The Call
It started as a dream. At a quarterly prayer retreat during my second semester of theological training, we had taken time for a prolonged meditation. When the group was called back to our meeting area, I remained lying on the floor of the chapel. I was caught up in a dream, although I knew I wasn’t asleep.

While I don’t recall exactly what went on in the dream, I came back to the group and announced, “I’m going to teach people how to confess and how to listen to confession.” The group barely acknowledged my declaration.

When I returned to school, I announced to my spiritual director, “I’m going to teach all over the world.” When he asked me to elaborate, I could tell him nothing other than my ‘dream.’ And exactly that, nothing more came of it. I would sometimes think about that day, more like a passing thought drifting by. “Hmm,” I’d go. “I wonder what all that was about?” And then I’d dismiss the whole proposition as a mistaken conclusion by a new and eager-to-contribute Christian.

In the latter part of October 2003, I spent a troubled night. I kept half-waking from dreams about end times. In each one I was searching for the scriptural basis of the apocalypse or whatever you might call that period. After I stumbled out of bed, I met my husband, Robb, heading for the bathroom. “I’ve had a miserable night,” I said, tagging along behind him. “I’ve been dreaming about end times all night, searching the Bible for scriptures.”

He closed the bathroom door. “And I’m not sure I even believe in end times,” I hollered through the door. I grabbed him as he left the bathroom. “Hold me,” I said and he generously complied. I started babbling about confession as we returned to the bedroom and about my prayer-retreat vision.

Believing that I had just had a bad dream, he attempted to calm me. “Confession,” he began. “Is just between me and God.” I reached for the Bible on the night stand next to the bed. “It says here, we confess to one another.” Robb and I went back and forth with differing views until I finally gave up so as not to get him too riled up this early on a Sunday morning.

That was the end of our discussion, but it was only the beginning of the issue for me. Initially, ideas just swirled in my head. Later, when I calmed down, I began taking occasional notes. An entire book was forming in my mind, but I resisted writing it.

At that time, I had no personal identity as a writer (even in the face of evidence to the contrary). I know what it takes to write a book, and I thought I didn’t have it in me to complete, or worse yet, to do a half-assed job on another one, as I had on my last two. I’d placed those two with print-on-demand publishers and had done minimal marketing or promotion. I had an unfinished third book that I had put away three years previously. “Damn,” I thought. “Am I going to have to finish that book before I begin this one?”

I resolved the issue of the unfinished book (called "After She's Gone") by making it available in disk form, semi-complete. I needed to do that because I had interviewed a number of people – on a very personal subject – and I didn’t want to leave them with an incomplete
experience.

With that resolved, I began my research for this work. I first looked up all the scriptures listed in my Biblical Concordance speaking in any way about confession. I next checked the internet and found some wonderful websites, only a couple of which were useful.

Amazon.com listed at that time 34,163 titles dealing with confession. I browsed the descriptions of the first fifty or so. I checked my local independent bookstore and Barnes & Noble as well as exclusively Catholic, Protestant and New Age outlets.

The subject is broadly discussed but not at all from the point of view I wished to present. As the clerk at a New Age bookstore said, “If
you can write that one, you’re the next Messiah.” Dismissing that comment, I sat down at my computer.

The times were chaotic. Confession is Good for MORE than the Soul was written in the second year of the War in Iraq, right after the Episcopal Church ratified the confirmation of a gay priest as Bishop, during the time that errant cities were performing gay marriages, during a final report by the Catholic church quantifying thousands of abusing priests, during a bitterly fought national election year and included the opening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Jesus the Christ.

Given all that, as Desmond Tutu said at a service on Ash Wednesday 2004, "Everyone is an insider, there are no outsiders, whatever their beliefs whatever their colour, gender, or sexuality.... When there is confusion in the world, and complex, heart-breaking problems ... people turn to issues on which they can have a black and white stance, because then they will be in close association with people of
the same attitudes and they feel protected and safe. That's why fundamentalism grows in periods of confusion. But this is not the answer. It is to admit vulnerability and to embrace your brother and sister with whom you disagree."

I hope that after reading this book and performing the recommended exercises, we will all be better able to do some embracing.

Leslie Reynolds-Benns, October, 2004

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