On confession and absolution as a therapeutic technique

Knowledge of sin alone and free grace alone both trap us within ourselves. If we accept no grace, we have no hope of change, we’re in full knowledge of our failures but are crushed by them and by what we are (our identity as monsters) and turn inward. If we grant nothing but grace and admit no sin, no need for forgiveness, then again we are trapped as ourselves. Unable to see how we go wrong or how we could be different or better, we’re trapped within our identity as angels (the divine in us).

Knowledge of sin is the door, and grace is the key. Without the key, there’s no way to make use of the door and escape into a larger world. It torments us. Without the door, the key doesn’t lead it anything, we don’t see that there’s anywhere to go but where we are. It’s useless. The two must be combined for growth to be possible.

Both are painful. The power of guilt and fear over us and the unwillingness to raise ourselves against our shadow, especially the more clearly we see it, the more obvious our own imperfection is, the more helpless we feel, the more impossible they seem to overcome. We feel helpless before the tyranny of ourselves. And we can’t find the means within ourselves to grant ourselves any right to escape. That is why grace comes as a gift from outside. The door is built from the outside, and we choose from the inside to accept it and walk out.

It’s also very tempting to resist any knowledge of our own imperfection and fallibility and sin. It’s much easier to just assert that we are only as we were made, embrace the deterministic element of our moral identity and our own dislocation for any responsibility for it, because we cannot be anything else. It’s a comfort, it protects us from the demands and criticisms the universe might put on us by restricting our moral universe purely to ourselves. But that sacrifices the possibility of all growth for the sake of comfort. It sacrifices who we could be for who we are.

Humans are made for more than mere happiness, the unconscious contentment of a cow; they need to grow, they need to see how their life is painful and broken and see what it could be. That’s the burden of consciousness, knowing the pain and the limits of your own existence. And painful as it is to learn that you’re less than you could be, if you’re trapped by believing you cannot be anything else, you’re denying yourself a doorway you desperately need.

You have no idea what your potential is, what you could be. And you won’t find out what that thing is by staying safe inside yourself. Humans are made to realize their potential through confronting and adapting to and overcoming difficulty. If you never face those difficulties, you’ll never grow beyond them. In either case, judgment or grace, if you decide that you’re finished and complete, then you become completely static. You’re no longer a living, growing thing. You’re dead.

So those who deny themselves grace and those who deny themselves sin each trap themselves and (likely) rightly recognize the tyrannical threat the other position poses to their preferred position. Grace is sin’s contradiction. Sin is grace’s contradiction. Surely we need to deny one or the other. Surely the other must be destroyed to save the world of what we are.

No, we are wrong. When these two opposites are combined, they do not eradicate one another, they transform one another. They create an explosion of creation, not destruction. They create eucatastrophe. They create life as we know it. So much of our time and temperaments and human activity is spent flailing back and forth between one or the other, embracing the one that appeals, avoiding and resisting the other that does not, feeling trapped and then maybe throwing ourselves in reaction into the other camp to try to correct ourselves and find peace in the other extreme.

But that peace, that growth, cannot be found in either extreme. It is found, rather, in their tension. In the combination of their power in proportion to what we, as an individual, need to bring us to the middle point, to where key and door can meet.

Maybe for you that means a movement toward a bit more grace, more understanding of your light and divinity. Maybe for another it means a movement toward knowledge of your shadow, your sin. You can’t afford to live without either. You just need to know how to move toward your opposite enough that the two can meet and unlock the door. That’s why confession and absolution are recommended to us. Not one or the other, but both. We see who we are today, and we learn who we could be tomorrow. We aren’t naive about ourselves, and we aren’t hopeless about who we could be.

Knowledge of grace and knowledge of sin both come to us from the outside. It’s when we take them entirely into ourselves and our control that they become monsters of destiny that devour us and trap us forever. If we are the ultimate arbiters of our own sin and judgment, we cannot grant ourselves grace. If we are the ultimate arbiters of our own grace, we can never properly understand our sin. If we ever want to be more than just our limited, single selves, trapped within ourselves, we have to open ourselves up to an intrusion from the outside, a path to a larger world we could inhabit.

There is safety in relativism, but it’s inherently solipsistic. We exist each in our own isolated value structures, and nothing can bridge the gap between them. We are islands of loneliness in a sea of anarchy and chaos. There is also a kind of safety in absolutism. We are secure in our value structures, but there is nothing that can break down the walls between them, no escape from their tyranny, no place to hide from their judgment, nowhere to go to be free. One prison gives us nowhere to go, the other leaves us no place to be.

Forgiveness of sin, the core of the gospel, is good news because it goes beyond either relativism or absolutism. It takes both up, understands both halves of humanity, and brings them together to create a door for both. An intersection. A cross. And by it we gain new life, a new nature, and freedom.