September is a time of new beginnings: a new school year brings new classes, new books, new teachers. New beginnings offer us a beautiful opportunity to act consciously on inspirations received and to commit ourselves with fresh vigor to acquiring the virtues we know we lack.

Perhaps the most stunning new beginning offered by our loving Father is sacramental Confession.

St. Damien, heroic missionary to the lepers of Molokai, yearned so desperately for Confession that, forbidden to board a ship arriving from Belgium, he elected to confess his sins aloud, shouting them up to his provincial, who stood at the steamer’s railing.  A century later, prisoners in a Siberian labor camp risked not only the good opinion of others but their very lives to go to Confession.

In one haunting passage from his memoirs, Jesuit Walter Ciszek recounts how female prisoners, separated from the men by a fence, would pencil their sins, along with a number identifying each woman, on scraps of paper, passed discreetly through the wire barricade. Father would read the scraps that night and appear the next morning within sight of the fence, where the women would lounge nonchalantly. Holding up the number of fingers corresponding to the person whose sins he was about to absolve, he would whisper the words of absolution and make a tiny sign of the cross in the air. Had this procedure ever been discovered, priest and prisoners would have been brutally punished, possibly killed.

Why did these people crave a sacrament that we disregard as routine or skip entirely?

They knew Confession to be an encounter with Christ; it is He who hears us, He who speaks the words of forgiveness.

What did the paralytic feel when Christ’s gaze pierced his soul and Christ’s voice echoed in his ears, “Your sins are forgiven?”

You will find the same Christ in the confessional, awaiting you with the same tenderness.

He wants to repair the relationship you have damaged or broken by venial or mortal sin; He wants to pour out His mercy upon you and send His life coursing through you once again.

Confession is also precious because it renews the whole Church.  Since baptism connects each of us with all other Christians, incorporating us into the Body of Christ, every personal sin, no matter how hidden we deem it, affects everyone else.  Our sins wound the whole Body, just as an injured limb impairs the rest of a physical body.  Similarly, our acts of mortification and virtue build up the Church.

In Confession, we are given the specific graces needed to combat the sins we have confessed.  Thus, not only are we and the whole Church healed, but positive growth occurs.  Let us avail ourselves frequently and devoutly of this tremendous gift, allowing Christ to “make us new.”

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Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharst.