It’s only 29 pages but it’s loaded with challenges that will spark personal revival!  Some highlights include Chapter 4 “The Highway of Holiness” and Chapter 10 “Protesting Our Innocence?” (which was included in our Passion Readers).  It’s well-worth reading again and again…

[Note: This pdf was made available from http://www.christianissues.biz/pdf-bin/sanctification/thecalvaryroad.pdf ]

“A Family Affair: What would the church look like if it put we before me?”

by Joseph H. Hellerman

Christianity Today, May 2010, pp.42-46 [first two paragraphs are excerpted below; full article is available on-line for download at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=87899]

“Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of community. Persons who remain connected with their brothers and sisters in the local church almost invariably grow in self-understanding. And they mature in their ability to relate in healthy ways to God and to fellow human beings. This is especially the case for those courageous Christians who stick it out through the messy process of interpersonal conflict. Long-term relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay grow.

People who leave do not grow. We all know persons consumed with spiritual wanderlust. We never get to know them well because they cannot seem to stay put. They move from church to church, avoiding conflict or ever searching for a congregation that will better satisfy their felt needs. Like trees repeatedly transplanted from soil to soil, these spiritual nomads fail to put down roots, and they seldom experience lasting, fruitful growth in their Christian lives.”  [continue to read Dr. Hellerman's article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=87899]

Joseph H. Hellerman is professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is the author of When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus’ Vision for Authentic Christian Community (B&H Academic).

by Joseph H. Hellerman

Click here to download the excerpt of this chapter.

He replied to them, “Who are My mother and My brothers?” And looking about at those who were sitting in a circle around Him, He said, “here are My mother and My brothers! Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.” Mark 3:33-35

Nick and Tina (not their real names) attended a church where I served in the late 1980’s. They came to see my on a Wednesday evening in mid-October, having just finished their weekly ministry in our children’s department. The couple had met at a church softball game a couple of months earlier. Now they wanted to get married in December. I did the math. Nick and Tina would have just four months together from acquaintance to the altar. The way that Nick and Tina wrestled with this major life decision helpfully illustrates what can happen when the church family functions as God intends it to.

For years I went to church. Religiously. I actually went to church for about 25 years. Then I stopped. I’m so glad I did. Instead of going to church, I started being the church. It’s radically changed me. They have changed me. My family has gotten bigger.

Bono’s Church

The church is supposed to be a family. But there’s a problem. The church in America is too often very un-church. As a result, a lot of people say that they like Jesus, but they just don’t like the church … and they’re in pretty good company … with Bono. In U2’s song “Acrobat”, from the album Achtung Baby, Bono articulates a fairly common perception of the church:

No, nothing makes sense, nothing seems to fit.
I know you’d hit out if you only knew who to hit.
And I’d join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah, I’d break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in.

This is a common view of the church. What’s the view? Conflicted: “And I’d join the movement If there was one I could believe in. Yeah, I’d break bread and wine If there was a church I could receive in.”

Like many of us, Bono wants the church, but there are too many ifs. He wants to be part of the movement of the church. Unfortunately, many churches aren’t concerned with movement. Too many of them are inwardly focused, not outwardly focused. They aren’t the world-changing communities of the New Testament. They are static, inert and inward.

Bono wants the communion of church, but says there’s no church he can believe or receive in. I’m guessing that what Bono is referring to is not merely the eucharist, but the one-body community that is symbolized in the act of communion (1 Cor 10:16-17). Like Bono, many of us long for church as movement and communion, a church that is missional and communal.

To read the rest of the articles…

North Carolina ministry seeks to build ties between prisoners and their children

MAURY, N.C.—Along the back roads of eastern North Carolina, the 1,500 residents of Maury barely outnumber the population of the tiny town’s largest residential facility: the Maury Correctional Institution, a close-security prison holding nearly 1,000 men facing long, hard time. Just around a secluded bend, the prison’s concrete walls and barbed wire tower over the surrounding acres of green fields brimming with short, leafy tobacco.

Even if inmates’ families make the trek to Maury, visitation is a sterile affair: Inmates sit across from visitors at small, square tables, and rules are strict—one hug on arrival, one hug when leaving, and no other physical contact. The regulations are understandable: Many of these men are serving time for violent crimes, including murder. Whatever the crime, the sentences are often long, averaging 20 years to life.

None of that seems to bother Scottie Barnes. The founder of the Taylorsville, N.C.–based Forgiven Ministry—a Christian ministry for inmates and their families—is familiar with visiting days: Her father began spending long stretches of time in prison when Barnes was 4 years old. He died in a Kentucky jail when Barnes was 42. Her life-long desire to reconcile with her father happened after he embraced Christianity, shortly before his death.

Barnes hopes to narrow that gap for other children. That’s why she’s in a conference room at the Maury prison on a Thursday evening, training local volunteers for a program that will reunite a handful of inmates with their children for an entire day. The program—called One Day With God—is particularly striking at a prison like this one where visitation rules are tight. Officials have agreed to allow carefully selected inmates to interact with their children in ways they normally couldn’t: playing games, holding hands, sharing a meal, making crafts, lots of hugs.

Over a small sound system, Barnes tells a dozen volunteers why organizing one day of interaction is worth so much effort: “Just because that daddy’s behind these walls doesn’t mean he’s not a father.”

That’s a theme the ministry has repeated at more than 15 camps this year, serving more than 1,100 inmates, children, and caregivers. Barnes plans to conduct 14 more camps in five states before the end of the year with the help of two other full-time staff members, including her husband, Jack, and a cadre of unpaid board members and volunteers. Each place they visit, the message is the same: Be a responsible father. Ask God to help you do it.

The message extends to the ministry’s other programs too: For example, an 18-week re-entry program led by volunteer mentors teaches life skills to inmates nearing the end of their sentences at minimum-security jails. Monthly Bible studies encourage inmates to stay connected to their children. Some programs cater specifically to children: Volunteers staff the ministry’s Ezekiel Room at another prison, allowing children to hear Bible stories and interact with each other during otherwise long visits in confined quarters.

But the ministry’s centerpiece is the two-day camp at prisons, which usually begins like the weekend in Maury: On an early Friday morning, inmates—17 when I visited—in white T-shirts, tan pants, and white tennis shoes begin trickling into a windowless visitation room. Each man has one or more children he hopes will visit on Saturday. The prison chaplain and other officials have selected inmates who must meet certain criteria: no sex offenders or pedophiles; each participant must remain infraction-free for at least 90 days before the camp.

Barnes, assistant Karen Strickland, a Bible teacher, and a handful of volunteers spend Friday helping the fathers prepare. The day is mostly devoted to biblical teaching about fatherhood, with an emphasis on the gospel. The fathers prepare in other ways too as they gather around small tables set with white tablecloths and a cluster of gifts for each inmate: crackers, Moon Pies, peanuts, bottles of juice, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a tract, a devotional book, and a Bible-based parenting booklet.

Before the teaching begins, Barnes tries to break the ice, but these dads are quiet. She finally asks: “How many of you are nervous?” Every hand goes up. Barnes pauses to pray for the men and then assures them: “Your kids aren’t looking at you in any other way than as a daddy tomorrow.”

The men line up at a long table for their first project: decorating wooden picture frames for their children. A photographer will snap a photo of each inmate and his child on Saturday, and the dads will give their children the hand-­decorated frames to display the pictures. They’ll also write a message on the back with a black pen.

Sheldon Sutton talks about his nervousness as he sticks a small, foam diamond and pink flower to the corners of a frame for his 8-year-old daughter. Sutton is serving a sentence of life without parole, and he hasn’t seen his daughter in over a year: “I really don’t know what to say to her.” Mostly, he wants one thing: “I want her to leave knowing I love her.”

In a box in the corner, the men stack the completed frames, bearing hand-written messages: “I wish I could be back in your life.” “I miss you very much.” “I look forward to our future together.” “I think about you everyday.” “Daddy loves you.”

Barnes tells the men they’ll make a small lamp with their child tomorrow. She asks, “How many of you have something you made with your daddy?” No one raises a hand. She follows up: “How many of you had a daddy who was in jail?” More than half raise their hands.

Barnes knows that these inmates’ children face a similar danger: Children of prisoners are seven times as likely to end up in prison themselves. It’s a sobering statistic for these fathers, and Barnes asks: “Do you want to break that cycle?” Heads nod hard around the room.

Haseem Everett especially wants to break the cycle. His daughter is 9 years old. He hasn’t seen her in 6 ½ years. He’s eager to encourage her to live a clean life: “I was running the streets at 13, and I refuse to let her get into that situation.” He’s also eager to begin a relationship with her. “If we can just start a foundation,” he says. He confesses his biggest fear: “Her not coming.”

That’s a fear Barnes and her assistant, Strickland, share. After prison officials identify men for the camps, Barnes and Strickland send letters to each child’s caregiver—usually a mother, grandmother, aunt, or other family member. They follow up with phone calls, often pleading with sometimes-wary family members to bring the children. By Friday afternoon, they’re still calling families to confirm, and encouraging the inmates to place calls that evening too. Nothing is certain, they gently warn.

But the risk is worth it to these men, and they listen intently as Jim Williams of Blue Ridge Ministries presents a fathering seminar with practical instruction: Contact your children as often as possible. Encourage them to respect their caregivers. Maintain a relationship with Christ that informs your relationship with your kids.

By late afternoon, the men eat the last of their snacks—they can’t take food back to their cells—and they file out for a long night of waiting.

Early Saturday morning, children and caregivers begin arriving at a nearby church. The ministry pairs a volunteer mentor with each family, and mentors will remain with their assigned child throughout the day. Caregivers stay at the church for a day-long program designed to encourage and support them.

Meanwhile, in the prison’s gym, the dads blow up balloons and pace nervously. By 9:20 a.m. the children have arrived, and the prison goes on lockdown as they’re escorted through the cold, gray corridors toward the gym. Dads crane their necks as volunteers introduce each child. Some run to their fathers. Others are more timid. Some shed tears.

Sutton is relieved to see his 8-year-old daughter approach with white beads decorating her pretty, braided hair. She offers a wide smile and big hug. In a separate corner, Everett isn’t smiling: His daughter did not come, although she lives less than 30 miles away. “I’m just disappointed,” he says, and so are four other men. But Everett says he’s still glad he came, and he hopes to apply what he’s learned about fatherhood as he’s able.

For the others, a series of games, a magic show, and other fun activities allow dads to relax with their children, and begin to connect. For the first time in years, some hold their children on their laps. At a catered lunch of fried chicken in the visitation room, the conversations grow loud as fathers, children, and mentors chat over lunch. Since dads miss their children’s birthdays, the ministry provides a birthday cake and everyone sings.

After lunch, the families make small lampshades by threading clear beads onto gold safety pins and closing them with wire. Each child will take home a small electric lamp that fits the shade. One child, Destiny, expresses her gratitude for time with her father: “I’ve never had a day like this in my life, and I may never have one again.”

Darlyn White, the prison’s administrator, says she’s open to the ministry returning and says she hopes the men will keep in touch with their children. White believes in the Christian-based nature of the program and says her church donated $1,700 toward covering the camp’s cost. “We’re not so naïve to think that every one of these men is going to change, but Jesus says He goes after the one lost sheep,” says White. “These are our lost sheep—and if we can save one, we’re going to do it.”

The day winds down with quiet time for fathers to talk with their children, and with a balloon release in a tiny outdoor courtyard surrounded by towering walls. As the families watch the colorful balloons dot a blackening sky, some wipe away tears. In a few moments, the day will be over. The children will be gone.

The last few minutes are difficult, and some fathers cry harder than their children. Barnes and Williams gather the men to encourage them to build on what they’ve started today, and promise to pray for them. “I love every one of you,” says Barnes. “You’re my daddies at Maury now.”

For Sutton, saying goodbye was hard, but the dad who initially wasn’t sure what he’d say sent his daughter home with this handwritten message on the back of a frame holding a picture of the pair: “I give you my all/I am there to pick you up when you fall/In flesh or in spirit/In chains or free/I will love you forever/I will be a better me.”

For more information on this year’s Hope Award for Effective Compassion and to read profiles of other nominated organizations from this year and previous years, click here.

Forgiven Ministry

• First six months of 2009:
• 1,133 inmates, children, and families served at 14 camps;
• 1,256 camp volunteers, most from local churches
• Serves both men and women inmates
• Maintains “The Adams Center,” a facility for families visiting inmates in area prisons
• Winner of Texas Governor’s Criminal Justice Volunteer Service Award for “Best Family Program”
• 2008 income: $327,291
• 2008 expenses: $298,530

by Jim Forest

Among the hottest best-sellers of the 1970s was a book that had the catchy title, I’m Okay, You’re Okay. One of its enthusiastic readers, a young priest in Boston, gave a sermon about it which was a rave review. He wished he could give everyone he knew a copy. The book’s message was simple: To love others started with loving yourself, and loving yourself meant acquiring self-esteem.

At the end of Mass, standing at the door, the priest asked one of his older parishioners how he had liked the sermon. The man wasn’t eager to criticize but responded, “I haven’t read the book. If what you say is true, it’s better than the Bible. My only problem was that I kept thinking of Christ on the Cross saying to those who were watching him die, ‘If everybody’s okay, what in blazes am I doing up here?’”

The problem is I’m not okay and the chances are neither are you.

I’m Okay, You’re Okay was one of the pioneering books in launching the self-esteem movement which has gone on to produce a Niagara Falls of books, magazine articles and television shows that remind us that, to the extent that we lack self-esteem, we are unhappy, our marriages doomed, our careers stunted, while a society whose citizens are blessed with high levels of self-esteem will be more stable, more prosperous, and less troubled with anti-social or criminal behavior. In 1986 the California State Legislature created the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.

Unfortunately recent studies in America and other countries suggest that self-esteem isn’t delivering on its promises.

“A preoccupation with self-esteem may be inevitable in a society where self-worth is often defined by a diploma from Harvard, a size 4 dress or a mansion in Southampton,” commented New York Times journalist Erica Goode in a report published in October 2002. She noted that one of the findings of recent self-esteem studies is that criminals often have more self-esteem than people who are not a danger to their neighbors.

One of the researchers she quoted, Dr. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, argues that the frantic pursuit of self-worth as measured through external trappings exacts a high personal and social toll.

“The pursuit of self-esteem has short-term benefits but long-term costs,” says Crocker, “ultimately diverting people from fulfilling their fundamental human needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy and leading to poor self-regulation and mental and physical health.”

Crocker found that people whose sense of self-esteem is based on good looks, favorable reception of others, academic or vocational achievement, recreational performance or similar yardsticks are actually more at risk of difficulties, relationship conflicts, aggression and an increased likelihood of drug or alcohol dependence.

In a study of 642 college freshmen, Crocker found that students whose self-regard was based heavily on academic performance reported more stress and more conflicts with their teachers than did their peers. They spent more time studying than other students but did no better in their classes. Freshmen who invested heavily in appearing attractive reported more aggressiveness, anger and hostility than others, more alcohol and drug use and more symptoms of such eating disorders. They also became more depressed as the year wore on.

In contrast, it’s striking that students who judged themselves by more internal measures such as religious faith or virtue were less likely to show anger and aggression and more restrained in their use of alcohol and drugs even though some of them had to cope with greater feelings of loneliness for being outside the main currents of social life on campus.

While it should hardly come as headline news, Dr. Crocker’s studies show that an obsession with external markers of self-worth leads to self-absorption. The correction for an exclusive focus on the self, Crocker argues, cannot be found in self-esteem classes that encourage children to believe that their personal success and happiness are of paramount importance. “Not everything is about ‘me,’ ” Dr. Crocker said. “There are sometimes bigger things that we should be concerned about.”

While I hardly dare imagine that publication of such a report in The New York Times suggests the high water mark has been reached in the self-esteem movement, still it is encouraging to see this pseudo-gospel being challenged.

A different, more intimate kind of evidence that self-esteem mania is being challenged greeted me a few days ago at the Matthew 25 House in Akron, Ohio. The founder is Joe May, a member of Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in the same city and a graduate of Holy Cross Orthodox Seminary. In what was formerly a crack house, Joe and those who work with him take in homeless men. At the moment the guests include a number of refugees from Latin America and also some US-born ex-convicts. In the house library there was no sign of the I’m Okay, You’re Okay type of book, but in adjacent bathroom, next to the mirror, was a small sign that read:

I am not a big deal.
I am not a big deal.
I am not a big deal.

Over lunch I asked what was behind this surprising message. Joe explained that during confession his priest once suggested that every morning he repeat the words “I am not a big deal” three times. Just to make sure he remembered, Joe put the text in the place where he shaves each morning.

One might also say:

I am not okay.
I am not okay.
I am not okay.

Not only am I not okay but it may well be that I will never be okay this side of heaven. In fact I am, to put it bluntly, a sinner. I am not just a sinner but I dare to say I am an expert sinner. At my age, I’ve had a lot of practice.

Forty years ago, when I was a catechumen preparing to be received into the Catholic Church, I recall what a hard struggle I had in trying to understand the word “sin.” I was bewildered with the idea that, if you knew God didn’t want you to do something, you might do it anyway. How could any sane person consciously and intentionally disobey God?

A legalistic definition of sin, which was what my catechism provided, never quite cleared the air for me. It helped later on coming to know the Hebrew and Greek words — chata’ and hamartia — normally translated as “sin” simply mean staying off the path, losing your way, going off course. “You shoot an arrow, but it misses the target,” as a rabbi once explained to me. “Maybe it hits someone’s backside, someone you didn’t even know was there. You didn’t mean it, but still it’s a sin. Or maybe you knew he was there — his backside was what you were aiming at. Now that’s a sin!”

The Jewish approach to sin tends to be concrete. The author of the Book of Proverbs lists seven things which God hates:

A proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked deeds, feet that run swiftly to evil, a false witness that declares lies, and he that sows discord among the brethren. (6:17-19)

As in so many other lists of sins, pride — that is to say, self-esteem — is given first place. “Pride goes before destruction, and a disdainful spirit before a fall” is another insight in the Book of Proverbs (16:18). In the Garden of Eden, Satan seeks to animate pride in his dialogue with Eve. Eat the forbidden fruit, he tells her, and “you will be like a god.”

Pride is regarding oneself as god-like. In one of the stories preserved from early desert monasticism, a younger brother asks an elder, “What shall I do? I am tortured by pride.” The elder responds, “You are right to be proud. Was it not you who made heaven and earth?” With those few words, the brother was cured of pride.

The craving to be ahead of others, to be more valued than others, to be more highly rewarded than others, to be able to keep others in a state of fear, the inability to admit mistakes or apologize — these are among the symptoms of pride. Pride opens the way for countless other sins: deceit, lies, theft, violence, and all those other actions that destroy community with God and with those around us.

“We’re capable of doing some rotten things,” the Minnesota storyteller Garrison Keillor remarks, “and not all of these things are the result of poor communication. Some are the result of rottenness. People do bad, horrible things. They lie and they cheat and they corrupt the government. They poison the world around us. And when they’re caught they don’t feel remorse — they just go into treatment. They had a nutritional problem or something. They explain what they did — they don’t feel bad about it. There’s no guilt. There’s just psychology.”

So eroded is our sense of sin that even in confession it often happens that people explain what they did rather than admit they did things that urgently need God’s forgiveness. “When I recently happened to confess about fifty people in a typical Orthodox parish in Pennsylvania,” the Orthodox theologian Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote, “not one admitted to having committed any sin whatsoever!” [Fr. Alexander Schmemann, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3 (Fall 1961): 38-44; also posted on the web — www.schmemann.org/byhim/reflectionsonconfession.html. ]

Confession is not a rite of self-esteem but is rather the recognition that there is rubbish in my life — things done and undone — that damage my connection with God and with those whom God has given me to live among, people I know and people I don’t know, people I love and people I fear. Confession is facing up to all in my life that I find it painful to know about myself and struggle to keep hidden or camouflaged from those whom I want to love or respect me. It is a gradual return to wholeness, a return to communion, not because I have been made admirable by the church’s sacraments but at least am pointed in the right direction and am trying not to delude myself about how excellent I am when left to my own devices.

For the person who has committed a serious sin, there are two vivid signs — the hope that what he did may never become known; and a gnawing sense of guilt. At least this is the case before the conscience becomes completely numb as patterns of sin become the structure of one’s life to the extent that hell, far from being a possible next-life experience, is where I find myself in this life. (Rod Steiger in the film The Pawnbroker, in a desperate action to break free of numbness, slammed a nail-like spindle through his hand so he could finally feel something, even if it meant agonizing pain — a small crucifixion.)

It is a striking fact about our basic human architecture that we want certain actions to remain secret, not because of modesty but because there is an unarguable sense of having violated a law more basic than that in any law book — the “law written on our hearts” that St. Paul refers to in his Letter to the Romans. [2:15] It isn’t simply that we fear punishment. It is that we don’t want to be thought of by others as a person who commits such deeds. One of the main obstacles to going to confession is dismay that someone else will know what I want no one to know.

Sin is linked with guilt, which is one of the themes of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. The central figure of the novel is Dr. Thomas More, a descendent of St. Thomas More, though the latest More is hanging on to his faith by a frayed thread. The latest More doesn’t seem to be in danger of becoming a martyr for the faith. Dr. More is both a physician and a patient at a Louisiana mental hospital. From time to time he meets with his colleague Max, a secular psychologist eager to cure More of guilt.

Max tells More, “We found out what the hangup was and we are getting ready to condition you out of it.”
“What hangup?”
“Your guilt feelings.”
“I never did see that.”
Max explains that More’s guilt feelings have to do with adulterous sex.
“Are you speaking of my fornication with Lola…?” asks More.
“Fornication,” repeats Max. “You see?”
“See what?”
“That you are saying that lovemaking is not a natural activity, like eating and drinking.”
“No, I didn’t say it wasn’t natural.”
“But sinful and guilt-laden.”
“Not guilt-laden.”
“Then sinful?”
“Only between persons not married to each other.”
“I am trying to see it as you see it.”
“I know you are.”
“If it is sinful, why are you doing it?”
“It is a great pleasure.”
“I understand. Then, since it is ’sinful,’ guilt feelings follow even though it is a pleasure.”
“No, they don’t follow.”
“Then what worries you, if you don’t feel guilty?”
“That’s what worries me: not feeling guilty.”
“Why does that worry you?”
“Because if I felt guilty, I could get rid of it.”
“How?”
“By the sacrament of penance.”
“I’m trying to see it as you see it.”
“I know you are.”
[For the full text, see pages 110-20 of the Farrar Straus & Giroux edition of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins published in 1971.]

Percy’s novel reminds us that one of the oddest things about the age we live in is that we are made to feel guilty about feeling guilty. Dr. Thomas More is fighting against that. He may not yet experience guilt for his sins, but at least he knows that a sure symptom of moral death is not to feel guilty.

Dr. Thomas More — a modern man who can’t quite buy the ideology that there are no sins and there is nothing to feel guilty about — is battling to recover a sense of guilt, which in turn will provide the essential foothold for contrition, which in turn can motivate confession and repentance. Without guilt, there is no remorse; without remorse there is no possibility of becoming free of habitual sins.

Yet there are forms of guilt that are dead-end streets. If I feel guilty that I have not managed to become the ideal person I occasionally want to be, or that I imagine others want me to be, then it is guilt that has no divine reference point. It is simply me contemplating me with the eye of an irritated theater critic. Christianity is not centered on performance, laws, principles, or the achievement of flawless behavior, but on Christ himself and participation in God’s transforming love. When Christ says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48), he is speaking not about the perfection of a student always obtaining the highest test scores or a child who manages not to step on any of the sidewalk’s cracks, but of being whole, being in a state of communion, participating in God’s love.

This is a condition of being that is suggested wordlessly by St. Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity: those three angelic figures silently inclined toward each other around a chalice on a small altar. They symbolize the Holy Trinity: the communion that exists within God, not a closed communion restricted to them selves alone but an open communion of love in which we are not only invited but intended to participate.

A blessed guilt is the pain we feel when we realize we have cut ourselves off from that divine communion that radiates all creation.

The figure of Dr. Thomas More in Walker Percy’s novel at least doesn’t suffer from the common delusion that one’s sins are private or affect only a few other people. To think our sins, however hidden, don’t affect others is like imagining that a stone thrown into the water, so long as it’s small enough, won’t generate ripples.

This is a topic Garrison Keillor addressed in one of his Lake Wobegon stories.

A friend — Keillor calls him Jim Nordberg — writes a letter in which he recounts how close he came to committing adultery. Nordberg describes himself waiting in front of his home for a colleague he works with to pick him up, a woman who seems to find him much more interesting and handsome than his wife does. They plan to drive to a professional conference in Chicago, though the conference isn’t really what attracts Nordberg to this event. He knows what lies he has told others to disguise what he is doing. Yet his conscience hasn’t stopped troubling him.

Sitting under a spruce tree, gazing up and down the street at all his neighbors’ houses, he is suddenly struck by how much the quality of life in each house depends on the integrity of life next door, even if everyone takes everyone else for granted. “This street has been good for my flesh and blood,” he says to himself. He is honest enough to realize that what he is doing could bring about the collapse of his marriage and wonders if in five or ten years his new partner might not tire of him and find someone else to take his place. It occurs to him that adultery is not much different from horse trading.

Again he contemplates his neighborhood:

As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they are no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families — my infidelity would somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gases come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white table cloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard the intersection and someone’s child will be injured. A sixth grade teacher will think, “What the hell,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the hell — I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To hell with the Health Department. This sausage was good yesterday — it certainly can’t be any worse today.”

[Garrison Keillor, News from Lake Wobegon, “Letter from Jim,” on the first of four compact discs, a Prairie Home Companion recording, 1983, PHC 15377.]

By the end of the letter it’s clear that Nordberg decided not to go to that conference in Chicago after all — a decision that was a moment of grace not only for him, his wife, and his children, but for many others who would have been injured by his adultery.

“We depend on each other,” Keillor says again, “more than we can ever know.”

Far from being hidden, each sin is another crack in the world. As Bishop Kallistos Ware observed:

There are no entirely private sins. All sins are sins against my neighbor, as well as against God and against myself. Even my most secret thoughts are, in fact, making it more difficult for those around me to follow Christ.

[Bishop Kallistos Ware, in a talk “Approaching Christ the Physician: The True Meaning of Confession and Anointing” at an Orthodox Peace Fellowship retreat in Vézelay, France, in April 1999.]

One of the most widely used prayers, the Jesus Prayer, is only one sentence long:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, be merciful to me, a sinner!

Short as it is, many people drawn to it are put off by the last two words. Those who teach the prayer are often asked, “But must I call myself a sinner?” In fact that ending isn’t essential, but our difficulty using it reveals a lot. What makes me so reluctant to speak of myself in such plain words? Don’t I do a pretty good job of hiding rather than revealing Christ in my life? Am I not a sinner? To admit that I am provides a starting point.

There are only two possible responses to sin: to justify it, or to repent. Between these two there is no middle ground.

Justification may be verbal, but mainly it takes the form of repetition: I do again and again the same thing as a way of demonstrating to myself and others that it’s not really a sin but rather something normal or human or necessary or even good. “After the first blush of sin comes indifference,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. [”On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”] There is an even sharper Jewish proverb: “Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a crime.”

Repentance, on the other hand, is the recognition that I cannot live any more as I have been living, because in living that way I wall myself apart from others and from God. Repentance is a change in direction. Repentance is the door of communion. It is also a sine qua non of forgiveness. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann points out, “There can be no absolution where there is no repentance.” Repentance, on the other hand, is the gateway to heaven. As St. John Chrysostom said sixteen centuries ago in Antioch:

Repentance opens the heavens, takes us to Paradise, overcomes the devil. Have you sinned? Do not despair! If you sin every day, then offer repentance every day! When there are rotten parts in old houses, we replace the parts with new ones, and we do not stop caring for the houses. In the same way, you should reason for yourself: if today you have defiled yourself with sin, immediately clean yourself with repentance.

It is impossible to imagine a vital marriage or deep friendship without confession and forgiveness. If you have done something that damages a deep, loving relationship, confession is essential to its restoration. For the sake of that bond, you confess what you’ve done, you apologize, and you promise not to do it again.

In the context of religious life, confession is what we do to safeguard and renew our relationship with God whenever it is damaged. Confession restores our communion with God.

The purpose of confession is not to have one’s sins dismissed as non-sins but to be forgiven and restored to communion. As the Evangelist John wrote: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9). The apostle James wrote in a similar vein: “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (Jas 5:16).

Confession is more than disclosure of sin. It also involves praise of God and profession of faith. Without the second and third elements, the first is pointless. To the extent we deny God, we reduce ourselves to accidental beings on a temporary planet in a random universe expanding into nowhere. To the extent we have a sense of the existence of God, we discover creation confessing God’s being and see all beauty as a confession of God. We discover that faith is not so much something we have as something we experience — and we confess that experience much as glass confesses light. The Church calls certain saints “confessors” because they confessed their faith in periods of persecution even though they did not suffer martyrdom as a result. In dark, fear-ridden times, the faith shone through martyrs and confessors, giving courage to others.

In his autobiography, Confessions, Saint Augustine drew on all three senses of the word. He confessed certain sins, chiefly those that revealed the process that had brought him to baptism and made him a disciple of Christ and member of the Church. He confessed his faith. His book as a whole is a work of praise, a confession of God’s love.

But it is the word’s first meaning — confession of sins — that is usually the most difficult. It is never easy admitting to doing something you regret and are ashamed of, an act you attempted to keep secret or denied doing or tried to blame on someone else, perhaps arguing — to yourself as much as to others — that it wasn’t actually a sin at all, or wasn’t nearly as bad as some people might claim. In the hard labor of growing up, one of the most agonizing tasks is becoming capable of saying, “I’m sorry.”

Yet we are designed for confession. Secrets in general are hard to keep, but unconfessed sins not only never go away but have a way of becoming heavier as time passes — the greater the sin, the heavier the burden. Confession is the only solution.

To understand confession in its sacramental sense, one first has to grapple with a few basic questions: Why is the Church involved in forgiving sins? Is priest-witnessed confession really needed? Why confess at all to any human being? In fact, why bother confessing to God even without a human witness? If God is really all-knowing, then he knows everything about me already. My sins are known before it even crosses my mind to confess them. Why bother telling God what God already knows?

Yes, truly God knows. My confession can never be as complete or revealing as God’s knowledge of me and all that needs repairing in my life.

A related question we need to consider has to do with our basic design as social beings. Why am I so willing to connect with others in every other area of life, yet not in this? Why is it that I look so hard for excuses, even for theological rationales, not to confess? Why do I try so hard to explain away my sins until I’ve decided either they’re not so bad or might even be seen as acts of virtue? Why is it that I find it so easy to commit sins yet am so reluctant, in the presence of another, to admit to having done so?

We are social beings. The individual as autonomous unit is a delusion. The Marlboro Man — the person without community, parents, spouse, or children — exists only on billboards. The individual is someone who has lost a sense of connection to others or attempts to exist in opposition to others — while the person exists in communion with other persons. At a conference of Orthodox Christians in France not long ago, in a discussion of the problem of individualism, a theologian confessed, “When I am in my car, I am an individual, but when I get out, I am a person again.”

We are social beings. The language we speak connects us to those around us. The food I eat was grown by others. The skills passed on to me have slowly been developed in the course of hundreds of generations. The air I breathe and the water I drink is not for my exclusive use but has been in many bodies before mine. The place I live, the tools I use, and the paper I write on were made by many hands. I am not my own doctor or dentist or banker. To the extent I disconnect myself from others, I am in danger. Alone I die, and soon. To be in communion with others is life.

Because we are social beings, confession in church does not take the place of confession to those we have sinned against. An essential element of confession is doing all I can to set right what I did wrong. If I stole something, it must be returned or paid for. If I lied to anyone, I must tell that person the truth. If I was angry without good reason, I must apologize. I must seek forgiveness not only from God but from those whom I have wronged or harmed.

We are also verbal beings. Words provide not only a way of communicating with others but even with ourselves. The fact that confession is witnessed forces me to put into words all those ways, minor and major, in which I live as if there were no God and no commandment to love. A thought that is concealed has great power over us.

Confessing sins, or even temptations, makes us better able to resist. The underlying principle is described in one of the collections of sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Gerontikon:

If impure thoughts trouble you, do not hide them, but tell them at once to your spiritual father and condemn them. The more a person conceals his thoughts, the more they multiply and gain strength. But an evil thought, when revealed, is immediately destroyed. If you hide things, they have great power over you, but if you could only speak of them before God, in the presence of another, then they will often wither away, and lose their power.

Confessing to anyone, even a stranger in an airport, renews rather than contracts my humanity, even if all I get in return for my confession is the well-worn remark, “Oh that’s not so bad. After all, you’re only human” — something like the New Yorker cartoon in which a psychologist reassures a Mafia contract killer stretched out on the couch, “Just because you do bad things doesn’t mean you’re bad.”

But if I can confess to anyone anywhere, why confess in church in the presence of a priest? It’s not a small question in societies in which the phrase “institutionalized religion” is so often used, the implicit message being that religious institutions necessarily impede or undermine religious life. Yet it’s not a term we seem inclined to adapt to other contexts. Few people would prefer we got rid of institutionalized health care or envision a world without institutionalized transportation. Whatever we do that involves more than a few people requires structures.

Confession is a Christian ritual with a communal character. Confession in the church differs from confession in your living room in the same way that getting married in church differs from simply living together. The communal aspect of the event tends to safeguard it, solidify it, and call everyone to account — those doing the ritual, and those witnessing it.

In the social structure of the Church, a huge network of local communities is held together in unity, each community helping the others and all sharing a common task while each provides a specific place to recognize and bless the main events in life from birth to burial. Confession is an essential part of that continuum. My confession is an act of reconnection with God and with all the people and creatures who depend on me and have been harmed by my failings and from whom I have distanced myself through acts of non-communion. The community is represented by the person hearing my confession, an ordained priest delegated to serve as Christ’s witness, who provides guidance and wisdom that helps each penitent overcome attitudes and habits that take us off course, who declares forgiveness and restores us to communion. In this way our repentance is brought into the community that has been damaged by our sins — a private event in a public context.

“It’s a fact,” writes Orthodox theologian Fr. Thomas Hopko, rector of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “that we cannot see the true ugliness and hideousness of our sins until we see them in the mind and heart of the other to whom we have confessed.”

Though we often dread it, confession itself is something beautiful.

I think of Zacharia, a large, round-faced Ethiopian woman of a grandmotherly age with a faded cross tattooed on her forehead, who is often the first person in line for confession in our parish in Amsterdam. The priest receives her, as he does all penitents, by reciting words that remind her that he is only a witness to the confession about to be made and that it is Christ the physician, invisibly present, who heals and forgives. Zacharia speaks little Dutch, still less English, and not a word of Russian, Greek, or German — thus no language that any of our priests understands. It doesn’t matter. She stands before the icon of Christ, her upraised hands rising and falling rhythmically, relating in her incomprehensible mother tongue whatever is burdening her. As the priest grasps not a word of what she is saying, he does nothing more than quietly recite the Jesus Prayer until Zacharia is finished. Then she kneels down while he places the lower part of his priestly stole over her head and recites the words of absolution: “May our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, by the grace and compassion of his love for man, pardon all your faults, child Zacharia, and I, the unworthy priest __________, by his authority given me, pardon and absolve you of all your sins: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

With these last words, he traces the sign of the cross on the head of this African woman who misses the liturgy only if ill. Then Zacharia rises, turns to face him, and receives a final blessing before the next person comes forward and the confessions continue.

Parents often bring infants and children with them when they confess. This is their gradually unfolding introduction to the sacrament. On a recent Sunday in our parish I noticed Fr. Sergei Ovsiannikov, rector of our parish, hearing a young mother’s confession while holding her baby in his arms.

I recall of an over-crowded church, St. Cosmas and Damien, in Moscow on a Sunday morning. Three priests are hearing confessions. There is a long line for each of them. The priest I happen to be standing nearest was Fr. Georgi Chistiakov, an ascetic man who looks something like a Russian Icabod Crane, only Fr. Georgi’s face seems mainly full of a joy. Penitents, aware of how many people are awaiting their turn, tend to be brief. In some cases they simply hand Fr. Georgi a piece of paper on which they have written what they have to confers. In these cases he reads the paper, tears the paper in half, and gives the fragments back to the person, as if to say, “Your sins are now in the rubbish bin.”

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Jim Forest

Kanisstraat 5

1811 GJ Alkmaar

The Netherlands

e-mail: <jhforest@cs.com>

tel: (+31-72) 511-2545 / fax: (+31-72) 515-4180

mobile: 06 – 510 11 250

Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org

Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://www.incommunion.org/home.htm

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DEAR BOUNDLESS ANSWERS

One of my closest Christian friends introduced me to your column, and even though I’ve NEVER written to a column editor before, I thought I would give it a try.

I’m 24 years old, currently in my third year of medical school. I’ve been a Christian for most of my life, but really started to walk with God the last few years. I have a decent network of Christian friends, though I’m not currently attached to a church or bible study, due to the fact that I travel a lot for my clinical rotations. I try to go to church when I can, but I haven’t been able to plug into one church since I am on the road so much.

Anyway, during my first year of medical school I met and started dating a wonderful guy and we’re starting to think about serious commitment (i.e. engagement). He is very sweet, kind, smart, funny, all those great things … and he’s a medical student like me. In short, we’re basically perfect for each other. The problem is, I’m not sure where he is spiritually. He SAYS he believes in God and accepts Jesus as his savior; however, sometimes I’m afraid he’s only accepted Jesus in his mind and not in his heart. If you gauge it by his religious practices, then some might say he isn’t Christian — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t participate in Bible studies and he doesn’t pray openly (he’s more of a private pray-er). But if you look at the way he lives and the way he treats people, you could say he IS Christian. He is a very loving person, and I believe he loves the way the Bible teaches — unselfishly, unconditionally, etc., etc.
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