Assignment 28 - Monday May 9 Concluding essay. Post an essay which expresses some

aspect of your thoughts at the end of this course. It may be a general "I have learned that..." or

you may select some specific aspect of the course or one of the topics we have treated. This is

to be a longer posting which will account for 10% of the grade.

I have pondered this question for several days. I have thought through several “takes.” First of

all, I have to state where I was when I came into this class. I had fled the confessional for 43

years. During that period of time, I had believed and preached that “confession,” as practiced by

Catholics, was at best “carnal,” and at worst “unnecessary.” In my final days, I had taught that it

was indeed important to confess our sins as an act of humility, but to one another, not to

someone who claimed sacerdotal authority. In Life Together by Bonheoffer, I argued that he had

successfully made an argument for confessing one‟s sins to someone other than God. Then,

two years ago, I came back to the Church, and by necessity, to the “confessional.” The last time

I had been in “one” was 1965, as Vatican II was closing. I have shared the terrible experiences

that I had as a teen with a priest who rebuked me every time I confessed my sins. Finally, as

one who tracks statistics, I saw that Catholics avoided the confessional rather than approaching

as a gift from God. This was the schema that I brought to this class. It was a combination of

personal pain experientially and personal skepticism theologically and statistically.

Even though, at times, when Fr.Tom would call for “metaphor” and I internally would call for

Cassian‟s four-fold sense of Scripture, this class has helped me. I now see there is hope for a

restoration of what Jesus commissioned the Apostles to in John 20:23, “whose sins you shall

forgive, they are forgiven… “When I discovered that all sacraments take their “cue” from the

Eucharist (Ezekiel‟s the wheel within the middle of the wheel) I began to see that the paradigm

should and could be restored. So one can see, I have come from the unknown to the known-this

may be an asset and not a liability. I am open! Let us be honest, the Sacrament of

Reconciliation is not the most popular and practiced of the Sacraments. This should be a red

flag to all of us. Are we to bury our head in the sand and say, “do it until it hurts,” or should we

step back, as we have done in this class, and look at foundations. I vote for the latter response!

So these are some of my “open-ended thoughts” at the end of this class. Now, I would like to

mention some of the touchstones, shaped by this class, that have become “road-signs” to direct

my future study, dialogue, fellowship and convictions. First of all, the book, Exploring

Forgiveness became a “can opener” to my soul. Bottom line, the different articles created a

unity that said, “I have no option to both forgive and be reconciled in those relationships where I

have experienced difficulties. Of course, the Marietta Jaeger article sets the bar so high, I have

no excuse. I also benefitted from the Joanna North perspective that both outlined the different

stages of forgiveness as well as introduced the idea of „reframing.”

Sunflower certainly impacted me by looking at the shallowness of my capacity to forgive. Who

on earth has been confronted with the issues of those in the middle of the Holocaust? It made

me feel like a spiritual “midget.” I continually felt like God was “setting me up” for something.

That something, I believe, was to look at the whole area of confession vs. the Sacrament. I do

not believe this is a false dichotomy. Rather, as I saw the evolution of this Sacrament from

Apostolic times to the Post-Vatican renewal and the Communal Celebration of Reconciliation, it

gave me hope that things could and would change.

Finally, creating the setting, script, handout and homily allowed me to put together in

permissible ways, the force of all that we had discussed these many weeks. I had “come home”

not only to the Church but also to this Sacrament that has been a dark closet and something

which caused me to recoil. I believe this course has been Providential in my journey. It has

taken me through a process that I could not have designed on my own. It has taken the

academic portion and amalgamated it with the experiential portion to create hope, vision and

conviction. Thank you Lord and thank you Fr.Tom as His instrument!