By The Work Worked

 I had been in bed for two days. I was simultaneously gripped with a pernicious anxiousness of undisclosed character while having no will to will anything. Acedia had swaddled me in its thick winter duvet and assured me he would never let me go. COVID had stuck a stick in the wheel of my five years of First Fridays and First Saturdays a couple weeks ago and reset my merit book back to zero. I hadn't confessed in two months. I felt the weight of everything stacked on my back, all the phantom fears, and the flight of joy from its perch. 

The snowfall from last night was melting a little as it hovered just above freezing and the sun was getting ready for bed. I shook myself awake and wheeled my bike out of the garage to bike the seven miles to St. H; I needed an exorcism to shake the ravens that had made a nest in me; I needed Confession.  

I arrived at the church--which looked abandoned from the busy boulevard--parked my bike and walked inside with fifteen minutes to spare. Everything was empty--the parking lot, the church, my soul. I slipped into a pew and said a quick prayer to remember my many sins and lay them bare. A single light illuminated from the confessional in the back. I entered into the confessional and closed the door behind me.

The priest had been waiting for me and for everyone. He must have been close to one hundred years old. I collapsed on the kneeler, blessed myself and sighed. He began with his script--how many times, how many years and decades, has he repeated the same words to penitents like a sacramental arcade game? I thought I was weary, how much more so this ancient priest?  It was the driest, most scripted exchange from his part, and a steady bleeding out of sinfulness from mine. 

But the funny thing? The very rote-ness of his interaction in the sacrament stirred me to tears. When I had confessed, he didn't give me counsel or talk to me. This was not animated Fr. Mike Schmitz or reaming Fr. Isaac Reyes here. This was a tired old human priest. He gave me my penance, absolved me, and asked me to pray for him as he had asked thousand of other penitents to do. Nothing different, nothing unique. He could have just as easily been praying to be let go from this life. I burst into tears. 

The power of the grace depended not on this good priest's character--whether wearied by age or buoyed by enthusiasm to save souls--and THAT was what moved me. The grace leveled me. Ex opere operato: "by the work worked."  I had encountered Christ then and there, had laid down my burdens at his feet and taken his light yoke up; I blubbered through my act of contrition because there was no illusion that this minister, this man acted in persona Christi by virtue of his apostolic office. That is the great grace of the sacrament, of all the sacraments of the Church, that do not depend on the merits of the minister. The Donatist heretics in the fourth to sixth centuries thought otherwise--that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the moral state of the minister.  

I simultaneously trusted that I was truly forgiven of my wickedness, wiped clean even though I did not feel different; just as the priest of a hundred years did not tailor his words to my psychology or change anything to suite me. He had no personality to speak of, no originality in his words, no piercing psychological insight. He didn't speak to my heart but dispensed simply the raw, undiluted forgiveness of Jesus Christ that has been entrusted to him in his apostolic priesthood. He just did what he had been doing year after scripted year, decade after scripted decade--forgiving sins in persona Christi by the book. By the work worked.