Favorite Penance

[EvelynEVF]

I think that rose bush is a fabulous penance! It fit the gravity of the sin, and every time you see that bush (and maybe any rose for the rest of your life, lol!) you will be reminded and have the opportunity to pray. It is the single hardest penance I’ve actually heard of, but the alternative is people who contracept and then get told to say a few Hail Marys, which feels like a slap in the face.

This week I confessed with more brevity than usual, a sin I have been overcoming. But then I got thrown a curveball and poof! So for penance, he asked me what my favorite prayer was, and asked me to pray it and reflect on it. Since this was Anima Christi, and Friday is all day Adoration, it was beyond perfect.

For those unfamiliar with Anima Christi:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me
Body of Christ, save me
Blood of Christ, inebriate me
Water from Christ’s side, wash me
Passion of Christ, strengthen me
O good Jesus, hear me
Within Thy wounds hide me
Suffer me not to be separated from Thee
From the malicious enemy defend me
In the hour of my death call me
And bid me come unto Thee
That I may praise Thee with Thy saints
and with Thy angels
Forever and ever
Amen

Hello, Incarnation!

 

[maize]

i was hoping when i went to first confession and dumped out 20 years of sins that the priest would want me to walk home carrying a heavy rock, but instead i got one chapter of john.

 

[paul_c]

i was hoping when i went to first confession and dumped out 20 years of sins that the priest would want me to walk home carrying a heavy rock, but instead i got one chapter of john.

I applaud you for returning to the sacrament after 20 years. By assigning you John, the priest may have felt this was reintroducing you to the bible. Not a bad thought. It may have been unnecessary, because you were reading the bible anyway, but not everyone in your situation would have been.

 

[Beverly_Jean]

Hi Maize,
Welcome home! I too returned home after twenty five years away, and my first confession was with the same priest whose penance I described above in my account of the rose bush (that was my second confession after having come back and then remembering more serious things) that I needed to confess.). My first confession with him was reassuring and welcoming (I hadn’t yet remembered some of the things that brought me back to him for the second confession (the one with the rose bush penance.). Anyway, his first penance was pretty meaningful in that he required that I do it when no one would know that it was me, and the story that went with that was truly funny. The penance was that I was to go through the whole church (very big church) and pick up all debris left by departing parishioners and their children, put up all the kneelers that were left in a down position, and arrange all the misseletts in the same way throughout all the pews (so that their bindings all faced the same way). I was to do this twice, once before our choir rehearsal (week day night) and once before our Sunday Mass. I had no idea how hard it would be to find a space of time when I could ominously do this, and when someone did come by, to figure out how to explain what I was doing without really letting it be known that it was a penance, and so as to appear that I wasn’t just cleaning up the church because I was just such a wonderfully good person with a lot of free time.And, then to have to do this twice put some “bite” into it. He told me that since I had received the benefits of the goodness of the church with my confession, that my penance would be to give some goodness back to the church without any secondary gain from it (that’s why it was to be done anonymously). It did that for me; it truly helped me to feel that I had indeed “come home”, and it was good. The rose bush penance was also “good”, but it was on such a deep and spiritual level (as was appropriate to the sin confessed in the second confession) that I will indeed be touched and pray for the rest of my life when I see or even think of a rose bush.
I hope when you read the book of John that you were able to feel the love and humanness of Jesus and feel that you have chosen to return to a Church that helps all of us come closer to Jesus.
Beverly Jean