It’s not a ‘sacrament’ in Protestantism (mostly because Luther wasn’t fond of the priesthood at that point), but confession of one’s sins is REALLY important. It may not be as formalized, but that’s the case for basically every Protestant tradition vis-a-vis a similar Catholic tradition - the notion of ‘priesthood of all believers’ does indicate that one should confess directly to God, but plenty of people use other folks as their ‘confessor’ or in evangelical-speak, ‘accountability partner’.
I grew up Presbyterian, and the lead up to Easter in Sunday school for the little ones was more or less glossed over; I thought Jesus just left for a little while and then came back on Sunday. Yay! Also, butterflies. Now let’s get the eggs and chocolate…
But, around age four or so (and I vividly remember this) I woke up early Easter morning and turned on the TV. I don’t know what the movie was, but it showed the choice between Jesus and Barabbas. I was sure the crowd would choose to save Jesus… 2000 year old spoiler alert probably not needed, I guess.
I went into my parents’ bedroom and turned on the light. “Mommy! They killed Jesus!”
Absolution is the forgiveness of your sins, yes, through the power that Christ imparted to the disciples and their descendants. Again, the priest isn’t sitting there judging if you confessed “well enough”. The idea is to confess your sins in a true spirit of being penitent, with the intention to go and not sin again. Obviously the priest can only go with what He is given and the person could be pulling a snow job. But why would someone do that? Or you may not remember everything – that’s OK too.
There is a ritual attached because it is a Sacrament and as such formal and important. It’s an acknowledgement that even with God’s grace, we stumble, and an acknowledgement that He is there to forgive us and always wants to reconcile with us.
I guess it’s hard to answer your last question. Yes, the church is the route to spiritual health and yes, it does make one rely on others to have the fullness of faith in practice, but it’s all in the service of God and directed toward Him. I guess I don’t then think, they’re holding me hostage to pay to keep them in “business”. We’re all a community and we contribute to the community to keep it operating. “Power play”? I don’t see priests sitting there thinking they are holding something over us. They have a gift and can’t wait to give it away in serving people and bringing them closer to God.
If you grow up Catholic, the crucifix is just something that is always there. Some crucifixes are MUCH more gruesome than others, making it awfully hard to ignore that the guy supposedly died a gruesome death. And some old neighbor or relative likely had the ever-lovely painting of the sacred heart of Jesus in their living room! Tasteful with any décor… :eek:
Even the fairy tale version of the bible is full of people (or God) killing/trying to kill other people. David thrown to the lions, David and Goliath, the deluge, etc. Jesus on the cross is just one more dead body. IIRC, a lot of it was blurred thru the haze of ancient history. All these atrocities happened “way back then.”
Confession always impressed me as stupid. As a kid the idea that I had “sinned” over the last couple of months impressed me as ridiculous. And, if I ever did anything I thought really bad (shoplifting is probably the worst thing I did as a gradeschooler), I sure wasn’t going to tell ANYONE, not to mention a priest. So I just made up some BS about lying, talking back to my mother, or whatever, and the priest would tell me to say a couple of our fathers and hail Marys.
Once you find yourself not caring that you are flat out lying during confession - it is a pretty quick hop, skip and a jump to tossing the whole religion thing.
I remember how horrified I was one time I went into the box, and the priest was the guy who coached the b-ball team I was on, and he greeted me by name. No way I’d by into any open confession.
It really is so odd. The whole rigamarole struck me as so ridiculous as a little kid. I still have a hard time realizing that otherwise intelligent adults actually believe all that crap!
I always understood that Jesus was crucified, but the actual horror of it didn’t sink in until later. We went to see an Italian movie called The Gospel According to St. Matthew (I would have been about eight) and the screams during the crucifixion still bother me to think about. I have never been able to bring myself to watch The Passion of the Christ.
But yes, Good Friday should come with a warning “May Be Too Intense for Younger Viewers”.
Regards,
Shodan
The last time I did confession, it was about as un-ritualized as possible. I walked into a church (during “off” hours, not during service), prayed for a moment, the priest asked me how I was and if I needed anything, I mentioned wanting to confess and he said that the usual hours were [whatever] but why didn’t I talk in his office since I was there. I said what I wanted to say, he said what he had to say and that was it. Really just a conversation – no “judging”, no shame attacks, no “Bless me Father, for I have sinned…”. Just a talk and his statement of penance.
I think a lot of people’s idea of Reconciliation are based entirely on the Hollywood version. Which is an option for some people but isn’t necessarily the norm but it makes very easy Hollywood shorthand for what’s going on.
It is outrageous that young Christians are made to experience crucifixion!!
Growing up protestant, there were crosses around everywhere, not crucifixes, so it’s less explicit. They don’t get into the details very much until you’re probably old enough to handle them. So, in Sunday School for very, very little kids, the lesson is pretty much just “He died.” When you’re a little older, you learn that it was on a cross and that it hurts a lot (but not very many details other than what you need to know in order for the story about Thomas to make sense (so, nails and stabbing).) Still, the focus is on rising again. By the time you’re old enough to read the details for yourself, you’re probably old enough to handle them. Also, you know the story by then, so it isn’t surprising or shocking as it’s always been in the background.
I think it was around middle school where they really tried to convey the physical pain that Jesus would have been in before and during the crucifixion.
It’s hard to say when I first heard the entire Bible story read, but it was probably age 6-7. At that point, my mental processing of it was very much in line with “Hansel threw the witch in the oven.” I got that he was whipped and crucified and stabbed and died in a factual information sense, but I wasn’t imagining blood and gore any more than I thought about Hansel’s witch blistering and peeling.
I was in Jr High before I put much effort into imagining what it must have been like. (Though that might be less a child development stage and more a personal religious phase.)
Born into a Christian family and with Jewish cousins, learning of the Holocaust horrified me far more than did the crucifixion. Probably because it was much closer in history, and I would have had distant family involved in the dying and the killing in Germany.
The Christians in my family are Episcopalian and Presbyterian, and those denominations don’t go in for lots of gory details about the actual crucifixion.
But they take fewer nails and less wood for the crosses.
This is kind of off topic, but when I was in the Army my fiance and I had a good friend who was supposed to be best man at our wedding. But he had troubles, went AWOL, and when he came back was confined to barracks. Dude was Catholic, and went to the RC chaplain to make his confession. Now, the chaplain is military too of course. He got into “disfavor” because when higher ups handling my friend’s case pressed him to tell them what the guy had said about his flight, he absolutely refused. We were scandalized that they’d even asked a priest to reveal what he’d been told in confession.
Yes, same here.
One of the surprising things about the mentioned *The Gospel According to St. Matthew *movie is that the director was an atheist, As Roger Ebert mentioned in a review: “Pasolini’s is one of the most effective films on a religious theme I have ever seen, perhaps because it was made by a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, underline, sentimentalize or romanticize his famous story, but tried his best to simply record it.”
It was one of the movies that also showed me that the catholic school I attended was not telling us the whole story.
And then later in life I found Dave Allen and I became more of a lapsed catholic/agnostic 
Like someone said, you also equated the crucifixion with something that happened “back then”, so it was kind of an abstract concept.
Huh, I never knew anyone who felt this way. Most kids I knew were really excited about it (if you were a girl you got a pretty new dress – I think my mother still has mine and my sister’s in her cedar chest), you got a big party, and gifts, not to mention you finally found out what the hosts taste like (paper). I guess it all depended on the instructor, though. Sr. Frances was my favorite teacher.
Confession – good god, I can’t remember the last time I went, but it was the same as everyone else said. No big deal. I remember thinking it was really cool when the priest told us that he couldn’t even tell our parents what we did. Score!
Count me in with the first confession confession being anxiety-inducing. Just about the only part of my religious “education” which was like that, really. After a few of them I realized it wasn’t a huge deal, but still in the category of things like being called to the principal’s office. One-on-ones with an adult in a position of power are scary.
D’oh! I read that as “communion” and I was like, "why would someone be afraid of communion? :smack:
Yeah, confession could get you a little nervous, at least the first time. But like I said, the cool part was “Hey, they won’t tell my parents and I won’t get in trouble, that’s pretty sweet.” And our priests at the time were pretty nice, so there were no fears of HELL AND DAMNATION!!!
I was more nervous about confirmation. THAT was a big deal. It was stressed that it was this big commitment, and our religion class that year was based pretty much on that alone, plus we had to keep a journal on our thoughts about it. Very intense.
I had one of those “as others see it” moments a few years back when my officemate (raised Christian, but not Catholic) said that he found those Alpine crucifiction monuments weird. These are the outdoor crucifixes set up with the Christ on them, but in order to keep the image from deteriorating too rapidly the entire thing is covered by a little roof.
It looked, he said, as if the Romans were crucifying Jesus, but they didn’t want him to get wet while he was hanging on the cross, so they put a little shelter over him.
I never would have considered it that way.
The box thing isn’t necessary; its purpose is to protect the anonimity of both parts. And the Father is capital-F: forgiveness comes from the guy without vowels in His name, not from the man in black.
The cases where a priest may deny absolution are very limited; mainly it would be either a case that he doesn’t feel capable of providing appropriate penance for (the example I always remember is a legend about an 8th century man who killed his parents by mistake… thinking he was killing his wife and her nonexistent lover, in a fit of unwarranted jealousy), or evidence that the so-called repentant isn’t repenting at all. Forgetting something isn’t important, but there isn’t much point in forgiving something that the person who did it doesn’t see anything wrong with. “Sorry I got caught” isn’t valid, it’s got to be “sorry I screwed up and hurt people”.
Yes. I burst into tears and couldn’t go through with it. The priest was very nice about it and I just tried again later.
I was an adult before I understood the horror of crucifixion. I’ve been hearing about Jesus since forever, and it gets old pretty quick. Or at least it did for me. And this is even though I grew up in a very secular country, so I can only imagine how desensitized you get somewhere where Christianity is a big deal. Crucifixion is, you know, just Jesus’s thing, he’s always hanging out on that cross. It’s what he does, whatever, and no one ever seemed to worry much about it.
I got a different perspective when I realized that crucifixion isn’t a Jesus thing, it’s a Roman thing. It’s so associated with Jesus that it’s easy to get the impression that he was the only one who was ever crucified (although in the actual story there are obviously other people being crucified on that same day, so that should tell you something right there). But the Romans crucified people a lot. In 71 BC, Crassus had six thousand captives from Spartacus’s defeated slave army crucified all along the Appian way. Which, BTW, is one of the main Roman roads in Italy. Imagine seeing that as you go into town to do your shopping. On the one hand, maybe you get used to the sight after a few trips. On the other hand, if you’re a slave, it’ll probably make you think twice about rebelling any time soon.
I guess what I mean is that when you’re the Son of God, and you’re dying for the sins of humanity, and you’re going to rise again in three days anyway, crucifixion is OK, in a sense. It’s kind of hard to empathize all that much with a guy like Jesus, since he’s literally superhuman.
But if you’re just some person (maybe a slave fighting for your freedom in a slave rebellion, so not even a bad person, by any moral standard), and you’re roped to a cross (sometimes nailed, although, in fairness, people were apparently mostly just tied up there), and just left there until you die (from dehydration, asphyxiation, heck, probably boredom, if nothing else gets you) - yeah, that sucks. It’s not an easy death, and certainly not a quick one. You would probably have time to go insane. It would be torture in a bunch of different ways. Heck, it was most likely even worse than it sounds. Crucifixion sucked so much that even the Romans thought it sucked, and they usually weren’t squeamish about these things. You weren’t allowed to do it to free Roman citizens.
And it could happen to you, and it could happen to me. Well, at least if we were non-citizens and got on the wrong side of the Roman authorities. I don’t know about you guys, but that gives me the chills.
(As a total side note, speaking as a recently converted Roman geek, I’m kind of vaguely bugged by how much in the background the Romans are in the Christ story. Jesus lived inside the Roman Empire, in the time of Augustus and Tiberius. When Christianity becomes a big deal, it’s because it becomes a big Roman deal. It’s all happening in a Roman context, and yet people seem to know bugger all about the Romans. No one ever told me anything about them. If religious history hadn’t taken such a weird turn, Jesus would be unknown or at most a minor character, like so many others. Similarly, in the Old Testament, the larger history of the Middle East, which is the larger history of the world, is sort of just going on in the background. If it wasn’t for the peculiar place of Judaism in religious history, we might actually hear about Assyria, and Babylonia, and Persia, and the Jews would be the sideshow gig that they were in reality. As it is, you never really get a sense of the larger picture. But anyway, now I’m just digressing. Maybe a grumpy rant for a different thread. ;))