Lay all our cards on the table

IT IS INDEED necessary that we be brutally sincere when we go to confession and to spiritual direction. We have to learn to lay all our cards on the table so that the human instruments used by God to help us in our spiritual life, can truly help us.

We should not be afraid or ashamed to do so, because in these occasions, it is indeed God who is acting through the human instrumentalities. We have to approach confession and spiritual direction with a strong supernatural outlook, because it is only then that we can go beyond our human respect.

As our dictionary would put it, human respect is “a kind of fear of the judgment of others…one acting from this motive lacks courage or fortitude…it seeks honor rather than the works worthy of honor.”

There is really no reason to fall into human respect when we go to confession and spiritual direction. God is a father who will always understand and love us. He is always ready to forgive us of whatever sin and failures we may commit. He is always there for us, to defend and protect us. His judgments will always be with mercy.

To be truly sincere is not only to say facts and data. It is to probe into the motives of all our actions, especially our sins and misdeeds. In the end, it is to see what the spirit is behind all our actions. Is it the spirit of God or is it another spirit?

To develop this virtue, we need time to get close to God in our prayer and in all the other ways that foster unity with him all throughout the day, especially when we are immersed in our daily concerns. Let’s remember that God is the source of all truth. We can only see the truth through him.

Without God, we can only make some estimation that often misleads us. What is worse is that we can get fully convinced that we are truthful when in fact we are not. Our pursuit for truth is often marred by some forms of self-interest, and these forms can be very subtle and deceptive.

What can help in developing sincerity when we go to confession and spiritual direction is to have faith-based trust in the confessors and the spiritual directors. Yes, they are also human with their own share of weaknesses and sins. But they have what is called the “grace of state” which is different from being in the state of grace. The grace of state is accorded either sacramentally or through some authority.

Of course, it is always helpful if we spend time preparing ourselves well before confessing or going to spiritual direction. We have to put ourselves in the presence of God and really try our best to fathom the real and ultimate reasons for our thoughts, desires, words, actions and omission.

A saint also suggested that to facilitate sincerity, we should say first the thing that we consider to be most shameful. We should avoid saying that we stole a rope when in fact at the end of that rope was a carabao.

To be sure, when we are brutally sincere, we make our life more simple. We can get to see things more objectively. Our judgments of things and events become more fair. We unburden ourselves of many unnecessary baggage. We can act more properly and easily. We somehow manage to stay above the usual drama of our daily life.

We should try our best to be sincere all the time, with God, with ourselves and with others. Let’s avoid making stories or, worse, to create smoke and mirrors in our relation and dialogue with others — that act of “obscuring or embellishing the truth of a situation with misleading or irrelevant information.”

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Fr. Roy Cimagala is the Chaplain of the Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise, Talamban, Cebu City (roycimagala@gmail.com)/PN