One of my favorite definitions of confession is: coming into agreement with what is true.
For those who’ve grown up in church, we learned to “confess” our belief in Jesus as Lord and Savior which for protestants, basically stops there and all other confessions thereafter were focused on purging our souls of sin and guilt. As I write this essay, I am sitting in a quiet room at Trappist Abbey in Carlton, OR for a writer’s retreat. I’ve wandered through the beautiful buildings and watched the current of holy water stream down the font. Growing up Evangelical, the idea of confessing my sins to a priest seemed absurd and unnecessary. I was well content with confessing my faults and falling short’s in the privacy of my prayer journal. My guilt was between me and God but the message of “I’m just a sinner saved by grace” seared into my adolescent identity brought little relief when I closed its pages.
For years now, I have participated in the season of Lent as a time to “purge” my soul of anything that keeps me stuck, disconnected, and untethered to God. I have actively participated in fasting from food and activity which has greatly benefited me, loosening the grip of my natural impulses and unhealthy habits. But as I approach this season, I am already Intermittent Fasting and have eliminated sugar. I already drink decaf and I don’t binge-watch my shows to the point my life stops *pat on the back*. Sure, I could scour the deepest, darkest corners of my soul and dredge up the garbage that may be there but is that really what Lent is all about? A season to beat ourselves up and dwell on the “original sin”1 that doesn’t seem to release its grip with our confessions?
In my last newsletter, I felt determined to write about being good “stewards of death” this Lent by practicing letting go of things that no longer bring us life *How depressing*. Even though I still feel called to lay to rest a few things in my life, I also feel a pull toward stewarding new life. Just as I want to be careful not to walk on the shoots of daffodils making their way through the soil, I want to be mindful of new life springing up around me and in me. And I have been surprised by how pastoring a Wild Church this season is helping me do just that.
Over the past month, I have been reading the book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell. Since starting Wild Church of Portland, I’ve wanted to gain more knowledge about Celtic Christian Spirituality. The Celt’s are more traditionally connected to the earth, the sacred Feminine, and do not draw a hard line between secular and sacred. After reading the chapter about Palegius (a monk and theologian in the first century) and his getting the boot from the church of Rome, I began to doubt my belief in original sin that St. Augustine wrote into our Christian doctrine in the first century and Calvin galvanized with “Total Depravity” in the 16th century. Whether you know these theological terms or not, they have influenced the culture of the church for thousands of years.
Palegius’s teachings often get misconstrued, especially his view on grace. Unlike Augustine who believed humans are born sinful, Pelgius believed we are born sacred. The big debate between these two contemporaries was: Then why do we need grace? Augustine accused Pelagius of a belief that we are able to save ourselves. But this is wrong. Palegius believed that grace is necessary but it wasn’t for saving us from a sinful nature but for restoring us back to our truest nature, which is sacred and made of God.
In our last Wild Church gathering, we celebrated the season of Imbolc, a Celtic holiday celebrating the first signs of Spring. In Imbolc, we shed those things that have died and begin to see signs of life and new beginnings. The season of Imbolc is said to be a threshold that holds the tension of being in winter, and yet Spring is showing its glorious face. This is also the tension we find in Lent. There is life and death, light and darkness, growing and pruning. But how does one hold these tensions? I believe it is a practice of confession that enables us to stand at the thresholds of life. The thresholds that say both things can be true. Yes, there is death but there is also life. Yes, there is sin that keeps us from our truest selves but grace gently guides us back to our sacred identities. If Pelagius is right about us and our true need for grace, then our view of confession changes into agreeing with what is true not just what is wrong. And what is true is that you are sacred, good, and made in the Imago Dei, the image of God.
Should we be stewards of death, shedding those things that keep us disconnected? Yes, absolutely. But we are also partners in cultivating new life, in us and in the world around us. Both things are true and as we stand at this threshold in this Lent season, may we learn to hold the tensions with grace and resiliency through spiritual practices such as confession, self-examination, prayer, social justice, and creation care.
This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lent season. Millions of people worldwide will gather and have ashes applied to their heads to symbolize their mortality.
We are but dust but we are dust with the faces of God
To dust, we will return and we shall return back to God.
But till then, there is the dust we walk upon in the here and now, the thresholds from which we stand and confess as God did in the very beginning:
it is good, it is good, it is very good.
Ash Wednesday Suggestions
Here are a few suggestions of things you can do to begin this season of Lent:
Visit a church that participates in Ash Wednesday
Take a contemplative walk through a park or forest that has been damaged by wildfires.
Journal about where are you seeing the opportunity to shed what has died and what new spring is springing up.
Over the season of Lent
Follow along during Lent for a weekly post as we explore different spiritual practices that enable us to stand at the thresholds of our life and declare God’s goodness. Some of the thresholds I will discuss throughout this series will be things like deconstruction, community, and grief, exploring what it means to use confession to endure the tensions we hold in different areas of our life. Each week, I will suggest a scripture reading, a poem or other reading, and a spiritual practice such as Centering Prayer, contemplative nature walks, and others.
A belief that humans are born with a sinful nature and that only by the blood of Jesus were we able to be saved.