From the Rector…
Growing up Catholic, I went to confession every week. I would step into a small closet called a confessional booth, with a screened window between me and the priest. I remember the priest as kind, but the experience itself was intimidating. I knew I was supposed to confess something—so, more often than not, I made it up on the spot.
I am sure I had broken plenty of rules in the week prior, but I rarely remembered them clearly. I would begin with the usual: being mean to my sister or telling my mother a fib. But that never seemed to satisfy the priest. Whenever I paused, he would gently prompt, “And?” So I kept going. I kicked the dog (which I would never do), I ate cookies after dinner, I envied a friend’s new bike. In truth, I needed to make confession after I had made confession. This time to confess all the lies I told the priest!
They say confession is good for the soul, but as a child, it left mine in turmoil.
And yet, there was a hidden grace in all those false confessions. I grew up wrestling with what is sinful and what is not. As a child, my sins were small: teasing my sister or sneaking cookies. As a teenager, they grew to include drinking on Friday nights and cursing. As a young adult, I began to grapple with what the Church calls the seven deadly sins—anger, greed, lust, sloth, pride, envy, and gluttony. Over time, however, I have become more persuaded by C. S. Lewis’ understanding of sin as disordered virtue.
Lewis suggests that our vices are not foreign to us but are, instead, virtues that have been distorted. Consider the person who longs for peace above all else. That desire is good. But when peace becomes avoidance—when it is reduced to the absence of conflict rather than the presence of wholeness—it can slip into sloth. What looks like peacemaking becomes disengagement. The virtue has been disordered. The peace that passes understanding—is not the absence of disruption, but a steady and grounded presence within it.
When we begin to understand sin as disordered virtue, a new path opens before us. Rather than simply naming and condemning our vices, we are invited to reorder them—to return them to their proper orientation. The danger is not merely that our virtues become disordered, but that we recognize the disorder and either resign ourselves to it or continue to deepen it. In this light, the Christian life is not primarily about cataloging sins, but about cultivating rightly ordered virtues in service of God’s kingdom.
After a season of penitence, we enter Holy Week ready to be renewed—to reorder the virtues within us that have become skewed. However we practice confession, it is important to remember what it is for. Transformation does not come simply from naming what we have done wrong—even before God. It comes in the reordering of our lives, as we align our hearts with the Good News God is continually setting before us.
Light and Life,
Candice+