The experience of walking into a church in which the statues and crucifixes are veiled never fails to make a deep impression on me.
The stark drama of the purple forms recalls a childhood memory of waiting to make my first Confession in front of a large, veiled statue on a plinth. As I stared at its outline a draught kept catching and moving the purple veil slightly, as if the amorphous figure beneath had stirred, giving rise to the idea that the figures beneath their veils were alive. Paradoxically, by veiling something it can acquire more notice, more power. This is certainly true psychologically. One of the maxims of 12 Step programmes is, “You are as healthy as your secrets” – and what is a secret except that which is veiled from view?
This is why the sacrament of Confession is of such vital importance to a heathy Christian life. It is about unveiling my true form, not the amorphous self that cannot stand the light of truth. Like an embarrassing symptom which I feel unable to reveal to a doctor, something that I keep from the Divine Physician in Confession, whether from motives of shame or pride, will continue to afflict me.
No one disputes that it is difficult to confess one’s sins, that it requires a degree of humility and perhaps involves shame, but the cornerstone of the fallacy for a generation formed in the 1960s and 1970s is that the difficulty of making a good Confession is the consequence not of sin itself, but of a perverse and anti-human desire on the part of the Church’s hierarchy to inflict shame on her children, or somehow to infantilise them by making them confess their grave sins. With that goes a second fallacy, that to avoid doing so brings greater peace and wholeness and freedom from so-called “Catholic guilt”.
I will never forget being upbraided by a parish catechist for daring to use the word “sin”. “You can’t say that word,” she said. “Sin is too negative a concept.” This had clearly been learnt on some recently attended course, its mere novelty clothing it in an unquestionable authority which could blithely permit ignoring Scripture and 2,000 years of tradition. Only if you don’t think sin exists could you cavil at calling it sin. Children have not yet learnt to “cover sin with smooth names”, as the psalmist puts it, and so they appreciate from personal experience that sin is a negative concept because it’s so negative. Analogously, one might ban the word “pain” from their vocabulary on similar grounds, but it wouldn’t ease their malady.
St Augustine, who understood the psychology of sin brilliantly, writes about just such a euphemistic approach to the reality of sin in Confessions. He says: “I still thought it was not we who sin, but some other nature that sins within us. It flattered my pride to think that when I did wrong, I incurred no guilt, and not to confess it, that you might bring healing to a soul that had sinned against you. I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing that was within me but was not part of me.”
Augustine’s recidivist Manicheanism sounds exactly like the kind of pop psychology inflicted on recent generations of Catholics in this country, so that many come to Confession perhaps annually and tell you that they feel they are making progress in “X” area or that they wish they were better at “Y”, without ever putting a name to an actual sin, as though this were somehow childish or unnecessary. At best they might say something like, “My main sin is ‘Z’. That, I think, is the thing I want to focus on,” because someone has told them that this is a more mature use of the sacrament than all that negative guilt stuff. It is as mature as going to the doctors with raging symptoms and saying: “I would like to focus just on this one symptom, because nothing else is relevant to a diagnosis.”
Again the unregenerate Augustine tells it as it is: “The truth was, of course, that it was my own self, and that my own impurity had divided me against myself. My own sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.”
This year Passiontide has taught me that you don’t conceal something by veiling it – you make it more obvious and distort its true features by covering it up, however sumptuous the covering. Only uncovering to the light of Easter will restore in us the true form of holiness.
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