This summer, I attended the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis with about 100 of our Sisters. I signed up as a volunteer, honestly for the sole purpose of being able to attend the event for the entire week. I thought I would just fulfill my volunteer hours and then actually get to enter into the congress. I could not have been more wrong.
My role as a volunteer was as a confession guide. Instead of just checking off the box of volunteering, being a confession guide became the highlight of my time there and the lens through which I viewed the entire congress. As penitents came to confess to one of the 70-80 priests we had serving as confessors at any given time, I greeted them and showed them where to line up for confessions. I also went out into the main hallway to encourage others to come to confession. This involved — I was surprised to find — an exhilarating experience of shouting into the crowd, “Confessions, Room 500, this way!” and holding up a sign one of our Sisters had made, which read, “Confession? Ask me where to go.”
I received so many beautiful responses from people: “Sister, I didn’t know that was what I was going to do now, but that is what I should do. Which way to confession?” “I should do that; I’ve been putting it off for a while.” One man, being encouraged by his wife to join her going to confession, said, “Yes, I want to do that … Well, I don’t want to, but…” I responded to him, to the delight of his wife, “But you want the freedom — and freedom is that way!” The hunger in people’s eyes when they saw the sign in my hands was also striking. It showed forth the deep longing that can only be filled by God’s mercy.
In her novel The Dry Wood, Caryll Houselander describes this longing as one of her priest-characters hears confessions on a Saturday night:
Father O’Grady understood his people; he knew they were coming to be fed. Penance is sorrow for sin and forgiveness, but it is much more too. It is the Good Shepherd feeding His sheep, feeding His lambs, and a crumb of the Bread of Life is the whole of life.
This reality was tangibly present in my experience as a confession guide at the Eucharistic Congress. We, the sheep, long to be “fed” with the mercy of the Good Shepherd.
I was surprised at the congress with a realization that I felt should have been obvious to me before: the sacrament of confession is central to the Eucharistic Revival we are seeking. As Fr. Mike Schmitz proclaimed to us Thursday night of the Congress, “Revival means repentance.” Only if each of us is willing to turn away from our sins in repentance by turning toward God’s mercy in confession will we be revived in our Eucharistic encounter, life, identity, and mission (the four pillars of this last year of the National Eucharistic Revival).
We go to confession to be fed with God’s mercy, which opens our hearts to feast on His Eucharistic Presence. The reality of our sinful condition is that we need God, we need a Savior. We cannot save ourselves, hard as we might try. If we want to have lives filled with peace and joy, lives centered on the Eucharist, we have to have lives penetrated with regular confession.
Do not put confession off any longer. Seek out the mercy God longs to give you in this sacrament. Approach Jesus, the Good Shepherd, there, and you will be fed. For, after all, “… a crumb of the Bread of Life is the whole of life.”
Sr. Mary Martha Becnel is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
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