Our friend and FT contributor Sally Thomas has a nice meditation on confession on her blog today . A portion:
My confessor raised the question of whether I needed to confess them at all, but when I said I thought I needed to, he heard me out. And then he absolved me. In that moment, I experienced a flash of understanding about the office of the priest, how he stands in, in his dealings with us, for Christ Himself. What the priest said to me, verbatim, was, “Your sin is gone. You are not that person any more.” And it was Father’s voice, but I heard the voice of Jesus, saying what He said to the woman at the well, to the woman caught in adultery, to the lepers, to the paralytic who rose from his mat. “You are not that person any more.” Whatever I was, whatever boring selection of the infinite and dazzling variety of sins belonged to me, I am not that person any more.
