How I Became Addicted to Confessing My Sins
The Fork, The Fear, and The Faith: A Journey from Anxiety to Peace
I was born with a tendency to obsess.
It might seem strange to you, but when I was a young boy, I became fixated on a fork. Some kids have security blankets; I had the fork. I hated to leave the house and disliked the uncertainty of other households with foreign expectations and unspoken rules. So, when I did venture out, I insisted on carrying my small metal fork, which I called my “reek.” Holding onto it eased my incessant worry and anchored me to the comforts of home.
As I got older, my fixations evolved but never really disappeared. When life shifted towards backyard play, I developed a fear that my heart would stop beating. During a game of tag, I would call a timeout, bring the game to a standstill, and hold my hand to my chest. After counting ten pulses, I would breathe a sigh of relief and signal to the other kids that the game could continue.
My fretting took a supernatural turn when my grandmother’s best friend, a chain-smoking priest from South Africa, visited us for the summer. Father Ronnie told stories about evil spirits, exorcisms, and witch doctors with spiders coming out of their mouths, confirming my belief that danger lurked around every corner. To keep the demons at bay, I clung to prayer.
For me, prayer was all about getting the words right. I’d say an “Our Father.” Halfway through the prayer, a thought would enter my mind: “God is bad.”
Then, I would panic. Fearing hell, I’d start over. “Our Father…”
Then, it would hit me again: “God is bad.”
I’d sigh and start the prayer over.
When I finally completed the prayer, I felt relief for a moment. Then, the whole cycle would start over again.
One day, my parents found me alone in my room, stewing. “Just tell us what’s wrong,” my dad prodded.
I paused. “I had a thought.”
“Okay,” my mom said. “We all have thoughts.”
I took a breath. “I thought that I hate you both.”
I waited.
It was such a relief to say it out loud. I told them that I didn’t believe that the thought was true. It was just a passing thought. As I put words to it, my shoulders relaxed. My chest felt warm as my parents bent down to where I was sitting on the carpet in my bedroom to hug me and reassure me that thoughts are just thoughts. They knew that I loved them. And they loved me.
And thus began my addiction to confessing.
Soon, I was confessing to anyone who would listen. I confessed when I did something wrong, and I confessed when I didn’t do something wrong, just in case. When I learned that priests could absolve me of all culpability for sin in the sacrament of confession, I formalized the whole obsessive cycle and called it a sacrament.
Imagine me, a fourteen-year-old boy, and a row of grandmothers wearing down their rosaries outside of the confessional on a rainy Tuesday night. I was too embarrassed to ask my mother for a ride, so I would find other reasons to leave the house and casually ask if we could swing by the church.
I’d do anything to get my fix.
My father was an anxious flier. Before he traveled on a plane, he always made a trip to confession. If his plane went down, he wanted to meet his maker with a clean slate.
Before one trip, he missed the regularly scheduled confession hour. Panicked, he accosted a young priest at the back of our church just as mass was starting. The priest didn’t know what to do as my father crossed himself and started to confess just as mass started. Even as the priest began his walk down the aisle with altar boys on either side of him, my father whispered his same bland, repetitive sins. Seemingly paralyzed by indecision, the priest offered a half-assed absolution as he neared the altar.
“The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.” Thomas Merton
My father and I shared that tendency to take a magnifying glass to every thought, to cling to rituals in the face of uncertainty. We shared the type of scrupulosity that can be helpful when you’re working your way through a to-do list or editing an Excel document but is lethal when pointed toward the great mysteries of life.
30 Days of Silence
Fifteen years later, I turned my obsession with religion into a vocation. I was thirty years old and in a novitiate program for a religious order of priests. As part of our formation, we made a thirty-day silent retreat called The Spiritual Exercises.
“Your whole lives, you’ve been told who God is,” I was told before the retreat. “This is about you finding out for yourself.”
I give myself credit for being honest and to my spiritual director — who I’ll call Alex — for being patient. Most of the men were there to discern a vocation to the religious order. Technically, I was too. But when my spiritual director asked me what I wanted out of my retreat, I blurted out: “I just want to feel okay.”
The Spiritual Exercises involve using your imagination to place yourself into scenes from the life of Christ. Each day, I engaged in five distinct meditation periods. Once a day, I met with Alex to discuss my experiences, and once a day, I attended a liturgy with the others on the retreat.
Otherwise, I kept completely silent.
My routine was to do a meditation and then journal about the meditation period. Afterward, I would walk the oceanside cliffs near the retreat house and watch the waves crash onto the rocks below or stroll a local fishing village. When I wasn’t trying, my brain was free enough to make a little bit of space for the Spirit.
The days could be intense. There were challenging moments in which I faced off against my old image of God as judge, as accountant, and as punisher, all attached like sea urchins to my anxiety. I confronted aspects of myself that once brought an immediate, urgent sense of fear. In the early days of the retreat, I faced these fears head-on and felt emboldened by those confrontations. I developed a strong sense of willingness to stick with it and “go there.”
In time, I got friendly with the quiet.
As I was starting to get into a flow, we reached the portion of the Exercises that focused on Christ’s suffering and death. When I tried to meditate on Christ’s suffering on the cross, my thoughts tightened. I was plagued with intrusive thoughts that led to feelings of deep shame. I had to do the meditation twice, and each time, I came up dry.
Before the retreat, I had never given much thought to the cross. I assumed that it meant being in a constant state of repentance or in a state of impossible suffering that I was destined to endure.
I told my spiritual director about the cycle of sin and repentance that had kept me grasping at perfection to earn God’s love. It was like a block between me and being able to pray with Christ’s suffering.
Then Alex said something that reset my retreat.
“Maybe that was your passion,” he said.
Maybe it was part of the journey, but not the last word. After all, Good Friday doesn’t last forever.
As I prayed with this, I began to see that the cross was not something that I had to accomplish. I didn’t have to find it or make a big thing of carrying it. I’d been carrying it since I was young. It was right there, in the concrete experiences of my life.
My obsessions weren’t separate from my salvation or things to get out of the way before God could get in. God could use it all if I allowed it. I began to accept my own helplessness over the whole compulsive cycle. Once I accepted it, I was able to hand it over.
I would never seek out suffering. But once I saw it for what it really was, I realized that my obsessions had taught me so much about what I don’t need.
I don’t need one hundred percent certainty. I don’t need to be in control of my relationship to God. I don’t need to grasp at God during prayer and cling to rituals to earn divine love.
Suffering shows us what we don’t need.
If I could let go and give my suffering to God, something new might happen. Something redemptive. Suffering could even lead me to my own Easter Sunday.
Since then, I have learned to accept my obsessions while also letting them go. That dance between acceptance and growth is, like the cross, a confounding paradox — one that I’ve learned to embrace rather than wrestle to the ground.
My fondest memory of the retreat was a simple moment. I didn’t have my journal, and there was no formal meditation for me to set my mind to. I was sitting in a rocking chair, looking at the ocean as the sun went down. Silence hit, and I realized that beneath all of my striving, there was a silent, steady presence just waiting for me. I was trying so hard to find it, but it was already there. After all those years of hustling for God’s love, here was a peace that could not budge, just waiting for me. Knowing it’s there, even if I can’t experience it on many days, contextualizes everything else.
I now work as a therapist. When working on anxiety, my clients and I often observe that we only worry about the things that we love. Since my retreat, I hold my spirituality very differently. I don’t pray in the same way. I no longer confess compulsively. But the truth is —and I almost feel the need to say this in a whisper — I’m still just a little bit obsessed with God.
