update from sparkleup

writing/sawtooth/limerent-object/61.md

@@ -1,3 +1,11 @@
+There is a strangely comforting humiliation to the act of confession, to admitting to the one on the other side of that screen just how long it has been since you engaged with your sins so directly, so honestly. You kneel on that delightfully familiar kneeler, the same you knelt on in high school, the same you knelt on when you got home from your failed venture out of state. You fold your hands, you nearly rest your nose against them, doing your best to smell only your scent and that of the cedar before you, not the priest, not the feline who was in there before you. You admit your deeds and the words roll off your tongue with the aspartame tang of your shortcomings.
 
+For a while, when I was getting my psych degree, I stopped going to confession. I will admit that there was a brief time during those studies that I thought I understood quite a bit more than I actually do. I knew enough to be dangerous. I thought, "Ah yes, if confession is the catharsis of letting go of an internal stressor, I needn't go to confession, so long as I have that regular release of spiritual energy!"
+
+But while confession certainly involves catharsis, that's not its sole purpose. I got my catharsis from the class trip to a junk yard where we were given goggles and sledge hammers and let at a stack of cars, from letting a friend talk me into driving up into the mountains so that I could shoot his pistol, even from visiting a batting cage.
+
+But it wasn't the right catharsis.
+
+I never felt like I was handling my sins when the bat made contact with the ball, and even when the ball hit me instead of the bat, I still had not served penance.
 
 (certainly not talking to kay, go into talking with god with scene from discerment)