Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

Earlier I talked to you about repentance and touched on confession. But confession is so important that I must dwell on it in more detail.

I want to draw your attention to this: a person makes his confession before God. In the exhortation the priest pronounces before each person's confession there are these words:

— “My child, know that Christ stands invisibly before you and receives your confession. I am only a witness.” We must remember this — remember it because we do not confess to the priest, and he is not our judge; more than that, at this moment even Christ is not our judge, but the Saviour, Who has compassion on us.

This is very, very important.

Confession takes place in the presence of a witness. But who is this witness? What part does he play?

There are witnesses of different kinds. For example, there has been a road accident. One man witnessed it. They ask him:

— What happened?

It is all the same to him who is guilty and who is in the right. He simply tells what he saw. There is another kind of witness. In court one speaks against the accused, another speaks in his favour. This is the kind of witness the priest is at confession. He stands before Christ and says:

— Lord, receive him, because this person has come to Thee to repent. Receive him. And if I pity him, then Thou pitiest him too, and pitiest him more than I. I cannot save him. I can only share something with him, help him in something; but Thou canst change him.

There is also a third type of witness. At a wedding the closest person is considered such a witness. In the Gospel such a witness is spoken of as the friend of the bridegroom. It may be said that in our practice the best man is such a witness too. The best men of the bridegroom and the bride share their joy, the miracle of their union. The priest holds just such a position. He is the friend of the Bridegroom. He is the friend of Christ, who brings the penitent to the Bridegroom — to Christ. He is the one who is so close to the penitent that he is ready to share his tragedy and to set him on the path of salvation. By tragedy I mean something very serious. I remember an ascetic father who was asked:

— Why is it that everyone who comes to you, telling about his life without any repentance, is then suddenly overcome by a terrible sense of being a sinner? Repentance takes hold of him; he confesses, weeps and changes.

— When a person comes to me with his sins, I take that sin as my own, because this person and I are one. And the sins he has committed, I too have committed — in mind, or in desire, or in thought. And so I live through his confession as my own. I follow him step by step into the depth of his darkness. When we reach a certain depth, I bind his soul to my soul and repent with all my soul and heart of the sins he confesses and which I make my own. Then my repentance passes to him, and he cannot help repenting himself. He goes away from me set free, while I repent of these sins anew, because compassionate love for one another unites us.

This is a wonderful example of how a priest can approach the confession of every person, what closeness of the bridegroom's friend he can have, how he can save the penitent from perdition. So the priest must be able to feel compassion, to share the penitent's sins. After the prayer of absolution he also gives the penitent counsel, and during this he must gather all his attention, because sometimes it is precisely during confession that it is revealed to him by God, by the Holy Spirit, what he should say to the penitent. Sometimes it may seem to him insignificant or out of place, but he must listen to this voice and tell the penitent what God has laid on his heart at that moment, even if he thinks it is not important to say, that it has nothing to do with the confession. Sometimes the priest feels that his words are not from God. The apostle Paul writes of exactly this in his epistles:

— This I tell you in the name of God, in the name of Christ; and this — from myself. This is what I have lived through myself, and I share with you the experience of my repentance and what I have learned from people who, compared with me, are holy and worthy.

Sometimes the priest may not be able to tell you this, but he will tell you what he has read in the holy fathers or in the Gospel. He can offer you this, so listen to him attentively and think about what is said. Perhaps through these words of the Gospel God will tell you what he himself was unable to say. Sometimes a priest may even say this to you:

— I have heard your confession with all my attention; I feel for you; but I can say nothing.

Such a thing happened to the venerable Father Ambrose of Optina, to whom people came twice, made their confession, told him their trouble, and waited two days for his answer. On the third day he said to them:

— For three days I have been begging the Mother of God to reveal to me what to answer you. But she is silent. How can I tell you anything without her grace?

At private confession a person must open his heart to the spiritual father. He should not try to look at notes, nor repeat what others have said. At such a time he should ask himself this question:

— Why should I be ashamed to say what I have done before Christ the Saviour and before the people who know very well who I am?! What should I be ashamed of, and why should I fear to admit what I really am?!

But what, then, should we say at confession?! Ask yourself: if my husband or wife, my children, my closest friend, my colleagues knew of this or that deed of mine, would I be ashamed before them? And whatever you would be ashamed of — that is exactly what you must confess. Confess it before God, because what you confess and bring into the light will be a heartfelt confession and not stock words.

As for children, we grown-ups must remember not to impose on them what they should tell the priest, because then it will not be their confession. There is no need to instruct them:

— Remember that you hurt me, that you behaved badly — repent of that.

A child should stand before God as before a friend, and share with Him with all his heart and soul his everyday and spiritual troubles, his relations with his parents, everything he is going through.

Sometimes people reel off to me a long list of sins which are familiar to me, because I have them too. I interrupt them:

— Repent of your own sins, — I tell them, — and don't tell me what you've come across in the prayers and the psalms. I need your confession — or rather, not I, but Christ needs your confession, and not such a general list of sins, not such stock repentance. You do not even have the sense that you are doomed to eternal torment because you do not read the bedtime prayers and the psalms, because you do not fast.

Sometimes it happens like this: a person is fasting but breaks the fast; then he thinks that he has failed the test and should not go on fasting, that his effort no longer makes sense. But in reality this is not so. God looks at all this differently. I can explain it by one example from my own life. When I was working as a doctor, I used to visit a very poor family. I did not take money from them, because they had none. And once, somehow toward the end of Great Lent, which I was keeping with all strictness and by all the rules, they invited me to dinner. It turned out that throughout the fast they had been saving money kopeck by kopeck to buy a chicken and treat me. I looked at the chicken and realized that my labour for this fast was over. Of course I ate a piece of chicken. I could not hurt them.

And afterwards I went to my spiritual father and told him what a misfortune had befallen me: that in Holy Week of all times I had been forced to eat chicken.

Then Father Athanasius said to me:

— Do you know what? If God had seen that you had no sin, He would have kept you from this sin. But He knows better: you have so many sins that no chicken could defile you.

I think many of you will remember this example, so as not to keep the rules blindly but to live honestly. Yes, I ate meat so as not to hurt a person. I ate it not as something that defiled me, but as something offered by people with love. I remember a passage from Father Alexander Schmemann's book where he says that everything in this world is the love of God. Even the food we take is the love of God — love that has become food for us...