How can a Confessor better call upon Believers to achieve Perfection?
How can a Confessor better call upon Believers to achieve Perfection?

Summary/Abstract: The Sacred Mystery of Confession plays a central role in the Orthodox life and spirituality. It reestablishes the connection between Christian and God interrupted through the sin committed after baptism. It is also called The Sacred Mystery of Penance, because it expresses recovery, personal transformation, repentance, confession and a new way of life through coming to terms with God. Although it is among the most used sacred mysteries and has the most beneficial effects, the interest in rebuilding of the spiritual communion through confessing the sins, and in confessor’s guidance has decreased, and in some places it is desultory. They confess sins, but only for an illusionary serenity of conscience, because they do not give up their sinful lives. Searching for a solution to this problem we have found in one of father Stăniloae’s articles (The Sacred Mystery of Penance as confession) a sentence with important present-day theological connotations about the Sacred Mystery of Reconciliation and about a more efficient approach to this sacred mystery: „We would like – says the father – to focus our attention upon confession in a restricted sense, to see through which kind of the confessor’s behavior might ease this act for the believers who experience an inner difficulty in front of him or consider it useless”.

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