A Complete Confession and Transformation

As we go about our day, most of us are not aware of an ultimate unity, a connectedness with God and other human beings. Instead, we’re preoccupied with our own plans and designs, our own hopes and fears. But if we are free of psychic clutter as a result of a deep confession, the ferreting out and release of unexamined or unconscious material in our psyche, and take a moment to get still, with nothing going on, we come to realize our connection with all humanity. We can see that there is no essential difference between us and our fellow human beings. We are all irrefutably a part of God, and love flows between us and other human beings as freely as blood flows in our veins. We then discover our “true”selves, the selves with neither body nor consciousness, the selves that exist as beginess, the selves we seldom stop to notice. Missing that experience in our daily lives is, however, merely a consequence of being human.

Not only does becoming clutter-free through confession lead to personal transformation, it can also lead to transformation on a global level. We have all seen or know about major shifts in public awareness, such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States or the formation of the United Nations, both with enormous ramifications. If you are familiar with the controversial principle of social change known as the Hundredth Monkey, in which it is purported that when one person knows something, that something is the property of that one individual, but when that something is passed forward to a critical mass of other individuals, then it becomes the property of the larger society. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell documents how a seemingly innocuous and often counterintuitive action can cause a social behavior, trend or idea to tip and “spread like wildfire.” Nevertheless, new concepts do enter the common language in only a decade or two, and wholesale changes to society do take place, such as the lowering of the crime rate in New York by cleaning up graffiti in the suburbs and stopping fare-beaters in the subways.

As each one of us confesses, we make way for the next person, until we reach that point of critical mass. For Christians, that point might even bring about the Second Coming. God Calling, (Russell, Jove Books) the writings of two anonymous women who in 1932 came together looking for a closer connection to God, speaks to that possibility. Reportedly, one woman heard the voice of Jesus Christ, and the other recorded what the first one communicated hearing. She reported Jesus as saying

I do not delay my second coming. My followers delay it.
If each lived for Me, by Me, in Me, allowing Me to live in him, to use him to express the Divine through him, as I expressed it when on earth, then long ago the world would have been drawn to Me, and I should have come to claim them as My own (November 5).

Those of us who are Christians may be moved by the above to confess the error of leaning on our own understanding[s], [Pr. 3] followed by a re-commitment of ourselves to Christ, trusting what is widely called a “vertical relationship” that is, a “one on one relationship with him,” living in him and allowing the divine energy to flow through us to the outside world – just allowing his energy to flow, without having to force anything, or to compel anyone to receive it. For in the Gospel of John, we find: “Then true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” [John 4] Today, we might interpret “in spirit and in truth” as “in oneness with a confessing heart.”
– Excerpted from Confession is Good for More than the Soul
www.confessionisgood.com
Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD, author, most recently of Confession is Good for More than the Soul. “Confession is like a damp cloth for the chalkboard of our psyche.” Speaker, trainer, workshop leader, community activist and wedding officiant. www.lesliereynoldsbenns.com.