Rites and Results

I had my first confession yesterday.

I had been anxious and apprehensive over this for weeks; probably not a unique experience. I'm not a terrible sinner, but still, there were some things that I was very ashamed of. As Hamlet says, "I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me." I prayed, asked the Holy Spirit to help me remember everything I needed to confess, and kept a list as things came to mind.

But it turned out to be much easier than I had anticipated. Part of it, no doubt, is that I have a good priest. But another part is that the things which I've been agonizing over, some of which I've never told any living human before, though I had confessed them to God and repented in private, just didn't sound as earth-shakingly evil as they had in my soul for all those years. In fact, as I listened to myself and looked at my list, it almost seemed trivial. Almost.

After confession, I stepped outside the church and lit my list of sins on fire, then buried the ashes on the church grounds. And I have to tell you, I feel wonderful: clean, light, and innocent. I enjoyed my reading last night more than I have in ages, like I'd recaptured that wonder and joy I had in my youth, in my early readings of Tolkien. And when I slept, my dreams were so many and so vivid that I was overwhelmed, and couldn't really remember much distinctly.

This was the second of the rites in the process of joining the Church, and both times I've felt a very real effect from them. After the Rite of Welcome, when I was received under the protection of the Church, the level of the spiritual warfare in which I've lived all my life dropped off dramatically. I don't talk a whole lot about this side of it, but the extraordinarily active spiritual life I have on the positive side has a correlation from the other side as well. I had come to accept that that was just the way it was going to be: that I would be living in a spiritual war zone for my whole life. But something has changed--like the volume has been turned way down. It's like, before, I was wandering around waging a private war, behind enemy lines; but now, I've been taken under the auspices of the U.S. Army, and have the entire might of the U.S. military on my side.

There's a psychological effect too. As you know, I've been and felt alone all my life. Especially in the area of ideology, I've experienced hate, rejection, revilement, hostility, anger, and even persecution because my beliefs and opinions are not acceptable either to the politically correct faction or the more traditional, "conservative" but secular and rationalistic faction of society. But now that I'm a member of the largest organization on Earth, I feel like I've finally found a place to belong. And especially I am very pleased to learn that, within the Church, there is an entire sub-culture of people like me, old-fashioned, traditional-minded people who love classical high culture; men who grow beards and smoke pipes, and women who wear mantillas (that is, chapel veils) in church (which I find so incredibly beautiful and admirable); who read Tolkien and Chesterton, Lewis and MacDonald, and discuss religion, literature, music, philosophy, art, and culture intelligently and sensitively.

This Sunday is the next step, and my confirmation will be on Easter, which is appropriate, as I feel like I will be starting a new life.