I was born into the institutionalised religion of Catholicism. At the tender age of 7, my classmates and I all underwent the training, practices and rituals that would allow us to make our first confession – currently called reconciliation. After confession we became eligible for ‘Holy Communion,’ the act which, according to Catholicism, symbolically unites one with God.
Central to the rite of confession is the concept of sin and the notion that we are all sinners with different levels of severity. There were lesser or venial sins, like calling someone names or taking a biscuit without Mum’s permission – these were the sins of childhood we were advised. Then there were the very heavy feeling mortal sins like adultery and murder that some adults engaged in, to the detriment of their ‘Souls’.
It was understood that the greater the severity of the sin, the deeper the guilt one should feel and hence the more intense the penance to be done. The type and quality of penance was ordained by a priest in a confessional box, a place I experienced as a child as having a suffocating quality and a rancid smell, which left me feeling nauseous.
I had problems with this notion of sin from Day 1… and this was not only attributable to the smell of the confessional box.
I was a gentle and obedient child and couldn’t relate to any of the ‘sample sins’ presented to us. I didn’t call people names and my Mum kept a lock on the biscuit box; I never hit my brothers, sisters or friends. Asking adults what I could confess to the priest, as I was worried about the quality of our conversation, I was advised to just make up a couple. Ultimately, my only sin was following this advice and lying to the priest that I had committed sins that I hadn’t! So I was guilty of lying to keep people and the church happy. I noted that as long as my guilt about something was assured, everyone was content and the self-perpetuating system was upheld.
Much later in life, and with the true blessing and grace of the Ageless Wisdom, I felt to revisit this experience and review it from the perspective of what I feel to be universal truth.
Firstly, for me true religion is about the inner connection with Soul, my innermost essence, which allows me to re-connect with Divine energy. This connection with Soul allows me to connect with God through feeling. It is not possible for me to connect with God through consuming a piece of white wafer or by taking a sip of wine.
Secondly, what removes me from God is choosing an energy that God is not – that is, a non-Soulful energy, or a spiritual energy. Re-connecting with Soul, by re-choosing the quality of the energy in which I move, is what is required to re-establish my relationship with Our Father and the Divine energy that God is. Nominating and renouncing the other false, spiritual energy – the energy that is not who I really am – supports me in choosing the energy of Our Father with greater consistency. This is all accomplished by my own awareness and does not need a priest to hear and/or to absolve what I have done, nor to administer a penance.
Thirdly, my personal experience of guilt is that it is a false, emotional energy that is not of the energetic quality of God Our Father. It does not serve to reconnect us. In fact, in operation, it serves to disconnect us and to place us in a heavy energy that separates us further from God.
The true religion I now live, The Way of The Livingness, is based on living the qualities of God on this earth, the qualities of Stillness, Love, Truth, Harmony and Joy, so that eventually we will not live on this earth at all, but return to our original Divine Soul Plane. The catholic religion of my childhood taught that I was born a sinner and could achieve salvation only through compliance to its tenets.
The Way of The Livingness presents that all children are born with a Divine potential within and that, with energetic integrity and responsibility, by choosing to align with this energy, our Soul, we start to discard all that is not of our true essence quite naturally. Neither the confessional box, nor any of the other rites, is ever needed for this.
By Coleen
Related Reading:
Catholic Religion Today – is it a Healthy Option?
God’s Waiting Room
Religion and The Way of The Livingness – Audio
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
If there were such a thing as sin then the Catholic church would be amongst the biggest sinners of them all, if not THE biggest sinner of them all.
Absolutely Alexis, well said.
External actions can’t bring us closer to God only our inner movements can. God is the fabric of Life, He is the innermost of everything, therefore in order to return to Him, we must go inside. And the way to go deeper within is to clear all the debris (beliefs, ideals, pictures and emotions) that silently bar our way to going deeper. And the only true way to do that is to align to a consciousness that is true because if we’re still aligned to the pranic consciousness then we might feel that we’ve cleared those things but we won’t have, we’ll just have pulled in more of the same energy that’s preventing us from accessing God in the first place.
I have never sat in a confessional box but can just imagine how dreadful they must feel. Sitting in a small wooden box and sharing what another has deemed to be ‘your sins’, knowing full well that you’re going to be judged and possibly condemned is not only awful but has nothing whatsoever to do with God. In fact the whole process is utterly ungodly and totally repressing.
There is a knowing as a small child that trumps all education, it is a knowing of what is true Love, what honesty is and what ease and flow in the body is. When you choose to feel the harshness of the judgement that comes through confession, you start to realise this is not what God represents, and come back to a more inner wisdom approach. Time to unlearn!
I agree with everything you say, to me the main stream religions are very hypocritical and do not make any sense to me.
I never understood the notion of sin, as a child this didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. And some religions are stuffed full of guilt, which I have discovered actually encourages us to feel as though we have separated from God because our guilt is too much for us to bear? This isn’t true either; I know we cannot be separated from God, because he is the very air we breath and the space we live in. We seem to have forgotten that we live in the universe, not just on this planet called earth which spins in space and that space is God, so he is holding us and so therefore we can never leave him as he can never leave us.
Ironic how an institute such as the Catholic church who talks about sinning are known for doing this themselves .. aka abusing others. Walking your talk is certainly not done here!
They sound like, and are a diabolical institution, horrendous for young children to have had to be in their presence and endure what they did.
My dad always used to tell me that if i’m truthful and honest, I will be uncomfortable to people – it is my choice to decide what is more valuable.
I recently watched a movie which very clearly exposed that it is common for the people who truly care about others to be pushed aside and/or out.In it there was a priest who was there for people, listened and lived his life in accordance to the teachings of Jesus to the best of his ability. However the people above him were thirsty for money and power, using their unresolved issues as fuel for all of the evil they were doing. It’s common in our world today, not just in the catholic church but everywhere we go – in our work place and on the street, the people who want to do true good step on the toes of the ones who are pretending, they become uncomfortable and figures of authority try to find ways to cut them out and make them disappear so that their plan is not rendered.
Being advised by adults to ‘make up a few’ when you went into the confessional box just so you could have a sin or two to admit to is a lie in itself.
What always stands out to me is that whatever rules we put on God or love, it does not make it god or love when the truth is, it isn’t.
There is something sad and hilarious about making up sins in order to do what was required at confession.
For me it is more sad than hilarious because the Catholic church are teaching children that it is ok to lie just to keep the status quo. Children naturally know what is true or not, so when asked to openly lie they are also going against what they know deep within is not true and yet this is accepted by adults and priests alike.
The whole concept on Sin made me super confused as a kid, for how can someone who feels so much joy and love and playfulness be ‘a sinner’ it was a dead give away that what was said was not true. As I grew up though what I realise now is had I kept holding that truth key in my heart I would have been able to not rely on words but use my feeling as a super power.
One day we will understand the concept of Sin and right and wrong have no place in evolution, today we are not there and for me these are still words and not a fully understand way of living, and that I feel is the point. What if we spoke only from how we lived, what felt true in our body then we would have an honest understanding about the world instead of out of touch theories in the mind about what is going on? What I do know is when I am in connection with that divine spark I feel inside the concept of Sin or Wrong or Right does not exist – life just is.
I love this statement, ‘re-connecting with Soul, by re-choosing the quality of the energy in which I move, is what is required to re-establish my relationship with Our Father, and the Divine energy that God is’ – is saying we have free will to choose what is the truth for us. And Coleen you could feel the difference from a very young age. It’s always there to return to.
Yes I love the fact it is through our movements that we re-establish the relationship with ‘Our Father and the divine energy that God is’. No big bills or loans to take out, simply a dedication to more awareness about the way we move.
Connecting with our inner-most, with God, ‘for me true religion is about the inner connection with Soul, my innermost essence, which allows me to re-connect with Divine energy. This connection with Soul allows me to connect with God through feeling.