Today is Sunday, which for me means two things: church (although I sometimes attend Saturday evening vigil mass) and PostSecret.
PostSecret has been my Sunday morning companion for something like nine years now. For those who don’t know, it’s a community art project where anonymous strangers send postcards confessing their secrets; select postcards are scanned and posted online, others are used in travelling exhibits, still others are shuffled away in a box somewhere—or for all I know, destroyed—never to be seen again. The website is updated promptly every Sunday.
I get a voyeuristic pleasure from reading these secrets. It’s human nature. Some of them I identify with, others I empathize with, many I judge with a sneer. Like I said. Human nature. When other people lay their souls bare, it’s hard not to compare yourself to what you see before you. Judgment. It’s easy.
PostSecret also provides a service to the writers of the secrets. We get pleasure from reading others’ secrets, yes, but for some, this website is the only way to unburden themselves of something that has hung over their heads, suppressing their natures. How many postcards have I read thanking PostSecret for being the only one who will listen? Or talking about the weight of a secret having been lifted off of someone because they sent in their postcard?
These postcards are confessions, plain and simple. From our very youngest age of cognizance, we learn to recognize basic right from wrong. We feel badly when we’ve done wrong, and the best way to undo that wrong is to confess it, to go back and try to right it. So Frank Warren, the creator of PostSecret, has provided an outlet into which we might anonymously pour our guiltiest feelings—our deepest and darkest.
It’s a commendable service. Often the secrets sent in are those of unrequited love, clandestine shame, or are addressed to those who have passed out of the secret holders’ lives. The things that are hardest to verbalize, but weigh heaviest on the minds of those they concern. Confession.
I myself have only sent one postcard into PostSecret. I remember sending it in and thinking that maybe I would feel this sense of burden lifted from me. But as I closed the big blue mailbox, I felt nothing significant change. I smiled because I was participating in an art project that I had enjoyed for a few years, but it wasn’t anything earth-shattering.
And I have to ask myself, why?
PostSecret, for all the support it provides to those with secrets—a community of those who may not otherwise have a community—is Confession.
There’s something very human to that word. Confession is an act we commit in response to something we’ve done. Using our own words, we unburden ourselves of the guilt we’ve felt. We can confess to our friends and family, we can confess to our priests and pastors, we can even confess anonymously to Frank Warren and the PostSecret community.
It is a great regret, as a Catholic, that so many of my fellow Catholics call that certain sacrament simply, “Confession.”
Because while, yes, confession is involved in the process of this sacrament, it is simply not the sacrament of Confession.
Keep in mind, Confession terrified me as a child. I went once a year, when my mother hard-handedly forced me because of the upcoming Easter season. I would leave it to the last week I could, I would pray while waiting in line that time would run out before I had to take my turn, and I remember trembling physically before, during and after. It was awful.
And now this is one of my very favorite sacraments.
After years of struggling with this requirement of my faith; several New Year Resolutions; a couple of college-level religion classes; chats with priests, friends, and family; I’ve finally figured out why.
It offers something Frank Warren and the PostSecret community can never offer. It gives us Reconciliation—the proper name for this sacrament.
In stark contrast to Confession’s human restrictions, Reconciliation abounds with God’s unlimited abilities. Humans taint confession with human judgment. That voyeuristic quality PostSecret lends to the process. The sacrament of Reconciliation, however, is the vehicle of delivering the perfect forgiveness that Christ died on the cross to offer us. We break the old covenant with God, and God fixes it.
I undoubtedly hear heavy influences from an argument which seized my interest early in my college career and has doggedly stuck with me ever since—the debate over justification through acts versus justification through faith. I feel that no matter what theological topic I try to discuss, it always comes back to this, and I inevitably side with justification through faith.
One day, I saw one of the giant boards churches like to put up to try to entice you to come to services. Normally I find them trite or bordering on offensive, but this one struck me:
“God gives and forgives. We get and forget.”
Humans can never earn the forgiveness God gives us time and time again. While we, in the act of confession, admit our wrongdoings and acknowledge that in which we have participated to separate us from our God, it is God’s forgiveness which reconciles the covenant between deity and human. There is no anonymity.
Whether a screen is between you and your confessor, as it often is in the Catholic church, or if you’re praying alone in a room where no one can hear you but God, the act of Reconciliation is admitting your sins face to face with your creator. And unlike the human act of confession, where PostSecret-esque anonymity is favored because of judgments which might be passed or opinions swayed, the divine act of reconciliation is as candid and perfect as its creator.
So when I sent in that single postcard to PostSecret, I was confessing, but I didn’t get the sense of relief so many receive from it. My actions cannot relieve me of my secrets; it is my God and my God alone who can do that. It is Reconciliation I have come to expect from unburdening myself of my secrets, and it was confession only which PostSecret was able to provide.
I had chosen Acts over Faith, asked the divine of the mundane, and had received from it all it could offer—a feeling which rang hollow and empty, as so many human attributes do when held in comparison with their heavenly counterparts.
