Genius has been defined as the ability to simplify the complex. St. Benedict offers many powerful lessons in this brief chapter on the handling of sin. He teaches us that there is personal responsibility in faults. He teaches there are responsibilities of the community. He teaches that leaders have gained wisdom to help others find healing. Their wisdom was not the product of their perfection, but through their experience of personal faults.
Five important lessons are given to us in this chapter; transparency in all things, need for confession, necessity of forgiveness, the safety of confidentiality for private sins, and the importance of wise leadership. These lessons are rarely exercised in secular communities today. They were probably poorly practiced in the declining Roman Empire of the sixth century. However, Benedict realized that strong communities that bear one another’s burdens must value individual responsibility and communal accountability.
When sin lingers, it infects and grows. The cure for sin in to purge it through confession. However, typical social response to confession is often disproportionate to the offence. The threat of exposure encourages cover-up because the cure is feared far worse than the disease. Have we created a cultural norm that make it easy it is for us to point at the fault of others and detract attention from our own sins? Transparency is risky, but confession is necessary for true healing. How different would our world appear if we encouraged confession with the response of compassion? This is the example that Benedict offers in this chapter. Much work is needed for me to look to confession with a desire for personal healing and value transparency as a means of spiritual discipline. I suspect you need to work at confession as well.
Compassionate response requires forgiveness. Instead of harboring malice toward offenders, forgiveness offers healing. Healing for the forgiver is the first benefit. Harboring malice, despite, and hatred only plant seeds of sin in our own hearts. Even as I write this paragraph, I feel the struggle in my own mind that wants to begin a list of exceptions. Is this fair? Should not there be justice? What would happen if no one was held accountable? Benedict provided means of justice and accountability throughout The Rule. These exceptions are merely ruses that shift my responsibility for forgiveness and offer excuses rather than obedience. My role in this community is to forgive the penitent. Your role is the same – forgive.
Confession is criticized by some faith groups. Perhaps you have heard (maybe even said), “I can go straight to God to confess my sins. I don’t need to go through a priest.” Truly, Jesus is the propitiation that appeases justice for the sins that you and I have done and will do. However, St. James urges us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.”[1] We must distinguish the difference between sin as a condition of the brokenness of our human nature and sin acts. Our behaviors are byproducts of our condition. When we hide our sins, fail to confess and acknowledge our sins, or rationalize our sin acts we give rise to the sin nature. Public sins demand they be publicly acknowledged and confessed. Private sins, perhaps known only to the sinner (“sin that lies hidden in his conscience” [2]), hold the same potential to grow and give rise to the nature of sin. Acknowledgement and confession are as essential. The place for confession is in the audience of “one another.” The priest is vowed to hold your private sins privately. That confidential space between sinner, priest, and God is a space of healing. There is no threat of exposure. There is wise counsel for correcting sinful actions. There is the assurance that true repentance incurs God’s forgiveness. How may confession be encouraged to begin healing?
Benedict concludes this chapter, by describing leaders who are trustworthy and wise. The abbot and spiritual elders who hold in their confidence sins of conscience revealed to them by offenders. Those spiritual leaders who value the trust of one who struggles with sins in his heart and hold confession is the strictest of confidence between the one who confesses, the confessor who receives the confession, and God Himself who forgives the sinner. Spiritual leaders who have proven themselves worthy of trust, as well as possessors of wisdom. Wisdom gained from experience. Wisdom as one who has also received healing from confession and the receipt of absolution for one’s own sinfulness. The abbot and spiritual elders are not examples of perfection, but models of holiness that has been imparted by the perfect God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are wise and trustworthy spiritual leaders “who know how to heal their own wounds, as well as those of others, without exposing them and making them public.”[3]
It should be noted that no harsh punishments are mandated as penitence for confessed faults. Instead, he admonished the leaders to offer healing to the wounds of confessed sins. There is compassion in his words that encourage the sinful to find healing after committing faults. Compassion that resounds in the words of our Lord to the adulteress, “Then neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”[4]
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[1] James 5:16.
[2] Benedict and Timothy Fry, RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in English, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1982), 68.
[3] _____, 68.
[4] John 8:11.
