Please People, Always Bring your Toddlers to Confession with You

I went to confession today.

I think some of the silliest temptations that ever go through my interior strike me when I am considering or planning going to confession. It is crazy. One of the thoughts is generally that I have no sins to confess. Another is that any other time would be better than now. Another popular one is that I am in the wrong mood or the wrong frame of mind to make a good confession. And it is all balderdash, of course.

Overthinking is no good either, and that used to be what plagued me, to the point where sometimes I could not get any words out at all because I had worked myself into a state of emotional paralysis.

So anyway, I went to confession today.

I hated going to confession for years, or rather I did it because I knew I should, but I couldn't really grasp what was supposed to be happening. I have stumbled and bumbled through for 23 years now as a Catholic, but now I realize that every single time I go to confession, I experience an encounter with the Lord. Often it shakes me deep down. Always, I think, I leave re-oriented.

Today I went by faith. None of the appropriate feelings seemed present. But then there was that woman with her kids.

One of them was old enough to be confessing, I'm guessing 8 or 9. The other was about 2. The older one popped out of the confessional just as mom was going in. This left the toddler looking a little forlorn about disappearing Mommy. He looked with huge, sad eyes at the closed door, and told his brother he wanted Mommy, and resisted a little being picked up by brother. Just then, he caught my eyes, too. I could feel that little boy's pain, and I tried to reassure him that his Mommy was right there and would be right back. Just then, the CD playing in the church went to a song based on Psalm 42: "Even as the deer pants for running streams, so my soul longs for you. When will I come to the end of my pilgrimage and enter and see the face of my God?" And the refrain rang out "My soul longs for you// My soul longs for you."

Those words, sung to that melody, and the face of the little boy became a sudden scalpel opening my heart in such a way that if it had lasted very long at all, I would not have been able to bear it. I realized that under all my adult clutter and dullness of soul and foul play in relationships, my soul is desperate for the tender embrace of God. I design so many things to hush up that desire, to make it more manageable, less of a panic.

But the panic is reasonable, because I am needier than a toddler. But it also is not necessary, because the tenderness of God, and of His Blessed Mother, his greatest minister, is imminently available to me. I need only come and ask.

It is hard to stay with the feelings, with the raw experience of the need that fuels asking, and of experiencing the need for tenderness being met. I thank God I can experience this to one degree; if I could really feel my need and God's response always I would not be able to carry on with normal life.

The beautiful thing to realize, of course, is that other people need simple human tenderness and personal presence from me, because this is the normal way that God's healing presence is mediated among people.

These days in our country have not been tremendous moments of tenderness. Everyone is riled up, it seems. We toughen as a way to cope.

But, let's do this: let's long for God. Let's allow our souls to long for God. He is able to break us out of cycles of longing for not-God, for things that never will satisfy. He is not slow to hear our desire, nor is He slow to answer. So let's honor Him with our trust and make a carte blanche of our souls, intent on Him alone.