When was the last time you went to Confession? It’s easy to come up with excuses to avoid going to Confession, but are any of these excuses actually any good?
Danielle Bean, brand manager at CatholicMom.com, stopped by Morning Air® to talk about why we should ditch the excuses and stop avoiding Confession.
“I am the worst (or I guess probably the best) at coming up with excuses, especially during those times when I particularly should get to Confession,” she said. “It is that voice of Satan, and we get to choose whether we are going to listen to that voice or listen to the voice of Jesus who is calling us to healing, calling us to come back into communion with Him through this beautiful sacrament. It’s such an opportunity.”
“Nobody ever regrets having gone. That’s the thing that we sometimes forget,” Bean continued. “It’s really important when we are coming up with these excuses – and they are lame excuses that we come up with sometimes. Whether it’s that you don’t have time, you haven’t been that bad, or whatever it is, remind yourself of the real value that we get every time we go to Confession. The real grace that God gives us to live out our vocation, to avoid those particular sins in the future. We need that life-giving grace.”
Maybe your reason for avoiding Confession isn’t because of lame excuses, but because you have had a bad experience of Confession in the past and are hesitant to go back. If that’s you, Danielle Bean has some encouragement to get you back to the grace and mercy of the sacrament.
“That’s understandable,” she said. “Priests are human beings and you may have caught someone on a bad day, you might have misunderstood something, you may have been embarrassed by something that happened, or confused. For that, I am so sorry you had that negative experience. But please don’t let that one negative experience keep you from the life-giving grace that God means for you to experience inside this sacrament. Don’t let that one thing get in the way of the healing God wants you to experience in the sacrament of Confession.”
“I’ve had experiences where I didn’t like what the priest said, maybe I even disagreed with what the priest said in the Confessional and got upset about it,” she continued. “But inside of those moments I still heard those words of absolution. And that’s where we need to focus. That’s the #1 thing that I always come away with – that I did meet Jesus in there.”
No matter your reason for avoiding Confession, Danielle Bean encouraged all of us to look at what we are missing out on by not taking the opportunity to meet Jesus and receive His healing and forgiveness.
“Through that flawed person of the priest who was present with me inside of that sacrament, I did meet Jesus there, and my sins were forgiven. That’s the thing that needs to pull us back in there. Because the Church gives us this means of obtaining this grace, this means of obtaining forgiveness of our sins, this means of growing in grace and humility through the sacrament of Confession. And it is up to us to take advantage of it.”
Listen to the full conversation below:
Morning Air can be heard weekdays from 7:00 – 9:00 a.m. Eastern/4:00 – 6:00 a.m. Pacific on Relevant Radio® and the Relevant Radio App.
