This excellent post by Max Lindenman prompted a question from a reader about repentance and forgiveness of sins. The question was, approximately: Just how sorry for your sins do you have to be in order to be forgiven via the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
To begin, some vocabulary terms:
“Perfect Contrition” is sorrow for your sins because you are sorry for offending God, whom you love. Perfect contrition alone is sufficient to reconcile yourself with God.
(You are obliged, all the same, to seek out the Sacrament of Reconciliation at first opportunity. But if you die in the meantime, you will have died reconciled to God.)
“Imperfect Contrition,” also called “Attrition,” is sorrow for your sins because you fear the just punishment due to you. That is, you fear purgatory or hell, and thus you wish you hadn’t gotten yourself into such a hot mess. Imperfect contrition is sufficient for receiving absolution (forgiveness of your sins) in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
It is possible, of course, to hate your sins for both reasons — because they offend God and also because they’ve gotten you into a pile of trouble.
Finally, coming to Max’s essay, is the question of a “firm purpose of amendment.”
What this means is that you’ve identified your sins and resolved not to commit them again. You are turning away from sin. Repenting, as we say.
Naturally it is necessary that you be turning away from sin in order to seek any of the sacraments of forgiveness, since that’s the whole point. Like the prodigal son whose father watched for him to return day and night, the Heavenly Father’s been sitting there waiting for you all along; it’s just a matter of getting you to turn away from evil and back towards God.
This is what it’s all about.
So just how firm does your purpose of amendment have to be?
You have to want to not commit the sin again.
In other words, confession isn’t your sin-for-free box. It’s not like when you send in one of those cards for the free trial of the magazine, knowing you can cancel after the first issue. (Actually, you shouldn’t send away for the magazine unless you’re really interested in subscribing if it turns out to be any good.)
But we know humans, and we know that the confessional isn’t gathering dust for lack of sin. I think I read somewhere that Pope Francis goes to confession every two to three weeks, which if I had his job I’d need to be going way more than that, but you get the idea. We know that try as we might, the odds we’ll behave perfectly from now on out are pretty low.
So the firm purpose of amendment isn’t God asking us for a money-back guarantee — I’ll forgive your sins once, but that’s it!!! He’s in on the same seventy-times-seven forgiveness plan He enjoined on us. (And that’s not a mathematical number — 70 x 7 is like saying “a gazillion” — it means perfect, unending forgiveness.)
Sometimes you really hate your sin, and you don’t want to commit it again, but you walk into the confessional with a plan for repentance that consists of, “Lord, I haven’t the faintest idea how I’m going to avoid this sin in the future. So my plan is that I’m counting on You to help make this happen. Give me the brilliant idea, because I haven’t figured it out yet. Or just do something to keep me out of trouble. Whatever it takes. Thanks.”
That’s a firm (if desperate) purpose of amendment. It’s enough.
Photo by Juha Flinkman, SubZone OY. Wreck of cargo ship “E. Russ”. Steering wheel. Located north from island Hiiumaa in Estonia. [CC 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In