Have you ever tried to avoid being blamed for something? We all have at one point or another in our lives. Even little children do it before they have really learned right and wrong. Adam and Eve did it right after they first sinned, so now it is almost instinctual in the rest of us. I am not speaking about being honest and admitting that we did not actually do something we were accused of; rather, I refer to the those instances when we know we did wrong, but we do not want anyone else to know it and pin it on us.
Of course we are not supposed to do this, and when we do we must go to confession to receive forgiveness for it. Yet, it is hard because avoiding blame is the very opposite of what confession is all about, so every time we avoid blame for our sins, we push ourselves a few steps more away from our Lord. In confession we accept the blame and acknowledge our failings. This is why it is so important for us not to break the habit of going to confession.
The bare minimum of once a year, as we are told in the Church's precept, is almost too infrequent to be much help in our spiritual walk. They did not ask me (which was probably a good idea), but I would have made the precept to be "a minimum of once every two months". Anything less frequent than that is not enough to help us build the habit of dealing with our sins, which is one of the most significant reasons to go to confession frequently.
So let me ask it once again: how hard do you try to avoid being blamed for something? Do you try hard enough where you keep yourself from confession? Do you try hard enough where you spend more time and effort getting out of being blamed than you would if you just accepted your failings and moved on? As you think about this, remember this one thing: Jesus went out of His way to accept blame for things He did not do, and He took them to the Cross, so that we could be forgiven for all things that we actually did.
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