Amazing Grace

                      

Back at the beginning of Lent, I think I mentioned that along with my other ambitious (for me, anyway) Lenten plans, I was hoping to go to Reconciliation/Confession every week.  Well, I have.  It was sort of an experiment, really, just to see what it would be like to go so regularly.  In the past several years I've increased my attendance at this beautiful sacrament from once or twice a year, when I first joined the Church, to about once a month during the past few years.  So for this Lent, I went even more, thinking that it would be quite a grace-full thing to do.  Here are some of my preliminary conclusions, based on this "experiment."

The more I go, the easier Confession gets.  Of course.  It's just like anything else--say, taking care of a new baby:  At first, it felt awkward and uneasy, and I constantly needed to check the "instructions."  But when I got it figured out, it became second nature--easy as pie, and I know what works for me.

Also, the more I go, the more fruitful Confession is.  Of course.  Because in order to first do a proper examination of conscience, it's helpful to have some sort of context running through one's head involving an idea of what sins have been especially difficult to avoid and so on.  I find that going to Confession once a year, while better than nothing, results, for me, in the confession of very vague and general kinds of sins (as in "well, I can get pretty impatient at times"), whereas regular Confession enables me to explicitly target specific sinful acts and thoughts that I might have committed during a given week (for example "I was too short-tempered with the person from Planned Parenthood who called me about the upcoming election.")  :)  It's kind of like cleaning the house:  Spring cleaning is nice and helpful and all, but if you haven't done the weekly cleaning since last spring, you'll never really get to all the dust bunnies under the bed.

The "secret" of the Sacraments, that I keep learning over and over, is that they're really just such incredibly powerful sources of God's abundant grace, that the best analogy is something like a fire hose.  Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if one could actually start to glow from participation in enough Sacraments within a short period of time.  (Maybe that's why there's a rule against going to Mass more than once a day!)  They're transformational, really.  And to think that the Creator of the Universe gave us the Sacraments as gifts, just so we could be a bit closer to Him in this life, and to help us inch our way towards eternal life with Him!  It's incredible, really.