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A Reconciliation

In the old days, the act of reciting one's sins to the priest was known as "confession." Today, the same act is called "reconciliation." By informing the priest as to the wrongs that one has committed-or as to the good deeds that one has left undone-one seeks to reconcile him- or herself with a righteous God who is both just and merciful.

Today, in some churches, the penitent sinner has the option of seating him- or herself across from the priest, in the same room, face to face, while he or she confesses his or her sins. In the old days, confession was done in secret, the sinner entering a confessional booth that adjoined the booth in which his or her confessor sat, with only a screened window between them, across which could be drawn a wooden panel.

The new approach suggests, perhaps, that the sinner need not be ashamed of his or her wrongdoing. What was done in secret can be confessed openly and unashamedly. In the past, the implication was that sinful behavior was shameful and that humility required a confession that was, if not exactly secret, private.

Henrietta Samson preferred the confessional booth to the face-to-face encounter with the priest. She liked the darkness of the cubicle. She preferred the privacy it afforded her. She favored the secrecy. What she shared with the priest, Father Bender, was something that she would admit only to him and to the God whom they both served, and she wasn't eager to see the face of the priest to whom she confessed her sins. In truth, she did feel as though her sins were shameful. To her, they were disgraceful. They were appalling enough for her to wish not to show her face, and she welcomed the dark and silent confines of the confessional booth and the wall that it imposed between her and the priest.

She stepped into the vast interior of the church, which was empty and dark, with only the afternoon sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, to spill across the blood-red carpet and the white linen cloth that covered the altar beneath the great crucifix that showed her Lord and Savior nailed to the heavy timber of the ancient cross. Like the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of her church was empty-or seemingly so.

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