Orthodox Confession: How to Prepare
Orthodox confession preparation means keeping confession as a disciplined part of your prayer rule: regular self-examination, silence to hear conscience, writing sins, and bringing them to a priest for absolution. Scripture and the Fathers (St. John, St. John Chrysostom, the Desert Fathers) frame this practice, and practical steps—scheduling, fasting, using preparation aids, and trusting your confessor—help the penitent receive mercy and real change.
Note: This article is an automatically generated transcript of an audio lecture. It was transcribed and lightly reworded for readability using automated tools, so it does not reproduce the speaker’s exact words. For the original, listen to the recording linked below.
Listen to the original lecture on Patristic Nectar →
Key takeaways:
- Make confession a scheduled part of your prayer rule and accountability
- Create silence so conscience can speak and guide your self-examination
- Write down sins; God records deeds and the Fathers urge honest confession
- Bring private repentance to a priest for absolution; do not skip confession
- Persist in repetition: return to confession until habits are healed
Why confession should be disciplined
The first thing I'd like to emphasize is that our participation in the sacrament of confession should not be haphazard. It should not be something we do only when we have an urging to go or only when we feel particularly guilty.
This is true not because you shouldn't go to confession when you feel guilty. You should. Confession is the solution for that condition, but you should also go to confession many times when you don't even know that you're guilty. In the process of preparing for the sacrament, you'll discover that you need the sacrament.
This is the case for all the mysteries, right? We don't always feel like praying when we need to pray. We don't always feel like going to communion when we need to go to communion. We don't always feel like living out Christian marriage when we're in the midst of Christian marriage. But on principle, we do so.
For this reason, confession should be a part of your spiritual discipline, meaning it should be part of your prayer rule. It should be part of your own personal devotion. It should be something you do as part of your spiritual life for which you are accountable to your pastor or your spiritual father, so that you have a discipline and can hold yourself accountable.
You could say, 'Well, it's time for me to go to confession. I go this often. I haven't gone. I need to go.' We do this in every other area of life. That's important. We schedule, we plan, and we stick to what we agree to. Confession should be a part of your prayer rule, and we should live from confession to confession.
What I mean by this is that when you go to make confession, you should be covering the period of time since your last confession. It's the discipline of many confessors to ask the person, when was your last confession? I'm mentioning this because this necessitates, therefore, a means of preparation that is sustained from confession to confession.
It's relatively easy to remember the sins of the day and maybe the day before, and if you did something really atrocious, maybe even a month ago. But if you aren't in the discipline of thinking about your confession from confession to confession, it's very hard after a month or several weeks to keep a record. So this is my encouragement to you: make it something you plan, a part of your spiritual discipline, and confess from confession to confession.
Next, by way of basic introduction on preparing confession, write down your sins on a piece of paper.
Why write things down and the books of judgment
In doing so, you will be acting like God, who happens to write down all of our sins and our virtuous deeds into a book.
I want to read you a text. This is from the Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 20, verses 11 and 12.
"And I saw a great white throne, and him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books according to their deeds."
This is a vision of the eschaton and of the great judgment, and there are two fundamental books. There is a book of life, which has written in it the names of those who have been given life, those who have been baptized.
In the service of holy baptism, if you attend carefully to the words, there is a reference to the angel flying up and recording the newly baptized name into God's book of life. In the time of baptism, you're written into God's covenant book of life.
There's a second book, however, that St. John says we're judged out of: the book of deeds, those that are good and those that are bad.
God records them all. We know this from the experience of many of the lives of the saints who had the scrolls of their life unrolled before their eyes. God writes down our sins; he takes them very seriously, and he takes our good deeds very seriously. We should also take our sins seriously.
So this is just an introductory encouragement about how to approach the subject in your own life of preparing for confession. Make it a part of your spiritual discipline. Live from confession to confession and write down your sins on a piece of paper.
Silence, conscience, and self-examination
Now, how do you discover your sins, and how do you prepare to write them down and discern them? This can only be done by creating silence for preparation in order to listen to your conscience. It is not wise to run to confession until you have created a little bit of silence—so that you can listen to your conscience.
This is the key to a successful, fruit-producing, grace-drawing confession: you need a little quiet. In our lives, that means creating some silence.
For some, it may mean getting up a little earlier on the day you hope to make confession, before the spouse or the kids are up. It may mean sitting in your car in a parking lot. I'm giving you my secrets here. The first one definitely does not work at my house.
You know how to find a little bit of quiet. Quiet is the milieu in which conscience speaks. If you want your conscience to talk to you, you have to settle yourself down and pay attention. The more you give an ear to the voice of conscience, and the more you care about and react to what it says, the louder and clearer conscience will articulate its voice.
The Lord God created the conscience in the human person to function as His voice within the human being. The atmosphere in which God speaks to us through our conscience is silence. The conscience is, according to the Church Fathers, a courtroom and a judge within every human breast, within the heart of the man.
By voluntarily going to this courtroom and submitting ourselves to the judgment of our own conscience in this life, we escape a harrowing and ruinous appearance before the judgment seat of Christ. This is the miracle of confession: listening to conscience and submitting to its judgments.
Those who voluntarily embrace the judgment of conscience now in confession will not have to pay twice. Those who are saved, the inhabitants of heaven, are those who have judged themselves ahead of time, before the great judgment seat of God. The redeemed are those who voluntarily judge themselves, who have voluntarily proclaimed their own sinfulness, their own infractions, their own divine felonies and spiritual crimes that they have committed, and have condemned themselves out of their own mouths.
For these, there will be no double jeopardy. This is the truth: if you condemn yourself now, you will not be condemned. If you deny that you have any sin and do not condemn yourself now, then you will be condemned later and eternally, and your sins will be shouted from the housetops. Everything in Jesus' words that is hidden will become known. The secrets of men's hearts will be disclosed to the world. Much better to disclose them now and receive the mercy of God.
This is St. John in his first epistle. "If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him, God, a liar, and his word is not in us."
St. John Chrysostom has something beautiful along these lines to say about conscience. He says, "When the Lord created man, he placed a conscience within him as a tireless, unerring prosecutor. Imagine the courtroom and the attorney who is prosecuting the case. God placed a conscience within man as a tireless, unerring prosecutor who cannot be deceived. Even if a sinner could elude the notice of all men, he will not be able to escape the notice of this prosecutor."
So create a little silence so that you can listen to your conscience. This is the first necessity in order to prepare a heart-cleansing confession. Get a little quiet so that conscience can speak.
Next, do a self-examination. Examine yourself. This is St. Paul to the Corinthians in his second epistle, chapter 13, verse 5.
"Test yourself to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourself, or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you, unless, indeed, you fail the test." What a tremendous apostolic injunction! Test and examine yourself to see if you're in the faith.
Now, I'm not asking for a show of hands, but is that the kind of thing we do? Test yourself to see if you're really a Christian, he's saying. Are you in the faith or are you not? Because a tree is known how? By its fruits. Sometimes, in confession, we have to judge that we aren't in the faith. And it's time to get back in the faith.
Time to make our lives conform to what we say we believe. The mercy of confession is that it brings us back onto the rails and puts us back on the road that leads somewhere we want to go. Test and examine yourself.
So our process of self-examination, which is common in all preparation for orthodox confession, is the fulfillment of an apostolic command. In order to confess our sins, we have to know what they are. And in order to know our sins, we have to know what God's will is and compare ourselves to the demands of God's law.
Knowing God's law and measuring our love
St. John, in his first epistle, chapter 3, verse 4, he says, "Everyone who practices sin practices lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness." That's what sin is. Sin is going against the will of God, against his words, against his law. And therefore, how do you know if you've done it? You have to know the Lord's will. You have to know his law.
If you know his law, then you can measure yourself against it. The better the knowledge of God's will, the better the knowledge of God's law, the better the possibility for an authentic and a deep confession. And as you know, God's law is chiefly concerned with two things.
Loving God supremely with your whole heart, soul, and mind, and loving your neighbor just as you love yourself. This is the great concern of God's law, and it's the standard by which we have to measure ourselves in preparing a confession. The more we understand the obligation of love, the deeper our own sense of sin will be when we fail to love the right way.
This is our goal when we measure our standards. When we look at our lives, we have to measure our life and ask, how does this measure up with the law of God? How is my life measuring up? This means asking how I stand in the issue of loving God and loving men. This is how we prepare our confessions.
This is how we discover our sins. Failure in the confessional may come either by not knowing God's law — if you don't know, if you haven't studied God's will, if you haven't really been a student of the Lord and a pupil, you might just not know what he expects — you might not know what the Lord's standard is. And if you don't know that, how could you judge yourself correctly? You can't. So failure can come by not knowing the Lord's law or by not examining ourselves, by not taking the time to listen to conscience in quiet so that we can measure up our deeds.
Remembering sins and using aids
So we have to know both. We have to know the Lord's will, and we have to know how we've actually lived. You know how we are: it's very easy for us to forget what we do, especially the unpleasant stuff. We like to forget it because we're embarrassed by it, we're not proud of it, and it just goes away from our memory.
But the way that it goes away from God's book is not by our forgetting. This is a big mistake we make. The way God forgets it is through confession. Our goal is to remember our sins so that God forgets them, and not to forget them so that God remembers them. Pretty good, huh?
St. John Chrysostom writes this. He says, "Do not consider your sins insignificant, but gather them all together and record them. Let us examine everything with care, and then we will discover that we are responsible for many sins." This is his point in his Homilies on Matthew. If we take the time to record our sins, we will recognize that we really are sinners; it is not just an empty statement. We are sinners, and we commit many sins every day.
In the actual process, how do you do this? I would encourage you to use the Confession Preparation Aids that the Church provides. If you look in our most common prayer book—the little pocket prayer book, which is a fantastic text—you will find, in the middle, a preparation for confession. It contains questions that, I think, one of our priests in the 1950s wrote. They definitely need updating. Talk about how the potential for sin has changed from the 1950s until today: many bioethical issues weren't even dreamed about then, abortion wasn't legal in the 1950s, and divorce wasn't like it is today. There is much that needs updating. But it is a really good examination based on the Ten Commandments, with questions that let you examine each commandment in turn.
Friends, Scripture, and the saints as aids
Besides the role of questions, which tremendously help us understand God's will and measure ourselves by it, there's also the valuable input of other people we love: our loved ones.
When you're preparing for confession, it's a great time to ask your husband or wife, your kids or grandkids, or your friends, What do you see me doing? That is the measure of a really good friendship if you can actually do that for each other. You can say, sweetheart, I think you're really doing great in this area, but since you're asking, how about this? Or maybe the friend will say to you, "I'll tell you one if you tell me one." That's a nice give and take. Ask the people who really love you, because they're given to you by God to help you, and you to help them. This is what friends do: iron sharpening iron—"so one man sharpens another." This is the Proverbs of Solomon. Ask the people who love you what they think. This is also great for making marriages good. I'll send you the bill for that: to be humble like that.
Use the questions, get the input of loved ones, and one of the best ways to discover our own sins for confession is to read the Scriptures faithfully, to stay in the Gospels. Read a little bit of the Gospels and you will see that the Lord's life brings our shortcomings right to the surface. Read the Gospels faithfully, and read the lives of the saints.
When you see what a real human being is, it reveals much. I remember the first time I read the life of St. Nektarios of Aegina. This was when I lived in Santa Barbara. I had just become Orthodox and I read the life and I told Presbytera, I said, "Sweetheart, I am not a Christian." That's all I could think after reading the life of St. Nektarios. I had never dreamed of a person who could be so humble. I had never seen anybody like that except Christ. When I read the life of St. Nektarios, I thought, wow, you can actually do that if you want to. This is the witness of the saints. In every generation, if you have the will, if you actually have the love for God, you can become like Christ indeed. So reading the lives of the saints is a tremendous revelatory process that can help in the preparation for confession.
Search your heart; it is deep and beyond complete comprehension and knowing. Seek to know yourself, and when you discover something in the process of preparing your confession using these aids, be thankful. When you give a gift to a friend or to a child and that person takes it and thanks you sincerely, your whole disposition toward gift giving is raised; you want to give another. One of the greatest gifts that God gives us is the illumination of our sins so that we can be done with them. We can speak them in confession, have them forgiven, and put them into the ocean of God’s love, never to torment us again.
This is a direct miracle of the third person of the Holy Trinity. Jesus promised that his Father would send forth the Holy Spirit into the world. This is John 16. The Holy Spirit would convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of the judgment to come. The conviction of sin is a miraculous work of the third person of the Holy Trinity, and when the Lord works a miracle in you by showing and convicting you—when you realize you shouldn't have done something—give thanks. Guess what? The Holy Spirit will do it again. He'll do it more. Don't run from it. Run to it. Embrace it.
When he hovers over you, puts the light into your mind, and gives you that conviction of heart, he is coddling you. He is taking you to the kingdom. The Spirit of God.
Think of sins with love, not condemnation
I also want to encourage you, as you're using these confessional aids and preparing your confession, and as you search your mind and your conscience, to do so in an atmosphere of love rather than condemnation. This is a very important point I want to drive home.
When you're thinking about your own sins—and this is even more important when you're thinking about the sins of someone else—think about them with Christ, with the Gospel, and not without him. Don't allow yourself to think about your sins as though Jesus has not died for them, as though he hasn't given you holy baptism, or as though you're not the child of the living God. You are all of those things.
Therefore, when you notice or reflect on sins, don't allow that process—by the trick of the evil one—to put you into a state of fear and condemnation. The discovery of sins is not a position of fear and condemnation. It's a mercy. God is near.
Listen to this. This is from the homilies on repentance from St. John Chrysostom. The person says, "I have spent my whole life in sin. Will I be saved if I repent?" "Certainly," replies the saint. "But how do you know this?" asks the sinner. "From the charity of your Lord," replies the saint.
And he goes on, "If we were talking about repentance only, then quite rightly you should be afraid. However, since repentance is mixed with the Lord's love, have courage, as there is no limit to God's charity. Your wickedness has a limit. God's medicine does not. Think of a spark that falls into the ocean. Is there any chance it could remain there or be noticed? As the spark is to the ocean, what is your wickedness in comparison with God's loving kindness?"
This is the truth about how much greater the love of God is than our own sins. It's very, very important, when we're discovering our sins, to recognize that we are doing the work of the gospel for ourselves. We're evangelizing ourselves. We're repenting because we love God. We're seeking our sins because we're Jesus's disciples. We're discovering them and renouncing them to his delight so that they can be cast into the ocean of his love and removed from us. This is not because he has a hammer above our heads, and if we don't get it done quickly, it's going to fall.
Identifying besetting sins and growing sensitivity
As a person grows in their experience with confession, they become more sensitive to the movements of their own heart and can discern them, especially identifying what their besetting sins are.
Those of us with some experience using the sacrament of confession should be able to identify our predominant issues.
Everyone has at least one predominant, dominating passion; some of us, unfortunately, have more than one. Knowing this is a tremendous help to becoming free from it, because if you know you are a certain way you can work against yourself and for your own glorification regularly. That awareness can remain with you. This is a little bit about the use of a confessional preparation aid.
Getting from preparation into the confessional
Let me turn your attention now to actually getting to the confessional.
You might have done all of the things I just mentioned: studied the will of the Lord, obtained quiet so you can listen to your conscience, done a thorough examination of yourself, and recorded your sins.
But then you still have the challenge of actually going from that to the sacrament. And believe me, once you've done that, the devils are in a twitter. They are frightened and they do not want you to succeed. All sorts of obstacles can come up in your mind and in your life to keep you from getting to the confessional. I want to talk about how you actually go from this point to the sacrament.
First, let me address mental obstacles. What do you do if you don't feel that you have any sins? Suppose you've gone through the process and given it some effort, but you still don't feel like you have anything to say. That lack of feeling is a loud bell calling you to confession because it shows insensibility. It's a really bad sign. It's like being sick with a tremendous tumor and feeling nothing; feeling fine in that case does not mean you're well. It means you're so sick that you don't even know you're sick.
We are responsible for our deeds, yes, this is true. But we're also responsible for our words and for our thoughts. If you think the truth about that—that sin is not just a matter of external realities but a matter of the heart and of the mind, including sins of commission and sins of omission—your insensitivity to the presence of sins will go away. You'll recognize that even if you have smiled at everyone for a month, and even if you haven't yelled at anyone or struck anyone, that does not mean you haven't sinned.
Monastic witness, the prodigal, and custody of thought
I once had an illuminating interaction with Mother Victoria, the Abbess of St. Barbara Monastery. In my first years of knowing her, when I was her neighbor, I noticed how often the nuns went to confession. I saw their life of work, prayer, and service, and I asked her, "What in the world are you going to confession so often for?" She looked at me like I was a dunce, which I was, and said, "This is where the war is." It was a profound statement. The world on the inside is much harder to cleanse than the exterior. We can become free of many physical deeds in a year of seriousness. But how do we clean the inside and acquire a pure heart and a clean mind? That is a lifetime’s quest. That was what she was saying to me.
So if you think that you don't have any sins, recognize you're in a really bad situation, and it's time to think differently about what sin is and to consider your words and your thoughts. Re-examine yourself with a true understanding of what sin is, and remember that taking custody of your own thoughts is the means to spiritual maturity.
Think about the prodigal son. His whole life hinged and swung like a pendulum based on his thoughts. First he had the thought that without his money and his inheritance and staying in his father's house, he was somehow missing out on life. It was a horrible thought that drove him to extremely arrogant and thankless acts, demanding the money, his inheritance from his father, and then squandering it in loose living and ending up in a pigsty.
The prodigal was so ruined that he was yearning for pig slop. Then he assessed his situation. He realized he could pick himself up, return to his father, and leave that misery behind.
He did not yet recognize the immensity of his father’s love and the forgiveness awaiting him. But he knew enough about his father to go back. He thought he would be a servant and have a good life. Little did he know that the robe, ring, new shoes, and fatted calf were waiting for him. Then there are the father’s words to the older brother: "Son, you are always with me. And everything I have is yours." That is the Christian mind.
That is the Christian mind. We can take custody of our thoughts and prepare a good confession. And we definitely should if we feel like we don't have any sins.
Overcoming despair and shame
What to do if you think that your sins are too great to be forgiven? This is the opposite problem. On one side there is someone who is insensitive; on the other is someone so sensitive to their sins that they actually do not think they can be forgiven. This is exactly what the evil one would like us to think: that there is a limit on the love of God and that the work of Jesus is only so good. He would have us believe it is not good enough actually to save the world, to be the Savior of the world.
The evil one wants us to think, "It can save everyone but not you." The moment we think that and give in to it — which is the door to utter despair — we will make no effort to escape. To us it seems in vain. Why should we try to get out of the pig pen if we are convinced we will never succeed?
The fathers say: are you a thief? Then you can inherit paradise. Are you a blasphemer? Then you can become the foremost of the apostles. Are you a tax collector? Then you can become an indomitable evangelist. This is the witness of our greatest saints. Nothing is greater than the love of God, and nothing can hold us back.
What if you're too ashamed to tell your father confessor your sins? So you simply do not go. You are all prepared, but you cannot imagine telling him. As the book says, shame is for sinning, not repenting. There is no shame in repentance. Repentance is dignity. Repentance is courageous Christian action. The time for shame is over.
It is a great irony, the fathers also point out, that when we commit the act and feel no shame, the mere mention of it in the presence of our spiritual father causes us to blush. We have to fix that. Put the shame where it belongs — on the deed — so that we stay away from it, and do not bring shame into repentance, which needs none.
Why private confession to God is not enough
What if you confess to God and think, therefore, that you do not need to confess to a priest? These two attitudes are often connected. If you are ashamed to confess to the priest, you may tell yourself, “God is so loving, and I always feel good when I confess to God.” That's good. Someone told me this recently while we were trying to schedule a confession. He said to me, "You know, I just have been confessing to God while I'm in church." I replied, "Well, that's good. Now when are you coming for confession?"
We are self-deluded if we deny what God has commanded—that confession be public and made to a priest. Confessing to God, of course, is excellent. It's a good start, but it must be followed through to obtain absolution and the power to break the strength of sin.
You can think all you want about how wonderful it is to partake of Holy Communion, but thinking about it does not make you a partaker. You become a partaker only when you go to the priest and open your mouth, and then you receive everything that Holy Communion brings. In the same way, absolution comes when you bring the prayer of repentance you have already made privately to God to the person God has given stewardship over forgiveness—the priest of the church.
Besides, this public act—going before your pastor—is immensely instructive. It raises the seriousness of what we are doing, in my opinion, at least tenfold. We take it much, much more seriously, which means we're going to be able to escape.
The danger of absolution without confession
What if you only want to receive the absolution prayer from the priest, but you don't actually want to say your sins? This is a common temptation. Every priest, I think, has been asked several times, "Father, will you just pray over my head? Will you just pray over my head?" Often someone is coming to Holy Communion and knows they are too far along for confession. They may say something to God about their sins and then ask, "Father, pray over my head, pray over my head." The proper response of the priest is to ask you to tell him what you are confessing; then, if he can, he will pray over your head.
Father Seraphim Alexeyev, a wonderful Bulgarian priest who suffered, was a professor of theology at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria and he wrote about this temptation. In the middle of the 20th century the Communists threw him out; he suffered terribly under them. He died in 1993. He wrote many beautiful books, some of which have been translated into English, and one of them is called The Forgotten Medicine, The Mystery of Repentance.
He says this about this temptation: "This reading of the prayer of absolution, meaning without a confession, just someone asking, 'Father, pray on my head,' this reading of the prayer of absolution is the greatest misuse. It is both lying to God and lying to oneself. Ananias and Sapphira paid with their lives for their wicked attempt to deceive the Holy Spirit. Do not fool yourself, Christian. The priest cannot forgive your sins until he hears them in confession. He cannot loose the knots of your conscience until he has touched them. No prayer of absolution, lulling your conscience, can possibly help you. You have either confessed your sins and have received forgiveness for them, or you have not confessed them and they have stayed in your soul. If you can wash yourself without touching the water, then you will also be able to clean yourself from your lawlessness without confessing it."
Temptations to postpone and to 'prepare' before confessing
Another obstacle the evil one throws up for confession is the temptation to postpone. This is one of his favorite tactics: you don't really have to go today; go next week—Father's going to be in town next week, so just go then. Next week becomes another week, and before you know it a month has passed. You're a month overdue; you haven't been close to the Lord, and you haven't taken communion for a while.
There's also the temptation from the evil one to think you should amend your life first before you go back to your confessor, so that you don't seem so bad. This is a big temptation. I did it again and I can't bear to tell him I did it again, so I'll fix myself. I'll amend my way, and then I can go tell him; I'll tell him I've been really great for the last month.
Amendment is great, but the grace that comes with amendment comes from confession. So if you really want to amend, go back to confession. It's not as though the priest is any different from you—he's not, I promise you; he's worse, probably. To go back and say it again is, of course, embarrassing if you haven't made a good amendment; just say that.
"I have to confess this again, and I'm particularly guilty because I should have amended my life from the last time I confessed it, and with the help of God and the grace of this confession, I am going, I'm resolved to amend my life now." I think God will give you grace to do the amendment that you want to do.
Trust the confessor and the value of repetition
Sometimes the evil one tempts a penitent to think that the priest is not competent. The answer is simple: he still has absolution. Whether he seems competent or not, he still has absolution. If he is a confessor, at least he has been judged competent by his bishop, or else he would not be a confessor.
St. Gregory the Theologian says this to people who are confessing their sins: "Do not judge your judges, you who need healing." This is basic.
There is also the temptation of embarrassment at repeatedly confessing the same sins, even though no sin is ever truly the same. It may look the same on the outside, but it is not. Consider a married man who is unfaithful to his wife with a neighbor. He repents, and then he does it again with the same woman a year later. Is that second sin the same as the first? Not even close. Not even close.
Maybe the wife put up with the first one because she trusted his repentance, but she ain't gonna do it again. No sin is the same. Sometimes it is less serious; sometimes it is more serious. More often, if we repeat a sin, it is more serious, because we have had the opportunity to correct it and we have not corrected it. We need to feel, at that moment, the particular pain of repeating it so that the priest can say, "Didn't you say that to me last week, or last month, or last year? Haven't you been saying the same thing for like ten years since I've met you? Isn't it time, really, to say enough is enough?"
It is only by pushing through this thought that you can come to that spot. The father asked this question: if there is a tree that needs to be cut down and it does not fall after the first few swings, what do you do? Do you give up and leave it there with a bunch of chops in the side? No. You take your ax, make sure it is sharp, and keep swinging until it is down. This is how you get rid of our sins as well.
Sin again? Keep coming back
What about those who say I shouldn't go to confession because I know I'm just going to sin again? Does that mean we shouldn't go to confession? Think of it this way: you get dirty and take a shower. Would you stop bathing because you know you'll get dirty again the next day? No—you take another shower. It's good to be clean, and you like having the dirt off.
It works exactly the same way with confession. If you do, in fact, sin again soon, then you confess again. You try to keep yourself clean.
There's a beautiful story from the Desert Fathers that I want to end with. Along the same line, a young monk complained to the great Abba Sisoes. This is the father who was dying; he was in the uncreated light and was arguing with his angel because he wanted more time to repent, since he had not begun to repent after decades in the desert. The young monk said to Abba Sisoes, "Abba, what should I do? I fell."
The elder answered him, "Get up." The monk answered him again, "I did get up, and I fell again." The elder replied, "Get up again." The young monk asked, "For how long should I get up when I fall?" Abba Sisoes answered, "Until you're dead."
This is the Christian life. Getting up is going to confession, and we ought to do it quickly, because if we do it quickly we'll have a good chance that when death comes it will find us standing up and not falling down. If we stay down, we heighten the chance that when death comes we'll be falling.
Sometimes I've buried parishioners, and I've had in my heart a wish that they had made more progress in their life so they could have approached death more boldly. I think this is a normal desire of pastors. But I console myself, and rightly, in those beautiful cases when I know that death came and they were standing up. They might not have been standing up for long, but they were standing up, cleansed by their humility and by confession.
Practicalities: schedule, approach, and fasting
And so, brothers and sisters, we need to have a firm resolve to get to the confessional and to put through all these obstacles which the evil one sends on us in hordes as soon as we've made a preparation. As soon as our time has come, we've said it in our prayer discipline, we've established some quiet, we've listened to our conscience, we've made an examination, we've searched ourselves, we've made a record. The temptation to keep you from actually going to the embrace of the Father and from receiving from Him this great abundance of His mercy and forgiveness is so strong that the devils will try to keep you from going.
So put this down in your planner. It's your most important appointment. Know exactly when you're confessing.
And try also, I should say, try when you come. Try to come according to reality, which means that you are coming to a sacrament. Remember, when you go to a sacrament, you go with preparation. You go well dressed. Do not wear common shorts and flip-flops to confession. And come fasting; it's really hard to confess with a full stomach. It's just not the time to confess.
When you have an In-N-Out double cheeseburger in your stomach, you are not going to cry — I promise you, you will not cry at confession if you have that in there. Instead, remember you are approaching a sacrament, and we are going to meet God in that sacrament. Therefore we should approach it the same way we do the other sacraments: prayer, fasting, and care.
Related teachings
- Are All Sins Equal
- Are Dark Thoughts A Sin
- How Can I Be Humble Without Hating Myself
- St John Of Kronstadt
- Jesus Prayer
Frequently asked
Why should confession be part of a regular spiritual discipline?
Regular confession helps you discover sins you otherwise miss, sustains spiritual growth from confession to confession, and creates accountability to a pastor or spiritual father. Treating confession like other disciplines—scheduled, planned, and repeated—prevents long gaps in repentance and makes self-examination and amendment a habitual part of the Christian life.
Is confessing privately to God sufficient instead of confessing to a priest?
Private repentance is valuable, but it does not replace sacramental confession. The Church calls penitents to bring their repentance to the priest so that absolution can be given and the power to break sin’s hold received. Confession before a confessor also increases seriousness, pastoral guidance, and the healing that follows forgiveness.
What practical steps help prepare for confession?
Prepare by creating quiet to hear your conscience, doing a careful self-examination, writing sins down (aided by confession preparation questions), reading Scripture and saints’ lives, asking trusted loved ones for observations, fasting, scheduling the appointment, and approaching the sacrament with prayer and humility.
What should I do if I feel my sins are too great to be forgiven?
Do not despair. The Fathers teach that God’s love and mercy exceed our sins; repentance is the remedy for even the greatest failures. Move from shame into action: confess honestly, receive absolution, and trust that God’s mercy is not limited. Shame belongs to sin, not to repentance.
