Tis_Bearself
Patron
I had been a sporadic Mass goer for many years and had also done some pretty bad things in my past. My mother, who wasn’t happy about my sporadic Mass attendance and didn’t know for sure but I suspect she suspected about the bad things, had died. A few months after she died I read about the Year of Mercy and I thought maybe this meant I should go back to confession and be a regular Mass goer again, because if I did I could try to get plenary indulgences for my mom’s soul and maybe other souls. So I drove downtown to go to confession at like 6:30 am in a cathedral with a holy door where nobody knew me. I had to basically just make myself go because I hadn’t been in a confessional for 20 years. The priest was very encouraging and we were done in a few minutes. I spent the rest of that year going through every holy door I could get to in order to get indulgences for deceased family and friends. I had to keep going to Mass and confession to fulfill the indulgence conditions. It felt weird at first but the more I went and the more I prayed, the more everything came back to me like it used to be when I was a “good Catholic”. I still feel unworthy or like I don’t fit in from time to time, but I put those thoughts out of my mind and just keep on doing and it’s okay.
