Confession. Timothy Azovskov
In Church life, the Sacrament of Confession holds one of the most important places—without it, it’s impossible to develop and grow in the spiritual life. We come to Confession with the desire to be delivered from the burden of sin. St. Theophan the Recluse says there’s no unforgivable sin save unrepentant sin.
At first, it can be painful and agonizing to reveal our sins, but when we overcome our pride and false sense of shame, we experience the joy of life with God. Over time, as we correct ourselves, the Lord opens our eyes that we might see our sins without embellishment, in their true, unsightly, terrible light. He gives us strength to resist sin, to remove it from our lives, as something alien and harmful. And conversely, He reveals to us the sweetness of living in peace with our conscience. Every sincere confession of sin is a step towards healing, towards inner peace, towards the amendment of our lives.
When we resort to Confession, we learn from experience that the Lord isn’t a harsh, merciless judge, but a loving doctor who joyfully receives and heals any spiritual illnesses or wounds. With God, spiritual wounds begin to heal, and then disappear. The heart, where only yesterday everything ached and stung, today has healed, the pain nothing more than a memory.
St. John Climacus writes:
Repentance is our return to God, the renewal of our Baptism; it’s a time when we can learn humility, that is, peace: peace with God, peace with ourselves, peace with all of creation. Repentance is born of hope and resolute rejection of despair.1
The prodigal son’s return to his father began when he hit rock bottom and came to his senses. He realized what a terrible, perditious state he was in. Realizing that you’re not at all where you need to be is the beginning of correction. When the prodigal son saw how foolishly he had squandered his inheritance from his father (which the Holy Fathers understood as the talents given a man by God), he didn’t give in to despair, didn’t rend his clothes and call himself unworthy of forgiveness.
Some people, approaching repentance the wrong way, sometimes falsely come to believe that they’re unworthy of God’s love and the good will of others. But what good thing can happen in your life if you yourself don’t want it? This leads to withdrawal, infantilism, and a lack of faith in your own strength.
The prodigal son, on the contrary, pulled himself together, calmed himself, and said: “I may not be worthy to be called my father’s son, but he’s a merciful and kind man. I’ll humbly ask him to take me on as a hired servant; after all, they live much better than I do now!”
Overcoming his pride and acknowledging his mistakes, the son returned home. And the loving father, instead of saying, “Oh, you so-and-so. You left me; you squandered all the inheritance I spent my whole life saving up for you!” rushed out to meet him, embraced and kissed him, and said: “My son was dead and is now alive; he was lost and now is found!”
The fruits of true repentance are peace in the soul, firm hope in the mercy of God that despite all our sins, delusions, and errors, everything in our lives can be amended with God’s help.
Repentance helps us come to know ourselves again, to see our place in the world, where every step counts. Confession isn’t just addressing God, but a sincere, honest conversation with ourselves, a bridge between who we were and who we want to be. Through the Sacrament of Repentance, we try to resolve the internal conflict between good and evil in our souls (where good impulses and aspirations face attachment to sins, inertia, and cowardice), and renounce evil and direct our will towards goodness.
This is our response to the love of God, in which we open our entire heart to God, our first conscious act of faith, hard-earned through struggle. Some think that an act of faith is some great spiritual asceticism beyond our strength, but this is a serious misconception.
The works of faith that are pleasing to God are a life lived according to His commandments. First we begin to fulfill them only for the sake of obedience, but over time we realize that when we fulfill the commandments and try to live in peace with our conscience, life is set right—it becomes better, clearer, simpler. When we set out on this path, a reliable and faithful guide walks with us—the Lord Himself. He is both the goal of our path and our good, steadfast companion, Who never abandons us on this path.
What the Savior says about how everything is possible for those who believe doesn’t refer to an external change in the world, as we so often think, but to the amendment of our immortal soul by repentance.
St. Barsanuphius the Great says about this:
The words of Scripture, all things are possible to him that believeth (Mk. 9:23), refer to enduring with hope the tribulations that come from the passions; to being patient, long-suffering, and courageously enduring everything, like Job.
I can do all things through the Lord Who strengthens me! (Phil. 4:13). You repeated this to yourself and managed not to respond rudely to the person who pushed you in the store. And this asceticism of yours—small and unnoticeable to the world, but real, serious, and important for your soul—will be recorded in Heaven.
An elderly priest once told me how he used to hear confessions from the old women in the village church where he had served for many years. These simple village grandmothers, who had brought the church back to life, amazed him—then still a young priest—with their learning, wisdom, depth of faith, and eloquence.
“I listened to their deep, heartfelt, hard-won, contrite confessions,” he recalled, “and trembled.” He continued:
It was the living, deeply felt pain of a contrite, repentant heart grieving over its sins and the everyday events it considered sinful—and it was so vivid that the picture painted itself, making it easier to respond whenever a question arose. They sincerely repented and wept, and were ready to do anything to restore a living connection with God. They lived by faith. Whatever stood in the way of their faith, they resolved to remove from their lives, decisively and irrevocably. I watched them, and I learned from them how to repent. Nowadays at Confession you usually hear either dry, generalized phrases listing every conceivable and inconceivable sin lifted from some book—or the stubborn silence of a partisan under interrogation, when they approach Confession as a mere formality, without even bothering to understand why or how it works. Naturally, with that kind of attitude, no real change in life ever takes place.
I spoke about this with the rector of our Holy Protection Cathedral in Kamyshlov, Fr. Sergei, who’s been serving in the Church for thirty years. He said:
How come our life sometimes doesn’t change after Confession? Because there’s no Christ in it! A man comes to me for Confession and begins to repent, saying: “I argued with my wife; I was lazy at work; I overate at lunch; I was too lazy to pray; I lay around on the couch all day.” I say: “What you’re talking about is, of course, regrettable, but everything here is about your moral state—your sadness about losing your moral and mental balance, but where is Christ in your confession?” And he shrugs his shoulders…
You may be a well-mannered, kind family man and responsible employee, but if there’s no Christ in your life, you have nothing. You’re just sowing on rocky ground that won’t bear any good fruit. Our goal is to accept Christ into our lives, and then it will begin to change. We go to church, we fast, pray, confess, commune, thinking that this is our spiritual life. But these are only the means of building a personal relationship with Christ.
Every one of us should have a space in our heart, a secret room where it’s just you and God. Our sins are what prevent us from going there. We sit in front of the room but we can’t open the door. Everything’s littered with various junk and garbage. We look at it and weep, repenting for having dragged all this into our hearts. We entreat Christ to help us clear away this filth: “Lord, I have nothing to offer you but this! But I know that You love me—help me, free me from this filth and impurity that I offer you again and again instead of good fruit!”
If we don’t realize that in Confession we offer our sins to Christ, it turns into endless complaining about ourselves, about others, and about our life. To give our sin to Christ means to feel in our hearts that we’ve hurt Him with our sins, that we’ve destroyed His peace here on earth. We’ve come to His house, and instead of something good, we’ve offered Him something bad.
When a man confesses and repents with such a feeling, then his life is set right, becoming better, clearer, and simpler.
