Childlike clarity. . .

Age and experience are supposed to impart wisdom.  Sometimes they also bestow a cloud or fog around things that should be clear.  I see it in myself.  I heard it in others.  It is hard to miss and even harder to overcome.  The child sees life through a rather uncluttered lens but the adult has all sorts of caveats that fill the landscape of life.  Even more, they make it often hard to see virtue and evil, good and bad, right and wrong.  Instead of clarity and fine lines, there are degrees of muddiness and gray that undermine the whole idea of right and wrong.

One of the places where it happens most clearly is confession.  When a child comes to private confession, they know what they have said and thought and done and they know one thing more.  They know it is wrong.  They do not like it.  Who does?  But they know the elephant in the room and they do not ignore it.  Sometimes a youth at confession ends up with swelling emotion and tears as they say out loud what has tormented him or her for too long.  Perhaps a careless word was said to a beloved parent -- I hate you; I wish you were dead.  Unlike adults who can minimize the power of words, these words live in their minds and hearts and they hear them over and over again with every glimpse of the parent.  Like a dam giving way to the flood, confession allows this to all come out unvarnished and without nuance of explanation or justification.

The adult is often more likely to rationalize the context and to say why it was said and to make sure that the father confessor knows they did not mean it.  But of course they did.  Everyone means the words that come spilling out of our mouths but later need recalling.  We meant it in the moment even though we may live with a lifetime of regret for having actually said it.  But the adult tends to soften the evil of the words and the intent and to smooth the rough edges of the sin.  Because of this, it is harder for the adult to leave confession having felt the full release of the absolution for as much as you make relative the sin, you also end up making relative the forgiveness.  If you are honest, you have heard it in yourself.  I have.

There is another aspect to this.  The child almost always confesses concrete sins.  They sins they have said, thought, or done.  The child does not have the advantage of living with intentions and lives more comfortably in the realm of words, thoughts, and deeds.  The adult lives easily in the arena of intentions and the confessions of adults are more about the things they could or should have done but did not instead of the concrete of the things they said, thought, or did that were evil.  In this way, evil itself is distanced from the everyday life of the adult in a way that it is not for the child.

Something to think about when you go to private confession.  Try not to explain your sins to the pastor hearing your confession or to God.  Simply confess them.  Confess them as concrete realities and not what might have been done that was not.  Believe you me, this is the key to walking away with a clear conscience and it is for this that know Christ and Him crucified.  He takes our sin away not by diminishing its wrong or giving it a context to be understood but with His blood that cleanses us and makes us clean.  Thanks be to God!