I need to discuss it with him, it is a very small parish, so not sure why he does it this way..
Ortho Lounge
- Thread starter TrainedLogosmotion
- Start date
It does sound unusual but there might be a legitimate reason why the priest was given a blessing to confess people in such a manner.
You are right to raise it peaceably with him in person. You can just say you find it unusual and ask if there is a reason why it is done this way, and say that you'd prefer one-to-one confession.
If the priest has a very negative reaction to being questioned about it, I'd consider talking to the bishop. But you shouldn't talk to the bishop without going to the priest with your concerns first.
How much detail should one go into when confessing? Sometimes there are specific circumstances or details about a sin which perhaps make it worse, I do not know if those can be omitted or if going into as much detail as possible is good. Like, say I consumed extremely disturbing pornography rather than "normal" pornography, should I describe the type of pornography in my confession as that detail probably makes the sin significantly heavier, or is it enough to just go "I consumed pornography" and leave it at that?
I obviously feel inclined to avoid going into details when confessing because there is a desire to "save face" before the priest, or a fear that the priest will think badly of me. I also feel pressured to keep things brief when confessing, because if I really go into thorough details every time, that'll be an incredibly long confession, and usually there's other people waiting for their turns to confess so that would feel extremely impolite. But then, we are not to omit things during confession, right? I do not know how to go about this.
I obviously feel inclined to avoid going into details when confessing because there is a desire to "save face" before the priest, or a fear that the priest will think badly of me. I also feel pressured to keep things brief when confessing, because if I really go into thorough details every time, that'll be an incredibly long confession, and usually there's other people waiting for their turns to confess so that would feel extremely impolite. But then, we are not to omit things during confession, right? I do not know how to go about this.
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I am not a priest or any kind of authority so don't take my words as the final say on anything.
I would say your conscience should be the guide. You will probably sense if you are making things too vague through shame.
That being said you don't have to go into specific detail. In your example, you wouldn't need to describe the video. I'd say something like "I viewed pornography, the content of which was particularly foul and degrading and as a result I suffered disturbance in my soul"
If you're trying to engineer a confession like a politician where you say things without really saying them, for example if you said "I looked lustfully at a video online" its not a lie but it isn't really confessing it truthfully because you're saying it in a way that doesn't get across what you really did, and makes out you just saw someone pretty on YouTube. So in short, say in no uncertain terms what is troubling your conscience without being explicit in the detail. There is no saving face in front of God.
Thinking about this and my oast struggles with faith, I wonder if it's not so much that I've lacked faith, as the fact that I couldn't accept that I didn't, because it would mean my problems were that transitory and self inflicted.
The idea that my own suffering is trifling and insignificant is a little difficult to swallow, and I don't think I ever consciously reconciled with this fact.
How can I can say that my troubles with suicide were a great trouble or inconvenience when Christ died on the Cross for after days of excruciating torture, when Saints have literally been burned alive for proclaiming his resurrection and not even faltered in the face of death?
It's humbling in a way. If painful. Yet as they say, the Dragon doesn't represent greed, it represents the Ego.
A Guide to Confession (II)
Written by Valeriu Gafencu – while in the Communist Gulag (continued from the previous post) The Ten Commandments The First Commandment: I am the Lord thy God, thou shall not have any gods…
orthodoxword.wordpress.com
Those who have read “The Saint of the Prisons” will perhaps be familiar with this, but I’ve been revisiting it again before I go to confession. I find it very helpful
I've been contemplating how insidious materialism is.
The foundational myth of materialism is that there is an objective state of things that we can somehow access by ritualistically stripping our human experience from reality. That the observer can be subtracted from the observation, and that this can somehow provide the most accurate portrayal of reality. This observation-sans-observer is as unreal as many atheistic materialists claim God to be. Yet many Christians still fall into the trap of thinking like a materialist. That this "objective" description of reality minus the observer is the standard, just that it somehow has God attached to it.
The post modernists who make everything about subjectivity miss the mark also, because they lack a centre. Christ is the objective centre of reality, by which we can measure our experience. Reality is centred on Him. So its not the case that the denial of materialism leads to a rudderless subjectivism wherein everyone's version of the truth is in some kind of eternal power struggle, but rather the incarnation of Christ is the point that holds reality together. Reality is neither some inaccessible objective description, nor a centreless nihilistic subjectivism.
Those who allow their Christianity to be subsumed by materialism, and posit that there is this objective description of reality that exists independent of us, just that the equation somehow features Christ, pretty much miss the point of the incarnation. Christians never looked at the world like this until recently. They looked at the world as it is, that is one viewed through human experience, but founded and centred on the God-man Christ, they did not concern themselves with some hypothetical reality that exists independent of that.
The foundational myth of materialism is that there is an objective state of things that we can somehow access by ritualistically stripping our human experience from reality. That the observer can be subtracted from the observation, and that this can somehow provide the most accurate portrayal of reality. This observation-sans-observer is as unreal as many atheistic materialists claim God to be. Yet many Christians still fall into the trap of thinking like a materialist. That this "objective" description of reality minus the observer is the standard, just that it somehow has God attached to it.
The post modernists who make everything about subjectivity miss the mark also, because they lack a centre. Christ is the objective centre of reality, by which we can measure our experience. Reality is centred on Him. So its not the case that the denial of materialism leads to a rudderless subjectivism wherein everyone's version of the truth is in some kind of eternal power struggle, but rather the incarnation of Christ is the point that holds reality together. Reality is neither some inaccessible objective description, nor a centreless nihilistic subjectivism.
Those who allow their Christianity to be subsumed by materialism, and posit that there is this objective description of reality that exists independent of us, just that the equation somehow features Christ, pretty much miss the point of the incarnation. Christians never looked at the world like this until recently. They looked at the world as it is, that is one viewed through human experience, but founded and centred on the God-man Christ, they did not concern themselves with some hypothetical reality that exists independent of that.