Growing up Roman Catholic in a small town in Upstate NY, confession with a priest was a weekly ritual. In the 1960’s, you couldn’t go to communion unless you had confessed and said your “penance” of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Times have changed and now that I am an Episcopalian, it appears that in most congregations a public confession is more of an annual and optional custom during Lent, even among my Roman Catholic friends.Of course, we are always encouraged to make private confessions directly to God where we admit our humanness and acknowledge how are sins have caused us to stray from Him. It is difficult that our culture demands perfection and the shame and guilt from falling short continues to circulate in our heads even after many years. We’d like to forget, but we can’t, and the burden of shame continues to multiply in our mind.But God’s intent is not to have us perpetually trapped in these feelings of inadequacy. We read in 1 John 10: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful a
