Transformation Begins with Confession

Leslie Reynolds Benns

  Transformation begins with confession. The need to confess has customarily been associated with wrong-doing. But that association is incomplete. Confession is good for more than the soul. Confession is one of the most life-affirming actions a human being can take, and it can lead to the formation of a new and often quite different personality.    The need for transformation is obvious. Our country, its organizations and its people are in need of an overhaul. Children are entering kindergarten acting like three-year olds, with a level of violence previously observed only in junior high school. Over fifty percent of marriages now fail, with many partners expecting a future divorce on their wedding day. The gap between the haves and have nots continues to widen. Many are saying that our country has lost its bearings and that our position on the world stage is in jeopardy.

There's hope in transforming this dismal condition. That hope is found first in personal confession – owning or admitting material that was previously hidden from sight, unburdening of our conscience or a cleansing of our souls. When we've done something that we are less than pleased with, confession relieves us of the burden either consciously or unconsciously carried. The so-called guilty conscience has been rehabilitated. When we've confessed to a person we may have harmed or misled, and offer a remedy, our personal integrity is reestablished.

However, confession does more than uncover incidents about which we feel guilt. A complete confession also reveals the sources of our actions that may have become so automatic that we no longer notice them. Uncovering and discarding the origin of these actions sets us free to create our life anew. Our psyches are like school "blackboards" that collected chalk dust on their surfaces from repeated erasures and can only be read clearly after being wiped with a damp cloth. Confession is the damp cloth for our psyches. Confession is the first step in transforming ourselves, our relationships and our society and is often called by different names: gaining integrity, becoming responsible, enlightenment.

At the level of organization and government taking a group inventory and risking the implementation of this confession may terrify those of us accustomed to "covering our own asses." But relax. While those may be beneficial, this process does not offer a panacea for all the world's ills, nor advocate stripping off our clothes and running through the streets, shouting, "Hallelujah, we're free." More measured steps on each level will be required, and they all begin with the personal.

A complete confession, one that looks inside at depth and uncovers and discards previously unconscious or unaddressed material, produces a lasting change in our lives and our world, making us available to possibilities in ourselves and our lives that were not previously accessible. It is a private in-depth confession – bringing all the clutter in our psyches to the surface, owning it and letting it go, sharing the distilled results of this self-examination with another person and, with some maintenance work, creating a clutter-free life and then sharing the whole experience with our fellows.  Excerpted from Confession is Good for More than Soul  www.confessionisgood.com   

Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD, author, most recently of Confession is Good for More than the Soul. Speaker, trainer, workshop leader, community activist and wedding officiant. Sign up for a FR*E*E 4-part mini e-course - CREATING YOUR OWN REALITY - at http://www.lesliereynoldsbenns.com

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