What is general confession? How do you prepare for general confession? Prayer before confession and communion. Sins, repentance and forgiveness.
Confession is one of the seven Sacraments of the Church . According to the Orthodox Catechism, this is a sacred action, thanks to which grace, the saving power of God, secretly acts on a person. The sacrament is a gift not for merit, but out of the love of the Lord. Grace operates throughout the world, but works with special power through the Church with the goal of strengthening the believer on the path to God. For this reason, only believing Christians baptized in the Church are allowed to confess .
What is confession?
Confession is the Sacrament of Repentance, in which the visible forgiveness of sins by the priest invisibly comes from the Lord. Confession cleanses the soul from sin.
Preparation for general confession
Unlike other Sacraments, preparation for confession does not require formalities . It can happen anywhere at any time. The only mandatory condition is the presence of an Orthodox priest .
An Orthodox priest makes a general confession in church, at home, or in a hospital.
To confess, a person is not required to fast or special prayers. Preparation consists of thinking about your own life, analyzing your actions and deeds from the point of view of God's commandments . It is allowed to write down sins so as not to miss something during the Sacrament.
You can pray to the Lord for the forgiveness of sins and the granting of repentance . When you feel ready, you can ask the priest to conduct a general confession.
The need for confession on the eve of Easter
The last week before Easter Sunday is a period when every day is important. All seven days are associated with the events of suffering and the miraculous resurrection of the Son of God. The milestones of the torment and the miracle are described in the Gospel written by the Apostle Luke in the books of the New Testament.
An Orthodox believer who wants to prepare for a new period - the liturgical year, before the main church holiday, strives to go through and empathize with the restrictions and torments of the messenger of the Lord God. A Christian must observe strict fasting for four decades, denying himself bodily and spiritual pleasures. Thus, he seeks to repeat the path of Christ, who fasted in the desert. The result of abstinence is Holy Week, when one should not only cleanse the body, but also the soul in confession.
General confession in church
Although repentance can be done in any setting , if there are no special circumstances, they go to church for confession . You can confess during the service or ask the priest to schedule a special time.
To conduct the Sacrament of Repentance for a sick person, an individual agreement must be made with the clergyman.
Typically, general confession is performed before the Divine Liturgy , during it, or before communion . If there is a large influx of believers, a special time may be appointed. It is better to clarify it in advance.
How to confess in church
Usually the priest confesses in front of a lectern on the sole, in the aisles or in the narthex . The parishioners stand one after another at some distance in front of the lectern, without interfering with someone else's confession.
You need to stand quietly, lamenting your sins and approach the priest in order.
Before the lectern they bow their heads or, if desired, kneel . Kneeling is canceled on Sundays, from Easter to the Holy Trinity, and on major holidays. The priest covers the penitent's head with an epitrachelion, asks his name and what he wishes to confess.
A person must name his most characteristic passions and shortcomings, as an awareness of general sinfulness, and also repent for especially serious sins, which may include insulting loved ones, blasphemy, and failure to keep the commandments.
The priest can ask questions, at the end of confession he gives instructions and prays for the forgiveness of the sins of the penitent .
A prayer of permission is read when a person’s sincere repentance and desire for correction are obvious. After reading it, it is believed that the Sacrament is completed and sins are forgiven by God.
The repentant sinner is baptized, kisses the cross, the Gospel and takes the blessing.
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh ABOUT CONFESSIONSpeaking about repentance, I only touched on confession, but the question of confession is so important that I want to dwell on it in more detail and in depth.
Confession
it happens in two ways. There is a personal, private confession, when a person approaches a priest and opens his soul to God in his presence. And there is a general confession, when people come together in a large or small group, and the priest pronounces confession for everyone, including himself. I want to dwell first on the private confession and draw your attention to this.
A person confesses to God. The teaching that the priest pronounces before the confession of an individual says: “Behold, child, Christ stands invisibly, receiving your confession; I am only a witness.” This must be remembered: we are not confessing to a priest and he is not our judge. I would say more: even Christ at this moment is not our Judge, but is our compassionate Savior. This is very, very important, because when we come to confession
, we are in the presence of a witness. But what kind of witness is this, what is his role?
There are different types of witnesses. For example: there was an accident on the road. Some man stood by the road and saw what happened; they ask him what happened. He doesn’t care at all who is right and who is wrong, he simply says: I saw such and such... There is another type of witness - in court: one testifies against the defendant, the other in his favor. This is a completely different position, and the priest partially corresponds to this, because he stands before Christ and says: “Lord, he came to You in repentance - accept him!” If I feel sorry for him, then, of course, you feel sorry for him much more than I do. I can’t save him, I can share something with him, help him with something, but you
you can transform it.”
And there is a third kind of witness. When a marriage takes place, the closest person is invited. He is the one who in the Gospel is called “the groom’s friend” (in our practice one could also say “the bride’s friend”). This is the person closest to the bride and groom who can share with them in the fullest way the joy of a transformative meeting, a connecting miracle.
And so the priest takes this position: he is a friend of the Bridegroom, a friend of Christ, he brings the repentant to the Bridegroom-Christ. He is the one who is so deeply connected by love with the penitent that he is ready to share his tragedy with him and lead him to salvation. And when I say “sharing his tragedy,” I’m talking about something very, very serious. I remember one ascetic who was once asked: “How is it that every person who comes to you and talks about his life, even without a feeling of repentance or regret, suddenly becomes overwhelmed with horror at how sinful he is, and begins to repent and confess? , cry - and change? And this ascetic gave a wonderful answer. He said: “When a person comes to me with his sin, I perceive this sin as mine.
. This person and I are one; those sins that he committed by action, I certainly committed by thought or desire, or inclination. Therefore, I experience his confession as my own, I (as he said) go step by step into the depths of his darkness, and when I have reached the very depths, I connect his soul with my soul and repent with all the strength of my soul for the sins that he professes and which I recognize as mine. And then he is overwhelmed by my repentance and cannot help but repent, and comes out freed; and I repented of my sins in a new way, because I am united with him in compassion and love.”
This is the ultimate example of how a priest can approach the repentance of another person, how he can be a friend of the groom
how can he be the one who leads the repentant to salvation. But for this, the priest must learn compassion, must learn to feel and recognize himself as one with the penitent.
And when pronouncing the words of the prayer of permission, the priest either precedes them with instructions or not. And this also requires honesty and attention. Sometimes it happens that a priest is listening to a confession, and suddenly it is clearly revealed to him, as if from God, from the Holy Spirit, what he should say to the penitent. It may seem to him that this is not relevant, but he must obey this voice of God and say these words, say what God has put on his soul, heart and mind. And if he does this, even when it does not seem to relate to the confession that the penitent brought, he says what the penitent needs.
Sometimes the priest does not have the feeling that these words are from God. (You know, in the letters of the Apostle Paul there are places where he writes: “This I say to you in the name of God, the name of Christ...”, or “This I tell you from myself...”). But this does not mean that then the priest’s words are “gag”; this is what he learned from personal experience, and he shares this experience - the experience of sinfulness, the experience of repentance and what other people, purer, more worthy than himself, taught him.
And sometimes even this is not the case. Then you can say: “This is what I read from the holy fathers, I read in the Holy Scriptures. I can offer this to you, take it into account, think about it, and maybe through these words of Divine Scripture God will tell you what I cannot say.”
And sometimes an honest priest must say: “I was with you with all my heart during your confession, but I can’t tell you anything about it. I will pray for you, but I can’t give you advice.” And we have an example of this. The life of St. Ambrose of Optina describes two cases of how people came to him, opened their souls, their need, and he kept them for three days without an answer. And when finally he was urgently asked for an answer, he said: “What can I answer? For three days now I have been praying to the Mother of God to enlighten me and give me an answer. She is silent; how can I speak without Her grace?”
This is what I wanted to say about private, personal confession. A person must come and pour out his soul. Do not repeat other people’s words while looking at a book, but ask yourself a question: if I now stood in the face of Christ the Savior and all the people who know me, what would be a subject of shame for me? that I’m not ready to open up to everyone, because it would be too scary to be seen as how I see myself?.. This is what I need to confess. Ask yourself a question: if my wife, my children, my closest friend, my co-workers knew this or that about me, would I be ashamed or not? If you are ashamed, confess. If this or that is embarrassing to reveal to God (Who already knows it, but from Whom I try to hide it) or would be scary, reveal it to God. Because the moment you open it, everything that is put into light becomes light. And then you can confess and say your
confession, and not a stereotyped, alien, empty, meaningless confession.
And if we are talking about children, we must remember that children cannot be forced to confess a confession that is not their own confession. You can’t tell them: “Remember that you made me angry because you did something wrong in this, so repent of it.” We must give the child the freedom to stand before God as a friend, and share his whole life and soul with Him, even his pain about his parents, even how hard he sometimes experiences them.
And now I want to say briefly about general confession. General confession can be pronounced in different ways. It is usually pronounced like this: people gather, the priest gives some kind of introductory sermon and then reads from a book as many of the sins as possible that he expects from those present. This list may be formal. How many times have I heard: “I didn’t read the morning and evening prayers”, “I didn’t read the canons”, “I didn’t keep fasts”, I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that... It’s all formal. Yes, this is not formal in the sense that these are the real sins of some people, maybe even the priest himself, but these are not necessarily the real sins of these people; real sins are different.
I will tell you how I conduct general confession myself. We have general confession four times a year. Before confession, I conduct two conversations that are aimed at understanding what confession is, what sin is, what God’s truth is, what life in Christ is. Each conversation lasts forty-five minutes, all those gathered sit and listen, then there is a half-hour silence, during which everyone must think through what they heard, look at their soul and think about their sinfulness. And then there is a general confession. We gather in the middle of the church, I put on the stole, the Gospel is in front of us, and I usually read the Canon of Penitence
Lord Jesus Christ. And under the influence of the canon, I pronounce my own confession out loud - not about formalities, but about what my conscience reproaches me for and what the canon I read reveals to me. Each confession is different, because each time the words of this canon convict me in a different way, in a different way, and I repent before all people, I call things in my own language, in my own name. Not so that they would then go around reproaching me specifically for this or that sin, but so that each sin would be revealed to people as my own. And if, while making a confession, I do not feel that I truly repent, I also say this as a confession: “Forgive me, Lord! So, I said these words, but they didn’t reach my soul”... This confession usually lasts thirty to forty minutes, depending on what I can confess to people. And at the same time people confess - silently, and sometimes saying out loud: “Yes, Lord! Forgive me and it’s my fault!” But this is my personal confession. And unfortunately, I am so sinful and so similar to everyone who is present at this action that my words reveal to people their own sinfulness.
After this we pray. We read part of the penitential canon, read prayers before Holy Communion (not all, but selected ones, which relate to what I spoke about or how I confessed). Then everyone kneels and I say a prayer of permission to everyone. If someone considers it necessary to come up later and speak separately about this or that sin, he can freely do so. But I know from experience that such general confession teaches people to make private confession. Many people told me at first: “I don’t know what to come to confession with. I know that I have sinned against many of Christ’s commandments, I have done a lot of bad things, but I cannot, as it were, put this together into a repentant confession.” And after such a general confession, people come and say: “Now I know, I have learned how to confess my own soul, relying on the prayers of the Church, relying on the canon of repentance, relying on how you yourself confessed your soul and how people around me confessed the same the confession itself was perceived and brought as if it were one’s own.” I think this is a very important point: for general confession to be a lesson on how to confess personally, and not “in general.”
Sometimes people come and read out a long list of sins - which I know from the list, because I have the same books that they have. And I stop them, I say: “You are not confessing your sins, you are confessing sins that can be found in the nomocanon, in prayer books. I need yours
confession, or rather, Christ needs your personal repentance, and not a general stereotyped repentance. You cannot feel that you are condemned by God to eternal torment because you did not read the evening prayers or did not read the canons, or did not fast properly.”
Moreover, sometimes it happens that a person tries, for example, to fast, and then breaks down and feels that he has desecrated his entire fast, that nothing remains of his feat. But in fact, God looks at it with completely different eyes. I can explain this to you with one example from my own life. When I was a doctor, I took care of a poor Russian family. I didn’t take money from them because they didn’t have any money. But somehow at the end of Great Lent, during which I fasted, so to speak, “brutally,” that is, without violating any statutory rules, they invited me to dinner, and it turned out that for some time they Due to the lack of money, they collected pennies to buy a small chicken and treat me. I looked at this chicken and saw in it the end of my Lenten feat. Of course, I ate a piece of chicken - I couldn’t insult them by refusing; but then I went to my spiritual father and said: “You know, Father Afanasy, such a tragedy happened to me! Throughout Lent, I could say I fasted perfectly, and now, on Holy Week, I ate a piece of chicken.” Father Afanasy looked at me and said: “You know, if God looked at you and saw that you have no sins, and that a piece of chicken could defile you, He would protect you from this; but He looked and saw so much sinfulness in you that no chicken could defile you.” I think many of us can remember this example for being honest, truthful people, and not just sticking to the rules. Yes, I ate a piece of this chicken, but the question was that I ate it in order not to upset people. I ate it not as some kind of filth, but as a gift of human love. There is a place in the writings of Father Alexander Schmemann where he says: everything in the world is nothing other than God’s love; and even the food that we eat is Divine love that has become edible...
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Can a priest refuse to accept confession?
Apostolic Canons (52nd canon) “If anyone, a bishop or presbyter, does not accept someone converted from sin, let him be expelled from the sacred rank. For [he] grieves Christ, who said: There is joy in heaven over one repentant sinner (Luke 15:7).”
You can refuse confession if, in fact, there is none. If a person does not repent, does not consider himself guilty of his sins, does not want to be reconciled with his neighbors. Also, those who are not baptized and excommunicated from church communion cannot receive absolution from sins.
There are also several other reasons: Penitents who cannot be resolved.
Are all sins forgiven in the Sacrament of Repentance, or only those named?
In the Sacrament all sins are forgiven, with the exception of those intentionally hidden. If you forgot to name some minor sin, then don’t worry. The sacrament is called the Sacrament of Repentance, and not the “Sacrament of listing all sins committed.”
Let’s read the priest’s prayer of permission after confession: “May the Lord and our God, Jesus Christ, by the grace and generosity of His love for mankind forgive your child (name) all your sins. And I, unworthy priest, by His power given to me, forgive and absolve you from all your sins , in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen".
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev: ...if a person does not consciously hide his sins, if confession is brought to him sincerely, sincerely, with the intention of correction, all sins are forgiven to him: both those that he named, and those that he forgot about, and those that he himself doesn't notice to himself. Once, at a lecture at the Moscow Theological Seminary, I expressed this idea - that sins in confession are either all forgiven, or all are not forgiven, but the third (that is, some kind of partial, incomplete forgiveness) is not given. One seminarian objected to me very sharply, saying that he would “raise the works of all the Holy Fathers” to prove the opposite, namely, that only sins mentioned in confession are forgiven. He worked in the library for six months, and then came to me and said: “You were right: all sins are forgiven.” But, as has already been said, the condition for complete forgiveness is open-heartedness and sincerity of confession, the determination to improve and start a new life. If a person conceals his sins during confession, or if his entire confession is reduced to an empty formality, or if he speaks only about the sins of other people, then the sacrament is profaned. In other words, in this case the Sacrament does not occur at all, because that change of mind that should accompany confession does not occur in a person. (Source).
Days of Lent when you can receive communion
Parishioners can receive communion on any day of Lent, when the Divine Liturgy is held, which is held daily. The clergy celebrate certain days of the week and tell what services are held:
- Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – the main worship service;
- Wednesday and Friday – the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is held;
- Saturday – the memory of John Chrysostom is honored;
- Sunday – remember St. Basil the Great.
It is noted that on the day of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, children who do not eat solid food are not given communion.
Rules for preparing for Communion
To properly prepare for the Sacrament of Communion, it is enough to fulfill only a few requirements:
- adhere to fasting;
- strengthen the prayer rules, which consist of several stages.
Stages of prayer preparation
- Three canons and reading of the akathist.
- Canon and prayer service before Communion itself.
What rights does a priest have to impose penance on a penitent?
Canon 102 of the Trullo Council requires that penance be assigned for the period during which the confessor could monitor this spiritual child. If a Christian has received penance beyond his strength and cannot bear it, then he should turn to the bishop for permission from the penance.
The opinion that any priest can release penance imposed by another priest is contrary to church law. Only the bishop has such power. No one else can permit what is forbidden except the one who forbade it, except in cases of death of the one who forbade it, as well as the fatal illness of the penitent.
Over those who have completed penance, the “Prayer over those who are permitted from prohibition” is read, by which he is freed from it and introduced into communion with the Church.
***
After Confession, how often did you thank God for forgiving your sins? ...But this is such a gift! The Lord gave forgiveness of sins to man just like that, for free, and we say”: “He should do so, he must do so.” It is not right. We must be grateful for everything. priest Daniil Sysoev
They say to a person: “Go to confession,” and he replies: “Why go, I’ll still sin. What is the point…? This is no longer the norm, it is a spiritual anomaly, when a person sits in sin and does not want to leave it. This is a very detrimental state of a person’s soul, a dislocation in his outlook on life. It is possible that the sinner thus justifies his attachment to sin. Life in sin suits such a person, therefore, from an intellectual point of view, he justifies his sinful actions. That is why the Holy Fathers called our mind a false mind. Those. he is called to see the truth, called to strive for it, but is so entangled in the spiritual sense by passions that he follows the lead of vice, sin, which lives in the spirit. And he justifies his sins even with theological reasoning. Archbishop of Polotsk and Glubokoe Theodosius
History of the sacrament
The first mention of the confessional procedure is found in the Old Testament. Cain went through it in order to repent of the committed crime, cleanse his soul and continue to live in harmony with himself, in harmony with the world. In the New Testament, Christians receive communion before Easter and every time they turn to the Almighty in prayer. In the writings of the evangelist St. Levi Matthew, it is said that whoever offended any person had to repent of his deed before the humiliated one.
The Holy Scriptures say that Christ ordered his disciples to serve the laity as spiritual mentors, helping them get rid of vices. The role of the apostles was taken over by the ministers of the church. Today, priests act as guides in communication with God, who is the healer of souls.
