"YES, I DID IT, LORD!"

-Fr. John Dresko

Great Lent is now upon us. The time is dark, quiet, pensive. The sounds of our church life have changed - instead of the light, joyous music, there is something else. It is still joyous, but laced with the realization that repentance is the major theme. It is a time for what Fr. Alexander Schmemann (of blessed memory) called "bright sadness." It is a time, above all, for personal reflection and movement back to God.

Sin, in literal translation, means "missing the mark." Not being where we should be. Where we should be, but are not, is in communion with God. So, for practical purposes, sin is separation from God. And, by definition, separation from God is death - because life can only exist where God is present.

Great Lent is the time when we take special care to try to reverse the effects of sin in our lives. We are, since sin came into the world with the very first person created by God, "consumers," filling ourselves with everything that entices us in this world. Food, possessions, material wealth, sexual adventures, various and sundry substances (not just drugs, but alcohol, etc.) all become simply "ways" to satisfy our urges. During Great Lent, we fast in order to restore the proper understanding and balance between our desires and the basic necessities that God provides for our nurture. Food is denied to the self not because food is bad, but because we only need a little to survive. We understand better during lent than at any other time, that man cannot live by bread alone, but needs the heavenly manna of prayer and effort given by God. Food is restored to its proper Christian place in the world.

Prayer, both personal and corporate, is also important during the lenten season. Our hunger that grows with our fast should be transformed by prayer and liturgical life into a hunger not for physical food, but for God Himself, who is the Bread of Life and the Fountain of Holiness. If we fasted from food without prayer it would simply be a diet, and would probably even be detrimental, provoking pride and "self-effort," thinking that "I" did something "good." Fasting without prayer is like the man who had the unclean spirit and cleaned it out, but left his heart empty, so seven spirits even MORE unclean than the first possessed him. The Church, in her wisdom, gives us Holy Communion frequently during lent to spiritually strengthen us, because we expose ourselves to more temptation by our fast. But, fortified by the Body and Blood of Christ, we are rejuvenated and able to continue the fight against the demons and temptation.

But the most personal, and usually most difficult, aspect of our lenten efforts is the journey to the Sacrament of Confession. Confession of our sins is a basic and necessary part of the Christian life. But Confession in Orthodox Tradition has always been to someone face-to-face, and that is, if we truly confess our sins, an uncomfortable experience. Many people outside our faith wonder why we simply do not confess our sins in private "to God." The answer is very simple - God already "knows" about our sins. Certainly, daily confession of our sins is part of our personal prayer life, but can never replace sacramental confession. The Sacrament of Confession is a gift to the Church from God that allows us to not only confess our sins, but to receive the assurance of God's forgiveness and the spiritual guidance that we need to help us overcome these sins.

Confession is a simple three-step process. First, we must recognize our sins. This is an ever-changing reality. As we get "holier," we see better and better how truly awful our life is, how truly estranged we are from God, and recognition of our sins gets better. Second, we must truly be sorry for the sins, and one of the true tests of our sorrow is the ability to confess those sins to another human being. Pride is the source of every single sin - the ultimate prideful act which condemns us is being so prideful that we refuse to confess our sins because we are worried about what someone else might think about us if they "only knew what I'm really like." Finally, once our pride is defeated and the sin confessed, we must try to repent, overcome the sin and live a truly sinless life. Of course, the effort is in the struggle, since we cannot actually avoid acts of sin. So, we confess, are healed, go out and struggle to remain sinless, sin again, confess, etc. But why should we confess to the priest?

1) Sin is, as we have said, separation. First of all, sin separates us from God. Sin keeps us from being who God intends us to be. The communion with God that was given on the first day of creation is fractured by sin, and eternal life can only be granted when that fracture is healed. Confession to a priest overcomes and heals this fracture because the priest is the sacramental presence of Christ in the Church. By the grace of the Holy Spirit given in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the priest does not "represent" Christ, is not the "agent of Christ," but is the very presence of Christ Himself in the Church. When someone confesses to the priest, they are confessing to God Himself, thereby healing the fracture which has occurred when someone sins. Our proper and intended relationship with God is restored when we confess to the priest.

2) Sin separates us from the Church. When we raise the consecrated bread off the paten just before we receive Holy Communion, the priest says "Holy things for the holy." Our relationship with God as fulfilled in the Church is done so through Holy Communion. No one is "sinless" when they receive the Holy Gifts, but when we progress beyond the "daily sins" or accumulate so many of them that our soul is burdened, we must confess our sins to restore our relationship with the Church. Our communion with the Church is fractured by sin, and healing can only take place when we bring our sin to the Head of the Church - who is Christ. The priest is the sacramental presence of Christ in the Church and the head of the local community by the blessing of the bishop, and to restore unity with the Church, we confess our sins to the priest.

3) Sin separates us from each other. Nowhere is the lack of communion between us and God that happens because of sin shown better than in how estranged we are from each other. Sin destroys my relationship with the "other," and Christ Himself says that we can only know God and we can only love God, when we know each other and love each other. So many of our sins are selfish, denying not ourselves, but the other. We must confess our sins and repent of them to restore our relationship with the "other." In the early Church that was very simply done - when you went to Confession, you stood up in the midst of the church community and confessed your sin, thereby healing that relationship with others. When problems arose, like a husband taking his wife out and having her stoned for adultery, the Church in Her wisdom decided to have the priest stand in the place of the community, since he was, after all, one of the community and another human being. So we confess our sins to the priest not only because he is the sacramental presence of Christ in the Church, not only because he is the head of the local community through the authority of the bishop, but also because he is a man, created and fallible just like everyone else.

When these three "healings" take place - between me and God, between me and the Church, between me and everyone else - then true healing begins, with the long struggle to overcome our sins and "be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect." Only when we can overcome our pride, come to the priest (and, miraculously, speak to God) and begin by saying "Yes, I did it, Lord. Forgive me!" can true repentance take place. Anything else and we have wasted the precious forty Holy Days of the Fast which have been given to us by God.