Enter with your sins; exit with his forgiveness.
The balance between sin and forgiveness has tilted - or seems to have tilted - to sin instead of to forgiveness. The overemphasis on sin and the underemphasis on forgiveness is the cause of the decline in the sacrament of reconciliation.
A story is told of a priest waiting to her confessions and no-one showing up. He exclaimed, “Doesn’t anyone believe in sin anymore?” This attitude encapsulates all that is wrong with the administration of the sacrament of reconciliation. If he would have exclaimed, “Doesn’t anyone want God’s forgiveness anymore?”, we could safely conclude that he understood the sacrament.
The sacrament of reconciliation is supposed to be all about forgiveness. It is supposed to remind us that Jesus forgave us for the evil that we did to him on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. That is the whole purpose of the sacrament of reconciliation. Now, however, the sacrament of reconciliation is all about sin. Instead of looking up at God, the confessional has become the place where we look down at us. We need to look in an upward not a downward direction.
The dial that controls his love for us is in his hands not ours. Moreover, it is set to the highest degree and is locked in place. Not even the evil that we did to him could budge it.
The evil that we did to him did not extinguish the bonfire of love that burns for us in his most Sacred Heart or reduce its intensity by even the slightest degree.
More focus on the forgiveness; less focus on the sin. The only job of the priest in the confessional is to plant the seed of forgiveness in the soil of our hearts. Nothing else. Forgiveness is the agent of our transformation - the catalyst of our conversion. The seed of forgiveness remediates the toxicity of the soil.
He gave to us that which we did not deserve, the blessing of forgiveness, even though we robbed from him that which did not belong to us, his life. The greater was the robbery, the more amazing is the forgiveness.
Hell is calculating our sins in kind and number, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, forever.
