CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR MORE THAN THE SOUL
Sample Chapter

Chapter One - A Complete Confession

Transformation begins with confession. The need to confess has customarily been associated with wrong-doing. But that association is incomplete. Confession is one of the most life-affirming actions a human being can take, and it can lead to the formation of a new and often quite different personality.

The need for transformation is obvious. Our country, its organizations and its people are in need of an overhaul. Children are entering kindergarten acting like three-year olds, with a level of violence previously observed only in junior high school. Over fifty percent of marriages now fail, with many partners expecting a future divorce on their wedding day. The gap between the haves and have nots continues to widen. Many are saying that our country has lost its bearings and that our position on the world stage is in jeopardy.

There’s hope in transforming this dismal condition. That hope is found first in personal confession – owning or admitting material that was previously hidden from sight, unburdening of our conscience or a cleansing of our souls. When we've done something that we are less than pleased with, confession relieves us of the burden either consciously or unconsciously carried. The so-called guilty conscience has been rehabilitated. When we've confessed to a person we may have harmed or misled, and offer a remedy, our personal integrity is reestablished.

However, confession does more than uncover incidents about which we feel guilt. A complete confession also reveals the sources of our actions that may have become so automatic that we no longer notice them. Uncovering and discarding the origin of these actions sets us free to create our life anew. Our psyches are like school “blackboards” that collected chalk dust on their surfaces from repeated erasures and can only be read clearly after being wiped with a damp cloth. Confession is the damp cloth for our psyches. Confession is the first step in transforming ourselves, our relationships and our society and is often called by different names: gaining integrity, becoming responsible, enlightenment.

At the level of organization and government taking a group inventory and risking the implementation of this confession may terrify those of us accustomed to “covering our own asses.” But relax. This process does not offer a panacea for all the world’s ills, nor advocate stripping off our clothes and running through the streets, shouting, “Hallelujah, we’re free.” More measured steps on each level will be required, and they all begin with the personal.

A complete confession, advocated here, produces a lasting change in our lives and our world, making us available to possibilities in ourselves and our lives that were not previously accessible. It is a private in-depth confession – bringing all the clutter in our psyches to the surface, owning it and letting it go, sharing the distilled results of this self-examination with another person and, with some maintenance work, creating a clutter-free life and then sharing the whole experience with our fellows.

Whoa, that’s a lot of sharing! you might say. I don’t know about that. I’m a private person.

Don’t worry. For confession to make a real difference, you only need to share what you can, when you’re able. But hang in here. You may become more willing to open up, and to share, as you uncover and discard some of your clutter.

We all have buried, or not-so-buried, matter that we might benefit from communicating to someone safe. We humans have picked up clutter in the process of living, but the clutter doesn’t represent who we are, though we often cling to it as if it did. This activity is only the stuff of being human. We have gripes that hold us hostage, and we don’t know what to do with them. We can’t identify how or to whom to communicate those resentments in a way that makes a difference. Or, perhaps, we can’t see any value at all in communicating some aspects of what we perceive as ourselves, for example, our fears, doubts and possible misunderstandings. Or we’re reluctant to communicate lest a situation backfire, producing still worse results.

What’s offered here is something we might call a complete confession – a life-altering soul searching – a stock-taking of the internal and external goods called our life: the past, the present and even our projected future.

Many people have practiced this type of confession before making dramatic changes in their lives.

Leo Tolstoy took stock of his life at its peak. In his fifties, after having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reflected on his life and came up with the astounding judgment that it had been “meaningless and a regrettable failure.” He then wrote A Confession prior to changing his ideas and actions. What? you might protest. Big deal. He never had that great success with his writing again. Yes, that’s true. He never regained the literary success that he enjoyed with his earlier works, but he had success at another level: not in money or acclaim in the world, which for Tolstoy came up empty and meaningless, but in a very real satisfaction in life on an internal level – in being true to himself. Without that satisfaction, the money and acclaim were nothing to him.

Recovering alcoholics also employ confession to make healthy and wholesale changes in their lives. They take a “personal inventory,” the results of which are later admitted to the God of their own choosing and to another human being, to ensure their commitment to a lasting sobriety. The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous uses the following metaphor:

“Taking a commercial inventory is a fact-finding and fact-facing process. It is an effort to discover the truth about the stock-in-trade. One object is to disclose damaged or unsalable goods, to get rid of them promptly and without regret.”4 Alcoholics, therefore, identify the clutter they have collected in their lives that may impede their recovery. When they cast away the clutter they have discovered and make the attendant changes, including amends to those they have wronged, they live freer lives and look forward to a future with new and different possibilities.

Confession can be a powerful and potentially dangerous action, however, when not done voluntarily. Complete confession needs to be done for ourselves, because we want the resultant changes in our lives, not to please or placate another. During the 1970s in China, members of the Red Guard were authorized to search peoples’ homes looking for anti- Communist evidence. Thousands were arrested and had to undergo a ‘self-examination’ after a long interrogation that sometimes included physical torture. Millions were forced to write a letter of confession on what they’d done to undermine the government. The Red Guard leadership knew that confession was essential to any lasting change in beliefs or actions. But this sort of forced confession created disastrous results for an entire generation in China, since so many people, out of fear of the consequences, refused to think for themselves. These compliant Chinese had not undergone a voluntary confession but had, instead, been brainwashed and were left neither happy nor productive.

In our own criminal justice system the confession and forced repentance of criminals most often lacks the power to transform because it is tied to punishment and reward and we reap the results with recidivism. There have been rare instances, however, of huge awakenings by imprisoned persons who take stock of their lives in the solitude provided by incarceration and go on to live crime free.

Can we Define Clutter?

“Clutter” is left undefined here, because what constitutes clutter varies from person to person. What may be one person’s awakening may be another’s cast off clutter. In life, we all move at our own pace in our own time. You may be able to identify your clutter when you pause and compare your thoughts, beliefs, and particularly actions to your highest and most humane values. In this book, you will be gently led through an inventory of your life. In the nine chapters following this one you will be asked to look at areas where clutter may accumulate, areas where we all tend to have fixed beliefs, strong emotions and undelivered communications. You can then root out and write down your clutter in those critical areas. After completing that inventory process, you will be given tools to assist you in maintaining a clutter-free life.

By making a complete confession, we gain a sense of who we are and the nature of our lives, but more importantly, we also gain a sense of the circumstances that have stopped our growth. It seems to be the nature of human beings to pick up clutter as we go along. For example, we pass over an opportunity to speak our mind, justifying that behavior by saying, “It doesn’t matter anyway,” or “I don’t want to cause problems.” We often don’t know how to handle an insult directed toward us, so don’t say anything, but carry our humiliation just below our conscious level to protrude into consciousness just as we go to sleep or wake in the morning.

We have uncomfortable feelings that we’re nervous about expressing lest we lose control and make fools of ourselves. Regrets about the past weigh us down like a runner attempting the Boston Marathon while carrying on his back all the old shoes and sweat pants he wore on previous runs. The clutter we collect as we go through life gets in the way of our freedom, joy and satisfaction. With that clutter removed, we have an opportunity to begin anew. Really anew. We can choose the kind of life we want to live.

Confession: The Path to Our Connectedness

Another benefit exists for living clutter free. With the clutter out of the way, we can then realize our connectedness to the universe. We human beings are all connected to each other by virtue of our shared humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. said so eloquently,

In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

And we are all connected with God, or whatever you call him, her or it, as well as with all creation. God’s spirit resides in us and is, as many religions articulate, the very breath we breathed at our birth.

In this book, the word God (or occasionally Spirit) will be used to stand for the name of a creative transcendent being more powerful than we are, and the conventional pronoun ‘he, his’ to refer to God and God’s genderless spirit. Whoa! You might say. As a Christian how can you say that? The Bible says that God is a male. I think you’re just pandering to us to sell books. That’s a valid thought but hang in here and please keep reading. I’ll later explain that your point of view might be a reaction to your own clutter, believing that God is exclusively male because the Bible indicates so rather than because you recently asked God himself.

If, to the contrary, you don’t currently have a belief in or even a concept of deity, please wait a while. That subject will be dealt with later in this chapter. It is worth noting, however, the variety of world religions that speak of our transcendent oneness. Ongoing references to Christianity appear in this book because most of the western world has some familiarity with the Judeo-Christian culture and useful Biblical metaphors. Please relax the grip on your biases, for the moment, just for the sake of keeping up.

This concept of oneness is central to most world religions. Christianity uses the image of the life-giving vine and its branches to illustrate the nature of this cosmic connection, where Christ is the vine and we are the branches. All attributes of Christ are available to flow to the branches. All attributes are available, regardless of our levels of consciousness. All attributes of whatever you call deity are available. Many of us take a considerable amount of time, however, to attain that awareness and to consequently invite deity into our lives.

In Tao-ism, the Tao is similar to the Christian God in that it is also omnipresent and all powerful. Except that the Tao represents the way, or the path, to oneness and is similar to the Buddhist word “dharma.”

Buddhism, rather than advocating looking outside ourselves for God, begins with the assumption of our oneness, which can only be found by letting go of expectations as well as the need to chase after the next experience we believe will produce lasting satisfaction. Oneness is only attainable by being present in the moment with whatever is going on. But to get to that oneness, we must also let go of our attachment to the past, let go of the clutter we have collected in the process of living, similar to Jesus’ saying, “Do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of it’s own.”

In most Native American religions there is no separation of the natural world from the world of the supernatural. This unity is thought to be beyond the comprehension of mankind and can only be shared in through the practice of rituals.

At the heart of Hindu theology, native to India, is the paradox of unity and diversity. Hinduism has a large number of individual divinities – 330 million by one estimate. In it, wisdom tends to be found in manyness. However underlying everything that exists, is the eternal, unchanging, spiritual essence that is called Brahman, in which all is unified. So ultimately, in this extraordinarily polytheistic religion God is one. Just as beneath the incredible variety of human beings, humanity is ultimately one. God is many and God is one.

Islam, as espoused in the Qu’ran, has at its hub the oneness of Allah. He holds complete control of the universe even to the most subtle movements of a leaf. “He knows everything-- past, present and future. When there was nothing, He was present. When there will be nothing, He will be present.” One essential difference between Islam and Christianity is that while Islam accepts the words of all the prophets of the Bible’s Old and New Testament, it doesn’t accept Jesus as the Son of God, nor believe that he was crucified, but that he was taken directly into heaven. Islam, like Christianity, that is, the Christianity reflected in the words of Christ in the New Testament, is open to distortions, or in this vernacular, clutter. This clutter can lead mankind to separateness and away from connectedness.

The above is merely a broad brush survey of oneness in a few of the world’s major religions. There are many others with similar values and the principle of oneness, often misinterpreted as a oneness of all believers (of that particular religion), which is divisive. And it is helpful to notice the benefits people acknowledge from practicing their religion or spiritual practice. These include peace of mind, courage in the face of fear, love for all humanity, trust in their creator, boundless joy in life, a sense of oneness with all creation, serenity in chaos, deep gratitude for life no matter what our circumstances, a giving heart, improved relationships, absence of the fear of death as well as fear of the future, and understanding of death as a part of life.

As we go about our day, however, most of us are not aware of an ultimate unity, a connectedness with God and other human beings. Instead, we’re preoccupied with our own plans and designs, our own hopes and fears. But if we are clutter-free and take a moment to get still, with nothing going on, we do come to realize our connection with all humanity. We can see that there is no essential difference between us and our fellow human beings. We are all irrefutably a part of God, and love flows between us and other human beings as freely as blood flows in our veins. We then discover our “true”selves, the selves without body or consciousness, the selves that exist as beingness, the selves we seldom stop long enough to notice. Missing that experience in our daily lives is, however, merely a consequence of being human.

Not only does becoming clutter-free through confession lead to personal transformation, it can also lead to transformation on a global level. We have all seen or know about major shifts in public awareness, such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States or the formation of the United Nations, both with enormous ramifications. If you are familiar with the controversial principle of social change known as the Hundredth Monkey , in which it is purported that when one person knows something, that something is the property of that one individual, but when that something is passed forward to a critical mass of other individuals, then it becomes the property of the larger society. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell documents how a seemingly innocuous and often counterintuitive action can cause a social behavior, trend or idea to tip and “spread like wildfire.” Nevertheless, new concepts do enter the common language in only a decade or two, and wholesale changes to society do take place, such as the lowering of the crime rate in New York by cleaning up graffiti in the suburbs and stopping fare-beaters in the subways.

As each one of us confesses, we make way for the next person, until we reach that point of critical mass. For Christians, that point might even bring about the Second Coming. God Calling, based on the writings of two anonymous women who in 1932 came together looking for a closer connection to God, speaks to that possibility. Reportedly, one woman heard the voice of Jesus Christ, and the other recorded what the first one communicated hearing. She reported Jesus as saying

I do not delay my second coming. My followers delay it.
If each lived for Me, by Me, in Me, allowing Me to live in him, to use him to express the Divine through him, as I expressed it when on earth, then long ago the world would have been drawn to Me, and I should have come to claim them as My own (November 5).

We Christians may be moved by the above to confess the error of leaning on our own understanding[s], followed by a recommitment of ourselves to Christ, trusting what is widely called a “vertical relationship” that is, a “one on one relationship with him,” living in him and allowing the divine energy to flow through us to the outside world – just allowing his energy to flow, without having to force anything, or to compel anyone to receive it. For in the Gospel of John, we find: “Then true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” Today, we might interpret “in spirit and in truth” as “in oneness with a confessing heart.”

For years there have been truly enlightened spiritual teachers. We may go to see them or read their works, then choose to either ignore their thoughts or to pick and choose what we will follow. Few of us give ourselves completely to the teaching of the enlightened ones. We have wonderful (some call them peak) experiences, then go back to the real world, to our life as we know it. Such is the human condition. But what if we could create ourselves newly out of every experience rather than falling back into old patterns? What if our listening in the
present was clutter-free and we didn’t allow our past to overwhelm our future?

There are many paths to oneness with God. Nobody knows with certainty what happens when we each follow a path completely. Completely. We might surmise, but nobody knows for certain. Could the Christians who believe that only those who profess a personal relationship with Jesus will be saved have a veil removed from their eyes? Jesus, in John 10, speaks of those within the sound of his voice. Or the sheep recognizing his Master’s voice. Or, for that matter, says that he has sheep of other pastures. “They too will listen to my voice
and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.” Could those in other pastures have been prepared by a different persona to bring them to the Father or to the path of ultimate oneness? If we suspend our attachment to our beliefs, then we just don’t know for certain. And that makes us available to finding out.

Herbert Spencer noted, “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” An anecdote from my own life illustrates this assertion. There are additional personal revelations set off in a different font throughout this work.

I had a deep and profound relationship with God. However, having had many disappointments in the religion of my birth, my God was not the one I had been taught in Sunday School, and it definitely did not include Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. One day a man whom I labeled as a “Jesus freak” engaged me in conversation at a fast-food restaurant across the street from my office. As a consequence of our talk, I agreed to look at my relationship with Jesus. On the way back to my office, I cavalierly looked inside, asking, “Okay, where am I with Jesus?” expecting to get an answer that Jesus was but a figment of man’s needy imagination. I was dumfounded with the life-impacting answer: “Who do you think you’ve been talking to?” I simply had never before asked that question. My rigid beliefs and my contempt for organized religion were blocking my discovery that it was Jesus with whom I had been in relationship all along.

Tightly held beliefs are a mighty force. They can lead to self-righteousness, to rigidity, to arguments and even to terrorism and war. We can only produce lasting change by letting go our tight grasp. It isn’t what we believe about God that is important, it is in our relationship, one on one, that we find lasting freedom.

To attain that one-on-one relationship, you may need to distinguish between the head and the heart. The head understands, while the heart knows naturally. The head analyzes and figures out, while the heart senses. If you want the changes offered in this book, you’ll need to move away from sheer reliance on your intellect, if that is the way you operate, and move in the direction of your heart, where compassion and oneness are possible. There is a big difference between believing that God loves you and experiencing his love directly. As Eckhart Tolle asserts you cannot find God with your intellect. It is, in fact, our identification with our mind that keeps us from experiencing deity directly.

The nonbeliever, however, may require some assistance. Rather than brushing all this God-stuff aside, I encourage the nonbeliever to act “as if.” Act as if there is at least one concept you hold--for example, the body of scientific knowledge or even The Force in Star Wars, or one entity in the universe--that you acknowledge as greater than yourself and that you may or may not call God. It may even be something that you leave undefined.

Or, if you prefer more definition, act as if God is everything you want God to be, and none of the things you have been afraid God was, or hated in the past, or were scared by in the past, or that you couldn’t understand in the past. God without all your clutter. And then try on that one-on-one relationship – being right here, right now, you and God. Give acting “as if” a try. The results might be extraordinary.

As one former food-addict reported,

I used my brain well, but I was a spiritual agnostic. I just didn’t believe in anything. And then, at my sponsor’s suggestion, I started saying “Good morning” to God every day, just to see what happened. The result was extraordinary. God came toward me when I came toward God. He took hold of my empty soul and filled it with His presence.

We learn to speak by speaking, to run by running, to work by working, and that’s how we begin with God, we learn to relate by relating with him. A very workable definition of love includes accepting another exactly as he is and as he is not. So you might begin by accepting God as you understand him and don’t understand him, or as you define him and don’t define him. Even many learned theologians’ nuances of understanding God change. You will then, if you choose to go along, be practicing loving God by loving. If you have some objections to doing this, save them for the inventory section, where we will be dealing with those sorts of items.

Similarly we learn to love our fellow man by loving, or as one definition of love says, celebrating who they are and who they are not. Doing so may call for confession, because for many of us the thought of celebrating another exactly as they are may throw us into an accumulation of our clutter from the past: I can’t accept him for that, let alone celebrate him for it! Wow! This isn’t going to be easy. Yes, that’s true. But it does work. Simply acknowledge areas where you might be unwilling and begin where you can.

If confession is owning or admitting something to be true that was previously hidden from sight, that something-hidden-from-sight might include material in our own subconscious. Incidents or experiences may operate in our lives but have become so automatic that we no longer notice them. Automatic positions are not life-affirming. They are little more than avoidance techniques–avoiding responsibility in our life and in our world. They may appear as safe alternatives, but ultimately they kill our aliveness.

Beginning

The thought of beginning may bring up fear in some of you. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Don’t let that fear stop you. Most people find that when they have confronted their demons head-on, the size and power of those demons diminish. They lose their intensity. Stick a toe into the water of confession. Courage is operating in the presence of fear, and courage begets courage. At the end of Chapters Two through Ten, read the condensed short examples of the questions that will be asked in detail in the workbook. From there you can decide whether to continue with another chapter or go to the corresponding section in the workbook and do the complete inventory. It’s your choice. You don’t have to commit to completing the workbook all by Friday. You can take a little bit at a time. Remember, you’re in charge of your life and this process.

The inventory section begins the confession process with religion in order to clear out the clutter in your relationship with deity. Many of us were raised in traditional Christian churches, or our parents or grandparents were, with the attendant images of heaven and hell.  Those of us raised in the United States have heard “In God we trust,” referred to God in The Pledge of Allegiance and sung about God in “God Bless America.” Those experiences form religious clutter in our psyches, even on an unconscious level. If you who are approaching this inventory process recall your first or last confession to a priest or minister, when you mouthed the words you thought you were supposed to say, don’t worry. This process isn’t that kind of confession. Nor is it like an appearance in court for a speeding ticket. Not even close. And for right now, you’re the only one who will see it.

Remember this is a new and different type of confession and sometimes may appear tedious. But I want to get as much clutter as possible to come to the surface, to bring it into the light, where you can own it and discard it. The introductory material in each of the
following nine chapters is designed to be provocative and for some may seem just downright wrong. Just note your reactions to these introductions.

Many of us tend to look at the behavior of others rather than ourselves. But “Speculating on other people’s attitude and notions is a waste of time and effort. To search out the reason for my own is a voyage of discovery.” This exercise is an opportunity to get to
know yourself at depth. Where are your thoughts inconsistent with who you think you are or what you could imagine as God’s will for you? Where are you holding onto old ideas that served you in the past but are no longer valid or useful?

This book is more than a quick read. It may take weeks, months, or even years to complete. The important point is that it be completed. You may want to read Chapters One through Fourteen and then move to the workbook. Or you may want to answer the questions thoroughly after having a taste of the questions in each inventory section. As I said before, either way is okay.

There are many areas in which we collect clutter, and we’ll take a good look at most of them: religion, the transition from power over to personal power, human rights, sex and gender issues, war and peace, our body’s health and wellness, our interactions with institutions, our stewardship of the environment, and living and dying in relationship. Some of these are thought-provoking and even controversial issues. We often know where we stand on those subjects. But do we hold some of our beliefs too tightly or rigidly? Are we certain that our points of view are the correct ones and that everyone who believes otherwise is wrong? How do we know for sure? Do we believe them because they were written down somewhere, or because we were taught them in our youth, or because others whom we respect believe them? As I asserted earlier, tightly held beliefs produce clutter.

It is often difficult to discover our own rigidity. We just feel that we are right. But my editor pointed out my own rigidity in the section on war and peace. I had tried to present the points of view that opposed my own, but only half-heartedly. Dammit I knew I was right and they were wrong! And I was slanting even the inventory questions in the direction of that certainty. That behavior is a consequence of my being human. So be gentle with yourself and with me, also, if more of my clutter slips through my editor’s watchful eye.

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