re not perfect, but we do try to lead ethical, peaceful and loving lives. Acknowledging our words and deeds and their effects on others gives us a way to learn from those painful situations so we don’t keep repeating them. Forgiveness starts with ourselves.

In order to do this, we need to honestly look at the consequences of our actions, including the emotions that arose. Awareness of consequences means that we pay attention to other people and what’s going on in the human interaction. We listen, we look. Since we consider ourselves well-intentioned, it occasionally comes as a surprise when our words or deeds hurt other people. We didn’t mean to, after all. We think that if we explain our motivations it will make everything ok ay. We expect our good intentions to mitigate the pain we caused others. Perhaps it does, but never fully. We need to acknowledge what happened and its consequences.

We need to acknowledge that feelings have a reality for the one feeling them. Did you ever notice that we cannot reason one another out of feeling the way we do? From our desire to help someone feel better, or from our own discomfort with emotions, we try to talk someone out of their feelings. You misunderstood me. Don’t feel hurt; it was just a misunderstanding. What you think happened didn’t happen. Get over it. I said I’m sorry, what do you want already? Or we don’t allow for feelings at all. How dare you feel hurt by what I said? How dare you imply that I could have done anything to hurt you?

I want to tell you a true story from my family. Once upon a time two young people loved each other very much. One of them, the woman, had a temper which she inherited from her father, who used to express his anger by throwing things around the house. He never became violent with people, only with things. The other, a man, grew up with a mother who developed a mental illness which led her to become violent, again, only with things, not people. That young man held his temper in check so tightly that although he only infrequently became angry, when he did get mad, he got really mad. One day something went wrong in her life and the woman with the temper threw a piece of jewelry down the stairs and broke it. The man became very quiet and withdrawn. Days later, he told her that he felt frightened when she threw the jewelry. The woman replied, “But I never take my temper out on you. I never mean to upset you.” Her love for him gave her good intentions toward him. He felt grateful for that, but it wasn’t enough for him to get past what happened. He explained that his feelings of fear had a reality for him. When she threw things she reminded him of his mother and how as a child he used to hide from her violence. The young woman saw the consequences of her behavior on the young man. She saw his feelings and she acknowledged them, which helped him to feel safe again. She recognized that although she did not intend to upset him, she had caused him pain. And because she did not wish to upset him, or think of herself as the kind of person who frightened others with her temper, she worked hard to find other ways of expressing her frustration. No more jewelry went down the stairs.

Acknowledging what happened, acknowledging the consequences of our actions, acknowledging the feelings that arose. Acknowledgement promotes healing and helps us to find the freedom to move on and maybe even to transform. And if we don’t get that acknowledgement from the other person? It makes our work harder, but we can still give ourselves the acknowledgement we need. We can be the kind of people who acknowledge others. As Jack Kornfield says, “Sometimes it is not so much that we forgive harmful actions, as that we learn to acknowledge and respect the hard struggle of life itself.” (After the Ecstasy, the Laundry)

We acknowledge our actions and their consequences, not because we are without value and need the forgiveness of an outside being. We acknowledge because we have value; we are worthy and we need to forgive ourselves and each other. We acknowledge what we have done and what has been done to us because we believe that, although we all make grievous mistakes, we can effect a repair, we can change, we can begin again, even if on a different footing. To adapt a thought of Jack Kornfield’s: “We have judged ourselves and others for so long, carrying on our battle with the past, with life itself. In (acknowledgement) we bow to it all with mercy and respect. . . With (recognition) our hearts become clear and whole for a time. The courage of our (acknowledgement) frees us to enter the next step . . . “ May it be so.