I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, what I have done, and what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault: therefore I ask the Virgin Mary, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God. – The Confiteor.

I had the most beautiful experience in confession yesterday. I’ve never been guided in imaginative prayer in the confessional before, though I have been told to engage in imaginative prayer in penance. It’s not a get out of jail free card. You can do five Our Fathers and Ten Hail Marys with less effort and less emotional investment. Priests will often recommend for penance a means of using the faculties that were used in the sin for what is good, not just for penance but to get the penitent to use those faculties for good.

My imagination can be used for good, or for bad. I think a lot of us are prone to fantasy and escapism, and some of us more than others. I admit, I do it often.

I was taken through an imaginative prayer meditation in which I was a shepherd at the edge of Bethlehem, on the outskirts of town, tending my flock at night. I took notice of that strange new star that became brighter and brighter with each passing night. I didn’t know what it was, but it was something I got to see each night. One night, when it was so big and so bright, an angel comes to me, singing praises to God and telling me about the birth of the Son of God, the Savior of our people, telling me to go down from the hills to a cave where animals were kept to see Him. He knew me. He was waiting for me to visit Him. So I went down the hill to the stable, and when I went in, I saw Mary sitting next to a manager where Jesus lay in His swaddling clothes. Mary looked up at me with so much love. Joseph was standing there, beaming with pride, welcoming me in, and he picked up the baby Jesus and brought Him to me, and before I could protest that I’m not worthy to hold Him, Joseph has already placed the baby Jesus in my arms. Jesus turns His head and snuggles up closer to me. Mary and Joseph are watching me with love. Jesus is looking up at me, and I’m looking at Him, and I am filled with the utmost peace, unlike any I have ever experienced. I am fully conscious, fully aware, but everything is wonderful, everything is fine. I am loved, and am I enveloped in love. God is truly there with me, and as I hold the baby Jesus in my arms and am wrapped in God’s love, I wonder if it is I holding God, or if it’s actually God who is holding me.

The cure for sin has always been God’s love: what hands could engage in sin when they’re holding the Son of God? How could you want to sin when you’re invited to hold Him?

Most confessionals are equipped with tissues, and its not uncommon for people to cry in confession. Sometimes it’s sorrow for your sin. Sometimes it’s the realization of what sin has done. And sometimes it’s in gratitude for being so loved that you are forgiven.

So what if I could do that for the remainder of the Christmas season? What if I could imagine that I am holding the Christ who has called to me and is waiting for me to visit Him? What if I could also imagine that everyone is a shepherd on the mountain who is called to, of whom the Lord is waiting for a visit from? What if I could imagine everyone I know, especially the people who annoy me or anger me, or people I may callously or carelessly disregard, being invited to visit the baby Jesus and to hold Him, having Joseph place Jesus in their arms, and baby Jesus happily laying in their arms?

And what if we could all see this, and what if we all knew that Christmas is actually about facing our Lord, beholding Him and being beheld by Him? The rest doesn’t matter: the parties, the gift-giving, the decor, the food, the music. It’s about an entire world full of shepherds coming face to face with God incarnated so that we can face Him? If this is what life is all about, then all the things we do in sin lose their appeal.

Why Confess? Why Confess to a Priest?

Confession is a sacrament, and Jesus told the Apostles that what sins they forgive, He forgives. While you can confess directly to Jesus, He wants you to humble yourself and seek the counsel of His representative on Earth for a reason. Jesus doesn’t do things on accident. Everything has a purpose. To humble yourself and tell your sins in confidence, to humble yourself and listen to the advice and admonishment (if necessary), and to agree to the remedy, to humble yourself to know that when your sins are forgiven, they are forgiven and forgotten, and therefore, to humble yourself to let go of your attachment to sin so that you may attach to Christ.

Catholics don’t believe that Jesus destroyed the covenant, but that He meant what He said when He came to fulfill it. The baby is not thrown out with the bathwater: God didn’t call the Jews out of Egypt and keep them in the desert for 40 years to teach them how to be His people in order to simply do away with all of it so people could create this own little temples in their own imaginations as they see fit. Therefore, the Old Testament requirements of intention and purpose still apply even if we’re not required to buy animals for slaughter. We are still confess and to atone, to not run from Him or to shrug and assume that we’re free to sin because Jesus has taken up the penalty for the sin. That’s like assuming that it’s okay for you cheat and steal because if you say that you’re sorry, your parents will pay everyone back eventually. Someone always suffers for sin, and someone always pays the penalty. Sin has consequences that we can’t even foresee, and someone we can’t foresee suffers for those consequences. If, in your pride, you won’t see this or you refuse to see how grave a matter it is to stop sinning, you’re liable to reject the mercy of God because you won’t see why you need it.

Confession doesn’t allow me to hide my face from Him. It doesn’t allow me to rationalize my sin, or to simply believe that I’m special so I’m allowed to sin, or that God is going to forgive the sins I have no regret for, or will forgive sins in progress. It makes me think about the sins I commit over and over again, even as I ask for forgiveness over and over again. It lets me know that I am not perfect, and that I fall short of the glory of God, but He loves me anyway, and His Mercy is endless, and it’s always been there for me to reach out for it. After denying that mercy for decades, I see it now, and I want it. And I’d love for everyone to reach for it and accept it.

Catholics must go to confession at least once a year, at least before Easter. That’s really the least you can do: imagine if you only took a bath once a year, just before Easter, and you didn’t clean yourself for the other 364 days. During those other 364 days, you touched other people. You were intimate with your spouse. You hugged your children. You fed them the food you prepared with your hands. You slept in your bed. You wore your clothes. You sat on furniture. You road on the train. You met up with friends. You kissed your mother. In the meantime, you rolled around in shit because you didn’t think it was a big deal because you’re so used to being filthy and believe that how filthy you are is really just a matter between you and God, and has no affect on anyone else, even though you are covered in shit. Maybe you think that you can cover it with perfume or clean clothes, but eventually, the smell and the filth seep out.

And you reasoned that, should there be any question of your hygiene, you insist that unless God Himself stands in front of you and literally tells you that you’re filthy, you’re therefore clean. If you actually said this to people, you’d probably end up as a candidate for an adult guardian.

Works will not save you, but grace does, and confession is how you remain in God’s grace. It’s specifically designed for that.

Most of us develop our sense of cleanliness based on those around us and what others will think of us: Americans, for example, tend to bathe daily, which can be considered a lot, but compare us to people from hotter countries who bathe twice a day and use bidets, we’re lacking.

Now, what if you’re not comparing yourself to people publicly, but rather, someone who is completely spotless, without a speck of filth? And what if you don’t even have to go out and compare yourself to others, but rather, in the privacy of your own shower, clean yourself so that you can become more like the spotless one, without anyone else around to make you compromise or make you feel too ashamed to take off your clothes and get in the water?

You’re not clean because you insist that you’re clean. You’re clean because you are actually clean because you have done cleaning.

Because we go to confession to remove as many barriers as possible to become more like the spotless one, the Lamb of God.

I don’t aim to inspire priests, but I do aim to make good confessions, because I remember what it was like to believe that I am stuck with my sin, and that I am stuck with other people’s sins, and that none of them can dissolved, even if I forgive or forget. I also know what it’s like to be at the mercy of people who do not forgive. I know what it’s like to live in despair and under the delusion that I have destroyed my life and others through my mistakes, my acts and omissions, and that because I personally do not have the power to change anything, that nothing can be repaired. This is why I asked Jesus if I could talk to Him last year, because He was the only one I could think of who would talk to me in this state, even if I didn’t believe in Him, and who promised to make all things new.

I don’t simply want to tick a box: I want to never feel like I did last year, and I don’t want anyone else to feel that way either. And I don’t want to offend God like I had been doing all the way up to last year, because if I felt horrible because of my sin, how did He feel? And how did He, whose compassion is inexhaustible, feel when I felt that my life need not go on anymore?

I’m not unique. I’m one of many, MANY former occultists/atheists who are reverting or converting. And we’re not just reverting or converting, but we’re actually largely doing so in a bubble and often isolated from other Catholics. Sure, maybe there’s social media and books, but one of the things I’m noticing is that there’s a lot of us who are being pulled out of Satan’s clutches 1) through Mary’s intercession to Jesus, 2) through the unique languages we speak and understand, and 3) with glory to God alone because of the fact we have zero or very little social or cultural influence tipping us toward Catholicism. Seriously: the only practicing and devout Catholic I knew was a sibling I talked to a little, and I was pleasantly surprised and continue to be surprised by just how devout and vibrant the Catholic communities can be in Chicago, which is nothing I ever experienced in the parish I grew up in or in my own hometown where Catholicism was mostly a hobby or a social club. On the other hand, there’s a lot of people who are confused or don’t understand the reversion, or they tolerate it as long as they think my politics and social values are aligned with theirs, not knowing or realizing that it was my questioning those politics and social values because their fruits were rotten and led me to despair that made me seek out Him out: I was waking up from “woke” about a year before I reverted to Christianity.

Waking up from Woke: the Guilt of the Penitent

Listen: almost two years ago, I was in a position to explain gender ideology to an immigrant who had never been exposed to it before, trying to explain to him how the person who I previously knew to be my older brother was somehow actually a woman. Because I liked this person and I knew who he was, I couldn’t conveniently write him off as a bigot, hater, or fascist for asking probing questions. He wasn’t insulting, dismissive, or unkind. The thing is, I learned gender ideology as an undergrad, so I had over 20 years of it under my belt and was confident that I could explain it succinctly despite the inherent contradictions. I even once dated a man who identified himself as an autogynephiliac long before this whole gender trend took off. That man not only admitted that it was all just a fetish, but looked down on men like my brother who would give up their manhood to play a game they could never win, because the entire point of the fetish is not passing — it’s the titillation of the humiliation of being emasculated and then imagining himself as an actual, idealized woman, and wanting to have sex with her or have sex like her. And yet, I was still defending this ideology.

The more I tried to explain to this friend how my brother is actually a woman despite being male and never ever presenting as female or even showing any interest in being female until he was 40, the more questions my friend had had, and the more holes he easily poked holes in gender ideology. Finally, he said to me “you don’t believe your brother is a woman. You know that he is a man, and that he is just crazy. I know you know this. I can hear in your voice that you don’t believe this thing. You’re just afraid not to believe this thing.”

And he was right: my “belief” that my brother is a woman, and a lot of my leftist ideology, was largely rooted in the fear of what would happen to me if I didn’t believe in it. Not only did I yass-light my brother along to the point where he permanently altered his body and his future, but I knew that it would be dangerous for me to openly question gender. The only gender critical people I knew of were few and far between, and they had all been assaulted, harassed, cancelled, doxxed, hunted, and oppressed by their own governments. The left equated gender criticism, and even merely questioning gender ideology, with literal, actual violence, even though there is no actual transgenocide. There is just simply no evidence that trans-identified people are being harmed for being trans-identified, and no one either side of the fence can produce that evidence because in reality, if a man slaps on a dress and says he’s a woman, he’s now a member of a highly protected group of people. There was no question that men who imagined themselves to be women were not only better than real women, but more deserving of time, attention, resources, and protection from real women, and that actually: they deserved all of those things from real women, and if you weren’t going to serve these men, you were the enemy, and you were fair game. “Be Kind” was a demand to not be questioned and clearly directed at women, because no one orders men to be kind and expects to be taken seriously because men will not be punished for not going along with such a demand.

And how is that fair in a free society? When did thoughts become crimes? When did the feelings of some people dictate the reality for everyone else? When did our culture start compelling speech? And why are young white leftist men simping so hard for other men and using that to justify patriarchal oppression and misogyny, because what else do you call it when men attack women because those women have the audacity to think for themselves, even if men don’t like it?

It all started to unravel, but without God, it didn’t make any sense. All of it began to unravel: accepting that I never thought that my brother was a woman and accepting that I always hoped he’s snap out of it and go to a real therapist and make the real changes in his life that seemed obvious to everyone else needed to be done instead of punishing himself by trying to slowly kill off the man he really is and replace it with a caricature. I carried so much guilt and shame for yass-lighting my brother into permanent, irrevocable bodily mutilation and destruction of his family. I carried so much guilt and shame for actually hating people because they voted for Trump, or because they didn’t want men changing in the same locker room with pubescent girls, or because they had what are actually reasonable and valid concerns about women losing protection and sex-based rights to men who can simply take off the costume and be men again when it’s convenient for them. I carried so much guilt and shame for supporting an agenda that encouraged division and weaponizing differences. I carried so much guilt and shame for having actively supported the suppression of free speech. I carried so much guilt and shame for being so hateful and cruel toward other women – real women – and toward Christians and those who believed, because in the end, most of them were just trying to live their lives, and if they were really so bad, how come pretty much all of them are happier than we are? We’re the liberated ones, right? Yet, we’re angry, miserable, and pretending that we’re scared but also somehow the majority? I carried so much guilt and shame for specifically avoiding the kind of romantic relationships that could lead to real intimacy and to marriage and family. I carried so much guilt and shame for how I led others astray, as an astrologer, to destroy themselves or feel emboldened to continue in their egotistical pursuit of nothing.

Everything I valued seemed like a waste. Everything I thought was important wasn’t important. I wasn’t a part of Brave New World: I was one of many, many cowards too scared to face reality. Accepting that my brother is not a woman, was never a woman, and can never be a woman was just the start of the existential crisis. Granted, I felt better in a lot of ways because I could at least admit the truth to myself, and I no longer felt the need to confine myself and others within a specific party line, as in, I wasn’t policing my own curiosity, so I was happy to accept nuance from other people. I started visiting red states and discovered that people are actually just people, and that it’s just a weird beta submission fetish that all the people in red states are violent and will kill you if they found out you were a Democrat or lived in a blue state. However, the more I opened my eyes, the more I saw what I had done, what I contributed to, and the nonsense, chaos, and decay that its wrought, and the cycle of insisting that we need to continue to destroy things in the name of progress.

By the time my 44th birthday rolled around, I couldn’t see a future for myself. What was the point? The world was getting worse, I helped ruin it, and I didn’t deserve to be a part of it if it was repaired. I was alone, angry, isolated, and full of regrets. I couldn’t restart my life and make new decisions. I couldn’t be optimistic about a country I assumed was going to simply fall apart.

Considering that I was an astrologer at the time, it made sense with what I was seeing in the stars at the time, because while the rest of astrology was predicting a bountiful harvest, all I was seeing in the world was bare trees and rotten fruit, and I couldn’t simply trust that a Deus Ex Machina would reach down and turn it all around at the last minute if I manifested it really hard.

And I had no one I could really talk to about this.

I was completely alone, and I always would be. That was my fate. It was my karma to realize the truth and to become hopeless because how could it change. Who could I talk to? Who would accept this massive failure of a person?

Who would understand or even care about how sorry I was about everything, and how much I wished it was different and how much I wished someone or something could fix what we all broke?

Jesus.

Jesus would talk to this massive failure of a person. He would be my company when I had no one to talk to about this. He, the Eternal Word, had the eternal word, and I could simply download those words onto my phone and read them. He would also forgive me for what I have done.

Even though I at first thought he was an archetype and a figment of my imagination that I was using to comfort myself, it became more apparent to that He wasn’t just a comfort figure that I was imagining, but that this closeness was manifesting in reality. The strange noises in my apartment that I had previous accepted as just an unfortunate annoyance began to subside. I was untouched by other strange phenomena when visiting other places – places where other occult practitioners would have experiences, I would be kept safe. My nightmares started to subside. I lost interest in magick, and my desire for power, money, and success gently subsided, too, because more and more, Jesus was the treasure and the only treasure I desired. It didn’t leave me thirsty for more the way that occult practices did either – I was satisfied.

I was sorry. I said I was sorry. I was sorry for the sins I knew about, the things I knew were sins. It wasn’t until I was gifted the peace of the Holy Spirit one night that I knew where it all was centered, and I knew I had a choice: obey, and abide in Him, or disobey, and remain in misery in Satan’s clutches. After all, atheistic Satanism is the same thing as Satan worship, and to belong to his temples, or identify with Satan aesthetically is the same thing as being subject to him. Satan will rub salt in the wound and make you feel that you’re helpless and that the world is irrevocably ruined and that you can never be forgiven and that your sins ARE who you are, so you may as well identify with your sins and demand that others respect that identity.

And then, in front of God whom he cannot deceive, he accuses us day and night of the very sins he tempts us to do.

But on the other hand, if you reach out to Jesus, even if you’re not entirely sure, even if you’re not entirely convinced yet, because the name of Jesus alone is enough to send a wave of fear through Satan because when His Holy name is spoken, Jesus listens, and He is there: hallowed be His name. Satan is entirely subject to God but without any of the love, because he rejects it. Since Satan rejected the Holy Spirit, knowing exactly what that would entail now and forever, he refused to remain a child of God, choosing to become a slave of God instead. He lies and induces humans to think he represents rebellion and liberation, but he actually eternally embodies self-destruction and slavery.

So it’s no surprise that after he’s convinced you to commit the sin that he turns around and tries to convince you to reject God’s mercy and to never seek forgiveness, to never feel sorrow over sin and seek to make amends. Then, you’ll just identify with your sin, emulating him, and continuously distance yourself from God until you’ve convinced yourself that God doesn’t exist, and if He does, He’s somehow the bad guy because somehow, He’s the reason you feel bad.

But you are not your sins, even if you are ashamed of your sins, even if others accuse you day and night, even if you identify with your sins and others encourage to identify with their sons, and even if others enable you to identify with your sins and and as your sins:

But now, this is what the Lord says—
 he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel:
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine. Isaiah 43:1;

Remember these things, Jacob, for you, Israel, are my servant.
I have made you, you are my servant; Israel, I will not forget you.
I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,
your sins like the morning mist.
Return to me, for I have redeemed you. Isaiah 44:21-22.

You are called by name: not socio-economic status, not by the groups you identify with, not by your online persona, not by who you prefer to have sex with, not by your career, or by the things you own or the things you strive for. Your name is yours no matter what you do, what you like, what you become, how you succeed or how you fail or in how others perceive you.

Return to Me.

It had been a long time since I had asked for forgiveness for sins, and even as a child, confession was not treated with any seriousness. I think I went maybe once a year, if that, and my parents never made an effort to go or to make us go. Most adults didn’t go; it was something old people did because they had the time, and it was something parents forced their children to do. It was only for an hour once a week, and you couldn’t take too long because then people would gossip about you, so you really couldn’t make a good confession – the old people in line would be angry, and the gossip would get back to my mother, and then I would have to explain why I had such a long confession, and what evil things I must have done (because you can’t be thorough, and if the priest feels the need to counsel you, you must be a very bad person) to make it so long. Because it would bring scandal upon you and your family, you had to receive the Eucharist even if you had a mortal sin on your soul. Confession rarely came up in homilies or in religious education.

I didn’t know that this was all super heretical and symptom of the faithlessness of the faith community. Currently, the church I grew in is now shuttered, and many other churches following, with the alleged faithful in town not doing a single thing to bring people back to the faith. In contrast, in Chicago, I go to confession all over the city, and no one gets mad at anyone for having a long confession – especially if they have tears in their eyes. The priests WILL stay until everyone has had an opportunity to be heard, and there is no judgment tolerated. People who go to confession believe in what they’re doing and what is going on. If someone in front of us makes a long confession, there’s a reason they need to do it and praise be to God that they are taking forever in the confessional because that’s potentially a lot of sins being forgiven, and potentially many tears wiped away from the Lord’s eyes as He saw those sins in the garden before His Passion, and so much glory for the God whose love and mercy for that poor sinner is endless.

And if you show up to confession five minutes before it’s scheduled to end, that’s on you.

What Does Confession Do?

Each confession is an affirmation of your baptismal vows. Every baptized Christian is marked: I have summoned you by your name; you are mine. This can’t be washed away. It can’t be revoked. Even someone like me who openly denied God and therefore the promises and protections of my baptism couldn’t wash it away because I can’t force God to give up the covenant He made with me: I can fail on my end, but He never fails on His end. I can come back. I can go to confession. I can be forgiven and there is absolutely nothing Satan can do about it. After all, when God forgives, He forgets, which means that we cannot be accused of what God has forgotten has happened. In fact, one confession is more powerful than an exorcism, because many times, the diabolical cling to sin because it separates us from God. Once that sin is removed, it’s gone. Even if other people throw up your sin to you, even if they remind you that you committed that sin, Satan can’t grab it again.

Confession makes you say your sins aloud, and you’re not allowed to justify or rationalize your sins or make a comparative confession where you argue that someone else’s sins are worse. This isn’t just merely asking Jesus quietly to forgive your sins. You have to recall your sins. You have to say them aloud. You have to use words so that you have to hear yourself say that your acts and omissions are harmful. You have to ponder how they hurt you and your relationship with God. You have to ponder how you will avoid those sins later on. You have to be humble and honest. This flies in the face of what our culture tells us is healthy – pride, denial, and walking away from a mess without cleaning it up – so it’s hard. It’s easy to simply ask to be forgiven for sins without having to recall them or having to parse them out of context or out of what other people may have done. It’s easy to simply assume your sins are forgiven without even having to actually ponder whether you know what they are or whether you’re actually sorry for them – it requires no contrition and no humility. It’s easy to simply assume that you didn’t sin and never contemplate your own behavior or beliefs. It’s easy to turn away and just seek validation from the culture or from those who are indifferent or spiritually lost, as you will always find someone willing to blow smoke up your ass. Hence, you go into that confessional alone, your face unseen, your name unsaid, and you present your sins with a contrite heart. That’s not weakness: that’s courage.

To confess is to be courageous.

If a cheating husband walked into the kitchen and said to his wife “I want to confess everything, and I want you to forgive me,” and she said “what do you mean? What did you do?” and he replied, “Well, first I want you to forgive me because I’m sorry,” what do you think the response is going to be? “What are you sorry for?” “Well, you know…” Even if she knows, the penitent man says what he’s sorry for and why it’s wrong and why he wants to be forgiven so he can start repairing his relationship with his wife. Penance isn’t about you and your ego and keeping yourself safe; it’s about the person you hurt. She could give him blanket forgiveness if she knows what he did, but how do they move on if he won’t face what he’s done and how it hurt her and their marriage? And why does it have to be a struggle unless the man, in his pride, refuses to admit to what he actually did and how sorry he is? His pride will save him in the short run, but it will destroy the marriage, and each time he tells her to forgive him without telling her what he wants to be forgiven for, and every time he just automatically assumes he’s forgiven even when he’s not even sorry, the more he destroys his marriage.

At some point, she’s just going to turn to him and say, “You say you’re my husband, but you cheat on me constantly and just assume I’ll forgive you – you won’t even admit to what you did. You won’t even come to me like a man and tell me what you did and ask for forgiveness. Are you really my husband? You don’t act like it, and I don’t even know you.”

There’s a lot of people, particularly white middle class people, shelling out way too much money for pseudo-spiritual, occult retreats and treatments that are confessory in nature, like ayahuasca rituals. “Shadow work.” “Inhabiting truth.” The list goes on and on. In the end, they’re useless. You can forgive yourself, but you can’t forgive your own sins, and there is no higher you or better you out there with the power or the authority to make you righteous. Ostensibly, these types of things are designed to make people confront and heal their trauma so as to clear up “blocks” or self-destructive patterns.

The problem that these things don’t work. After the initial high, and after “discovering” trauma, nothing that any of these things can do will sweep away your sins. It’s one thing to confront having been a victim, but it’s another to be accountable, and another to confront the maladaptive attitudes and behaviors that bring us and others misery. I think the scam is in pretending that these things are so deeply hidden inside of us and that it takes so much effort to weed them out and conquer them. Most of the time, people know what happened to them. They know they’re hurting. They may not accept it as abuse or neglect, but how much a person is harmed depends on mitigating factors, like good experiences, or one’s own grit and sense of self-determination, and one’s own perspective. Since this is a culture that demands that people identify with their sin and with their pain, and not to identify with their virtues or their triumphs, there’s definitely a push to be in pain or use that as an explanation for why you don’t have everything you feel you deserve. From a Christian perspective, you’re not entitled to have what you want when you want it just because you want it, but the culture doesn’t agree. You’re not also going to live free from suffering although no one is entitled to cause others to suffer, but the culture doesn’t agree. The culture says that you yourself are sufficient for all you need, but this isn’t working for anyone. You screaming into a pot of herb water out in the jungle isn’t enough. You insisting that instead of making the changes that will make you happy, healthy, and whole, that you need to find radical acceptance of your flaws and shortcomings, which somehow also requires everyone else around you to accommodate you. It’s not enough for you to feel feelings or act on them or get “wildly and dangerously vulnerable” with some random person you’re paying to hopefully not take advantage of you and scramble your brains even more.

And then what? You forgive yourself in order to let go of “toxic shame?” Toxic shame doesn’t fix itself when you don’t know that the shame is washed away in the Blood of the Lamb because you are inherently good and made in God’s image. And this culture isn’t actually good at liberating people from “toxic shame,” since what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander.

Forgiving yourself is of limited value – you’re ultimately seeking forgiveness from someone who no more and no less power than any other random person. You can’t make eternal covenants with yourself. You can’t cause yourself to become new, and you can’t sustain yourself when the wolves come to your door.

And I know this because I was an occult practitioner. I know this doesn’t work because no one is ever one-and-done. People who pay for readings get a little high, a little direction, and they feel good. Then the dust settles and they need another fix. Maybe they want to hire you to do even more complex readings. Maybe they want you to teach them. There’s charlatans and heretics out there creating entire “schools” to lead God’s children astray, possibly causing them mental harm while emptying their wallets, all while pretending that they’ve got some special occult knowledge and power that has led to spiritual and worldly success, but in reality, the only thing they’re successful at doing is cannibalizing their community by getting other occultists to give them lots of money.

Astrology can’t forgive your sins and help you sin no more. Neither can occult mystery schools or covens or workshops. They only affirm you in your sin and discourage you from virtue, and they cannot make you aware of Gods’ great love for you and make you prioritize it, because this shouldn’t cost you $10,000. And while people in the occult specifically hate on tithing or charitable giving to the church, they conveniently ignore the fact that they don’t do their work for free, and a lot of it is wildly expensive for reasons unknown, whether you’re doing the work yourself or paying someone else. There’s always a convenient excuse too: you need to be willing to make sacrifices to get what you want, etc. But in the end, nothing outside of Christ is freely given, and the “forgiveness” felt in these stupid rituals is just masturbatory, because it specifically doesn’t come from God and no one with the authority to forgive sins on Christ’s behalf is forgiving sins. Instead, you just get to keep replaying the moments of levity in your head over and over again until you stop reliving the high and the old feelings set in.

Which is, by the way, one of the reasons I returned to Catholicism: having been a practicing pagan before, I simply don’t trust any “worship” that heavily relies on a dopamine rush, because that’s actually how pagan rituals and most witchcraft actually works. What people think is pagan about Catholicism is based on what they know from pagan rituals invented in the 19th and 20th century England which heavily appropriated from Anglicanism and Catholicism since there was no historical high pagan rituals for them to draw on: it’s not the tail that wags the dog. There’s just simply no historical record of Celtic, Briton, or Germanic pagans having altars, using chalices, using bread as part of their ritual (instead of an actual blood sacrifice of an animal, as pagans actually did), or wearing vestment robes or using symbolic colors, and there’s absolutely no record of how the Druids worshiped, if they worshiped. The only thing Renaissance, Victorian, and modern area pagans had to model their practices on was usually Catholicism, which is specifically reverent and designed to keep the focus on Christ, not on the individual. In the case of certain paths, like LeVeyan Satanism, Order of the Golden Dawn, and some others, they specifically mock the Catholic mass in parody. But again: these religions didn’t exist until the 19th and 20th century.

But unlike with the dopamine rush of paganism, you know you’re done with a sin when you don’t have to keep coming back to confession for the same instance. You have clarity. You said what you did. It was affirmed that it was a sin, but the sin is not who you are, and your sin was forgiven, and you made spiritual amends. That’s how you do it. No navel gazing. No holding onto to a sin and replaying in your mind how you’ve addressed it. No coming down from the high either because confession is, like all of the sacraments, designed to be reverent and for you to keep your wits about you. No public confessions. And you focus on what you can control: yourself, and your relationship with God, and not what someone did to you in the past. You heal that way.

No, the Priest Doesn’t Remember Your Sins.

It’s like I tell my clients: this is harder for you because this is your first case, but this is my 200th case, so trust me, I have a better idea of what’s going to happen and how the judge is going to react.

And then I’m going to forget everything, because like I said, this is case 200 for me to your one case.

Your priest does not remember your sins. I mean, it’s possible if they’re really out there, or if your confession really, really different, but chances are, your priest doesn’t remember what you said and certainly doesn’t remember who said it. First, they’re not supposed to dwell on any on person’s forgiven sins because God has forgiven them. Second, they hear a lot of confessions. They hear a lot of the same things. They hear a lot of the same excuses. They hear a lot of the same requests. They hear a lot of the same voices. They don’t get time to dwell on anyone’s confession before moving on to the next one, and then the next thing. Priests are pretty busy, and good priests are very busy.

Of course, even if you’re forgiven for the sin, you may still be attached to the sin. This means that you still hold the desires, attitudes, and habits that lead you to sin, that make you vulnerable to temptation. Or, you could be sorry for the sin but still take pleasure in remembering it, which again, makes you vulnerable to temptation. That’s a lifelong thing, and if you die attached but accept God’s mercy, there’s the mercy of purgatory to help purge you of the attachment. Then there’s scrupulosity, or the anxious worry over the state of one’s soul that makes one unable to relax and be loved by God. But that’s a whole other blog post.

I’m going to think about taking the journey down the hill to the stable on the outskirts of Bethlehem tonight. I am finally done with all of my work festivities and obligations. I am still recovering from COVID. It snowed last night, and it hasn’t all melted. It’s Advent, and we await the coming of the savior, in celebration of His incarnation, and in joyful hope for His Second Coming.