Lent, Forgiveness, and the Gift We Keep Forgetting to Unwrap | February 8, 2026

Forgiveness can feel simple when we’re kids and impossibly heavy when life grows complicated. We open the door to the confessional and suddenly see the darkness of our own uncertainty staring back. In this conversation, we walk from childhood ritual to adult conversion, exploring why confession can become harder over time and how the sacrament still offers a direct encounter with Christ’s mercy—clear, personal, and spoken into our actual lives.

We talk about the hidden cost of carrying a child’s moral vocabulary into adult decisions, the discouragement of “same old sins,” and the slow, relational pace of real change. Along the way, we unpack the sacramental heart of confession: how “I absolve you” bridges twenty centuries and places us at the foot of the Cross, not as spectators but as people being restored. We also share practical ways to prepare well, using precise language for motives and patterns, and adopting a fearless moral inventory that names both faults and graces. Gratitude becomes part of repentance, protecting us from despair and teaching us how to cooperate with what God is already growing.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Setting The Lenten Frame

SPEAKER_01 0:03

This is Living Catholic with Father Donwolf. Who deals with living the Catholic faith in our time? Discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolf.

What Confession Really Is

First Confession Childhood Memories

Confessional As Cultural Marker

Adolescence And Avoiding The Screen

Adult Moral Language Problems

Discouragement And Slow Growth

Inventory Of Faults And Gifts

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Welcome, Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm a senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Oklahoma City and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother, and here we stand, not very far from Lint. It's the premier penitential season in the church, a time in which we prepare ourselves for the fullest, the deepest encounter with the presence of Christ in our lives. One aspect of this preparation is the sacrament of confession. Now, besides the fact that we talk about it all the time, and we are invited to make use of its graces to further our journey with the Lord, but in the face of the invitation, we don't often reflect on what the sacrament is or where its efficaciousness really comes from. In fact, once we hear go to confession, we don't think all that deeply about it, but we should. Like every Catholic school kid of my day, I learned about confession in grade school. It was my preparation for receiving first communion. After several weeks of going over the basics of examining my conscience and reviewing what I was supposed to say and do, the big day finally came. I was lined up outside the confessional with all my classmates, and one by one we approached the screen, knelt down, and began, Bless me, Father, this is my first confession. There wasn't that much drama to what was said, to tell you the truth. The secret sins of a second grader are usually reserved to private thoughts, and even then, they're about as conventional as the sunrise. In my family, as in most of grade school itself, life was lived in public, accessible to just about everyone. Our family house had five rooms. I slept with my brothers in the same bed, ate around the table with my three sisters, and every conversation, indeed every facet of life, was overheard and participated in by everyone. There weren't a lot of secrets, except for that which may have been jangling in the very, very small secret places of my mind. So when it came time to spill the contents of my sin-stained soul at the confessional grill, there wasn't any anxiety. In fact, I had probably gone over everything with my mother beforehand just so I'd know what I what was just so I'd know that what I said was the kind of thing confession was supposed to be. I don't remember exactly, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'd asked her what my sins might be. She'd know, with a lot more certainty than I would off the top of my head. No, there wasn't much anxiety about approaching the sacrament to receive forgiveness for my sins. That was reserved mostly for the space itself. Going into the confessional was the most imposing part of the experience. As I walked in and the door closed behind me, I was in the dark. We'd looked at the small room behind the door as part of our preparation for first confession, and we knew it was a kind of dark closet just big enough to kneel down in. And so it was. When my time came I knelt, I entered, knelt down in the dark of the space, the only light coming from behind the screen where Father was seated. I know now that the darkness gives the penitent a kind of anonymity that contributes to his freedom and provides a measure of open access to his thoughts. All I knew then was that the place was small, close, dark, and part of what we were supposed to do. I went through the ritual exchange, described the sum of my life and its failings, and received my penance. When I left, I was able to add that moment to the sum of what it meant to be a part of the life of the church. It was what we were there for, after all. Confession wasn't a trauma or an anxiety at that time. Now that I've been ordained for 45 years, I can only imagine what it must have been like for the priest to sit there on his side of the confessional and hear the litany of how many times we had disobeyed our parents and had fought with our brothers and sisters from the scores of kids who came in to confess. And all that, not just from the kids making their first confessions, but from all the kids in school who trooped to the church once a month to make their regular confessions. It's all very ritualized, all very normalized, and all very much expected. We understood what we were supposed to do. He, the priest, understood his role, and all of us together were a part of the kind of contract our lives in the church were defined by. Confession was simply one more aspect of what it meant for us to live our lives pointed toward Catholic. For a lot of people, confession isn't much more than that, which is to say the sacrament is a kind of identity test more than anything else. We Catholics have confession and we're expected to go into the confessional at least some of the time. Whether we go or not isn't as foundational as the fact that kneeling down to disclose our sins and receive forgiveness is a kind of badge we wear. It sets us apart from the rest of the culture and gives us a kind of separate status. Plus, it makes for one of the scenes on film that marks out a Catholic church from some other. Seeing someone go into the confessional or looking at a shot from behind the screen as someone kneels down to enjoy the anonymity of a small, darkened room indicates to every moviegoer that the person and the ambiance is Catholic. It's the clear, irrefutable marker of life in the church. It's also the general reveal of someone who's more or less serious about the faith. A scene in which someone's going to confession, whether the main star or simply a character from the periphery of the story, it tells the audience that he or she is serious about the faith, or at least not indifferent to it. The practice of the sacrament is a marker for the rest of the culture about the particularity of the faith. To that extent, it can be as facile and as passing as a joke, and there are no shortage of jokes to be made about going to and presuming the benefits of confession. At the same time, it's a major invitation to imagine there's something there in the life of the one who does go. Confession means something, even to the most casual observer or the most critical commentator, and we all know it. Only at adolescence did opening the door of the confessional begin to carry with it a greater weight, which seems to be a near universal experience. When our lives become more integrated into the energies of the world, as we strive to understand ourselves and our experience, we become more reluctant to own our faults and to identify our needs before the Lord. Of course, this comes about in the context of our awakening to the complications of the world and of our place in it. All of this is accompanied by the near constant experimentation with the options for our lives as we creep up to the edge of new possibilities. Everything feels personal and unique. We begin to feel singular and think of ourselves as isolated and alone. Revealing ourselves to another, especially to a disembodied figure behind the screen, becomes more difficult. It's ironic, of course, because every adolescent is facing the same set of challenges. He or she strives to understand what life is about and what their place might be in it, and if that striving were shared, would be simply one more version of the common experience of everyone. Rather than feeling out of place or singularly tired, if adolescents could hear one another or pay close attention to the stories of life surrounding them, they would know their sins and failings are common to everyone, their age and level. Admitting their sins and describing their struggles to the one behind the screen in the confessional sounds as conventional as the I disobeyed my parents mantra to the stream of second graders lined up for confession. But those adolescents, they don't know that. Putting words around their anxieties and describing their sinfulness becomes a struggle for them. After all, it's one thing to live amid the public hubbub of family and school life. It's a wholly other one to move into the challenges of an interior life. Saying, I have sinned, becomes deeply personal and vastly more intricate at age fifteen than at age eight. Opening our hearts to the prospect of being forgiven and restored, especially in the context of failure and shame, also requires a greater investment of the energies of faithfulness. Suddenly, confession isn't as easy as it was before, which is often why so many people begin to shy away from it at this point. It's harder and harder to talk about what's going on in their lives since it's often so confusing. Since it's more difficult to make good sense out of what the direction and purpose of life should be, it becomes more difficult to speak of where the faults are and what they mean. Rather than opening the confessional door and dropping to his knees to reveal the truth of his soul, the adolescent looks at the dark interior and sees mirrored there the dark uncertainty of his future. When he does, he seldom sees a bright hope. He begins to stay away, and often this perdures into adulthood. Added to this is the catechesis that we share with children. That is to say, many times the only information that gets through is what's been said to a person when they were a child. Often the only substantive interaction many people receive in the life of the faith is given to them when they are young children. After that, there often is never a setting in which a person is open to or focused on instruction. Even the serious believer can be malformed by the simplicity of his worldview. A child has to hear in black and white because that's the world he occupies. We tell children of the stark choices they have to make to do good and to avoid evil, of the clear focus of what they must do if they're going to be a good person. So, and because an eight-year-old has little capacity to weigh options or to understand consequences. He simply wants to know what he's supposed to do and what he has to stay away from. And many times that starkness is carried into adulthood with unfortunate results. I've been overwhelmed by the number of times I've talked to 80-year-old men who have the moral vocabulary of an eight-year-old. In talking about the content of their life in a confessional context, they'll say something like, I disobeyed my parents when their parents have been dead for 50 years. And what they mean to explore is that their choices and options in life disappointed their parents and caused them pain, even though they may have made the right choice. Or they'll say they stole when they mean to describe the occasions in life when what they received was undeserved or unearned. Unfortunately for them, they haven't been schooled with the language sufficient to their experience. When it comes time to evaluate their lives and find some measure of evaluation, they end up lost and mute. Kneeling at the confessional screen leaves them in the dark. As does the expectation that the work of grace is immediate if it's effective. Adults often become discouraged at the slow pace of their growth in the spiritual life. Even when they're serious about striving to make their lives different and responding to the movement of grace, they arrive at the evening and feel like the content of their day hasn't been especially different than it was before, and they grow despondent. Sometimes they simply give up trying, overwhelmed by the weight of the common and the ordinary. It's a version of the experience so common in life. A person can go to a conference or spend some time at a weekend retreat, or just wake up one morning overwhelmed by the chance to start something new. Or maybe he gets to the end of the year and decides he's going to be different. So seizing the moment, he becomes inspired. He looks at his life and is convinced that not only is it bigger than he thought, but that he ought to open his arms more widely to embrace it. And so he does. And then the truth of his self asserts its power, which is that the power is that changing isn't easy. After a little while, he finds himself back in his old ways on the same path as before. Change is the object of all striving, and change proves to be elusive. A person can feel overwhelmed. That's when the resolution for change is often abandoned or is left for later. Most often people will say that they're tired of confessing the same old sins. Over and over they encounter the limitations of their lives and feel there is no progress in the life of grace. Their limitations and failures are the only thing they can think of as they tot up the sum of their lives before entering the confessional. In that context, it's easy to see only the deficits. It's easy to see those and ignore the positives. In fact, it might be possible in their disappointment to ignore the growth of their lives altogether. A friend of mine was once in a treatment program for alcoholism. As part of the twelve-step process, he was instructed as part of the fourth step to make a fearless moral inventory of his life. He was given a long time to sit and write about the truth of his life, being cautioned that it should be as fearless and as complete as it could be. And since he was a priest, it was understood that it would be particularly thorough. When he was done, he met with his counselor to begin the fifth step, which is to share this inventory with another. Now he'd gotten through about fifteen minutes of the confession of his life, beginning with the most difficult things to talk about when his counselor stopped him. He challenged him. I thought this was going to be a fearless inventory. All I've heard, he said, is what's been painful and sinful. It's a list of what you've done wrong. Have you done nothing in your life that's right? Why haven't you talked about that? All my friend could count was what his faults and his wrongs were, as if there were nothing else to sum up in his life. We all have that tendency. It often blocks our pathway to growth and virtue, which is another way to say that confession ought to be a foundational part of our intent to grow in the life of Christ, but it shouldn't be the only one. Those who go to the confessional as the only place in which they consider their lives before God and absent themselves from the consideration of grace and blessing, apart from sins forgiven or punishment abated, have missed something important. Confession exists as a means, not as an end. The sacrament gives us grace, grace that's poured into our lives as gas it poured into a car as fuel for the journey. We short ourselves by imagining the goal of confession is to make it to the confessional. Confession exists as a sacrament, as the means by which we encounter Christ more deeply. Think of it this way. What's the greatest challenge when it comes to forgiveness? As we stare at the truth of our lives and the complications of our sinfulness, what do we face? What we face is the difficulty of embracing the forgiveness Jesus offers us. After all, Jesus lived and died two thousand years ago. In what manner do we have an encounter with him? How does the life, death, and resurrection of someone whose voice was last heard twenty centuries before we were born offer us hope and promise all these years later? How can I stare at the stark truth of the evil I've done and still hear the voice of forgiveness? And the answer is by way of the mediation of the sacrament of forgiveness. By entering into the promise of forgiving love, entrusted to the Church, I can kneel at the feet of the Church and hear in my own ears the promise of forgiveness extended to me. It's an assurance extended to me personally, amid the darkness of the sins I've committed and the good I've failed to do. It's not a bland nostrum or a disembodied promise, but an actual word spoken to me and into the truth of my sinful self. The message of Christ is given to me directly and certainly in a voice I can hear and understand. I absolve you is the gift of Christ's voice sounding in my ears. All sacraments exist in order to collapse the time between the ministry of Christ in Galilee with his disciples and the needs and hopes of the people of today. When we celebrate the Eucharist, for example, the valley of years between the Last Supper and this Sunday is bridged. We have access to that moment that was celebrated all those centuries ago. When the sick are anointed, the premier ministry of Jesus to forgive and to heal is enacted, as if it were Jesus Himself there present. And when the words of absolution are pronounced, the gift of Christ for the forgiveness of sins is unwrapped and placed into the life of the penitent as if he were standing at the foot of the cross. The sacraments mediate the presence of Christ to us. In the course of his experience, the Church has discovered the power of confession to make the gift of forgiveness powerfully real. When we speak the truth of ourselves to another, something happens in us. This is no secret insight, although it's often not explicitly embraced when it comes to the life of faith. To say something out loud is to make things happen. When a man says, I love you to a woman, the relationship bec the relationship becomes different. Speaking the words alters the truth of the situation. When a contract is entered into, a commitment by way of words binds the parties to one another. The word make the relationship different. It isn't an accident that when a nation goes to war with another, that war is declared. Saying the word war makes the difference and enacts that difference. And so it is with us when we describe ourselves. Sin can hide in us, disguises provenance, and push itself away from our awareness. We can be aware of it as we look at our lives, but it's bound up on the inside, a vague feeling of what's going on in our lives. And that's where almost everyone is, if asked. When asked to explain, things become more difficult to get to. But once we say the words about ourselves, the vagary lessens and the specific takes its place. It is as if a doorway into the heart is opened or a blockage is unplugged. Once access to the outside is granted, what's bound on the out what's bound on the inside can leave, and what's on the outside can come in. Human nature is just that way. Rather than being some sort of private Catholic opinion, this unblocking by confessing is at the heart of counseling and therapy. It's the talking cure that now defines so much of our lives, because when we talk, what's inside of us begins to change, and what's on the outside waiting for us can get to us. All the promises of forgiveness, all the truths of reconciling love, all the certainty of Christ's gift of Himself to us, all of which are offered and presented to us, can enter directly into our lives once this gateway is opened. After all, the promise of life and love has been made for all these centuries. The only blockage to them lies within us. Saying what needs to be said is to make way for what can be done, which is to receive the gift Jesus has for us. The penitent isn't just speaking into the void as he kneels at the confessional screen. He's speaking so that the lock over his heart can be opened, and the door sealing the entrance can be left ajar. Now I didn't know any of that the first time I stepped into the confessional. In fact, I had only the vaguest notion of who Jesus might be and why knowing him might be important enough to put so much energy into. Like most kids doing what they're told, I just imitated the ones next to me and went through the motions to fulfill what was expected of me. But this is what we did in everything, from playing baseball to shaping my letters in my big chief tablet. I learned only later what was really happening and what it meant. Going through the motions didn't mean it wasn't important, it just meant it was bigger than I could grasp at the moment. You might say it was something like when a groom says, I do at the altar. He has no idea what he's saying, not really, but by continuing to say it and then acting on it, his life is shaped by it until he begins to understand just what it means. And it was just this way for me. I confess has the same potential, the same power, which is why it's an important discipline to maintain. Your time in the confessional may be imperfect and unsatisfying. It may not be as easy as it once was, it may come with a complicated set of feelings and thoughts, and it may not be pleasant to you at first. But it's only by coming through the door and opening yourself to what's offered there that the gift can be unwrapped. That's what's offered, after all. We were all given the greatest gift of all, entrusted to us at the moment of our baptism, and then thrust into our hands. Hands when we were children. We were told to value it and appreciate it just because it was just for us. And it would be just exactly what we needed. But our first responsibility was to unwrap it. Which is our responsibility now. Don't be left waiting. Tug at the bow and see what's inside. That's what Lent is for. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called You're So Vain. You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you. That was playing all through my senior year, the plaintive accusation for the informed few, who would know all the funny, clever, subtle jeers. We all outside wondered who could be so vain as to be profoundly deaf to the singing. Our interests sharpened, they never waned. Vanity's call arch to the song ringing. Carly invited invoked vanity quite lightly, turned it into a comedy, a clue for us, that it was never to be treated lightly, to be no more than a prissy artist's fuss. I suppose we never imagined we could sin by staring at ourselves, gazing only there, mouthing empty words about what had been, we lost any sense of what was decent and fair. Here is to all that is deadly to our souls, may we be aware of its noxious breath, and awaken to becoming whole, to look upon other faces as our quest. That's you are so vain. Lent is upon us, of course. This is the R opportunity to make sure that we know what the schedule for Ash Wednesday will be, because that is coming quickly as the beginning day of Lent. And uh the schedule is uh particular to each parish, so be sure and find out when that is and make provision to come because it's often the most popular day in all of the celebrations of the life of the church. We hope that this Lent and in all the time to come that you can continue to join us as we together explore what it means to be Living Catholic.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.