Catholic Priest As Garbage Man
The Roman Catholic priest in the confessional Takes Your Spiritual Garbage
The Catholic priest, persona Christi and Milos Christi, in the confessional is a spiritual garbage man.
He takes your spiritual trash, dumps it at the foot of the crucified Christ on the cross, gives absolution through Christ and by the grace of his vocation; later, when you see him again, the priest has no memory of what you’ve said.
In the spirit of Psalm 103:12 the priest’s graced absolution of you and your sins in the confessional is like that of the Lord, as God states here:
“As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.”
כִּרְחֹ֣ק מִ֭זְרָח מִֽמַּעֲרָ֑ב הִֽרְחִ֥יק מִ֝מֶּ֗נּוּ אֶת־פְּשָׁעֵֽינוּ׃
And that’s a good thing, too - because who wants to be reminded by their confessor of their worst day and worst sin? Or, their habitual sin by the priest before communion, at the parish picnic, or just after mass?
“Hey, you’re that chronic liar, right?” “You’re the woman who de-frauded her family in the will! Phew, glad we got that straightened out!” “You’re the FBI agent who put that guy in prison on false grounds! Wow. That’s gotta be tough to live with!” “You’re the politician who voted YES on the war in Iraq?”
priest & garbage man: no memory of spiritual trash or trash, respectively.
Imagine a scenario with your garbage man where you ask:
“Good morning, Can ya’ give me a forensic account of my trash on the worst day of my life when I cheated on my wife, here at the house with that hooker five years ago – before I saved my marriage?!
Your ashen-faced garbage man in shock replies:
“Sir, I have no idea! I pull up to the curb in this neighborhood each Monday and take your trash to the garbage dump; I do that every day, Monday to Saturday, with thousands of customers. Sir, I have NO idea what’s IN your trash.”
The priest has no recollection of your or other parishioners’ sins either; just as the neighborhood garbage man has 0 memory of your and other customers’ trash.
And let’s be clear spiritual garbage smells JUST AS BAD as actual garbage. Maybe even worse.
When my best Danish friend Vibeke Sestrup, my Båring* Folkehøjskole classmate, visited New York City there had been a garbage men’s union strike.
Trash was ceiling high at the subway and it smelled wretched! I was deeply embarrassed and told her, “It’s NOT usually like this!”
(That was the 90’s).
Ever walked behind the alley of a restaurant, bar, or even a swanky neighborhood with grassy drives - at the end of a long weekend?
The garbage is bag after bag of a steaming pile of refuse, rotted vegetables, dirty, wet, slimy refuse hundreds of people, families, restaurant owners have thrown away.
Your sin - my sin - our spiritual sin smells worse.
Probably we don’t even notice the smell. Others can. Others do.
Deo Gratis for the milos christi or persona christi Roman Catholic priest who listens to all your sins and literally takes it away -wretched smell and all.
confessional as hockey penalty box
The Roman Catholic sacrament of confession within a confessional box is the equivalent of hockey’s penalty box.
The confessional is where you go to confess whatever sin separates you from G-d - and your friend or spouse, family member, co-worker.
Who’s God?
God is Love. Deus Caritas Est.
Whatever your sin: pride, gluttony, sloth, infidelity, sleeping around, lying, stealing, cheating, committing adultery, murdering, de-frauding, mocking another, inciting violence or war — it’s all a means to separate you from God and to separate you from your essential good - and from others.
Whatever the sin, it’s a means to separate you from the “little l” love of the person you transgressed — and also the Big L love of God, who is Love Itself.
After the confession comes the absolution, the reconciliation, your avowal “to sin no more,” in this manner again, and your prayerful penance.
Then, you’re “back on the ice,” and back in the game of Life and love.
Your sin, until it’s confessed in the confessional, “the penalty box,” as it were, has kept you “off the ice” and out of play.
In that unconfessed state, your team— the church, family, friends, colleagues et al are playing without you — playing one man down on life’s field.
[Catholic Answers, started by a lawyer (so that’s got to be a good thing) has informed, concise answers about the rich Catholic tradition – plus they employ a deep, wide, high sense of humor, an essential weapon of truth against the slings and arrows of spiritual warfare. For the difference between mortal and venial sins, check out this Catholic Answers article]
Man as priest; Priest as interlocutor; It’s NOT natural - It’s supernatural
The priest’s calling to serve others and the Church is not natural.
It’s super-natural.
The priest walks in the steps of Catholics’ spiritual ancestor written in what Catholics call the Old Testament and what Jews call the Torah.
The priest inherits the role of the Jewish teacher, or sage: first Abraham, then Moses and others who acted as an interlocutor between G-d and His Chosen people.+
To the sage, later called a Rabbi, G-d was revealed as, and then called, YHWH, Yahweh, יְהוָ֔ה and then other titles to reflect G-d’s profound essence.++
The Catholic priest’s authority to be interlocutor+++ between man and G-d comes from the Lord Jesus Christ in John 20: 21-23:
“ Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.+++
It’s NOT because the Vatican says he is an intermediary as to one’s sin.
Rather, it’s because G-d says the Roman Catholic priest, persona Christi, can.
[As my friend Fr. Alan Benander, o praem, says, “If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with G-d.”]
Roman Catholic priest Father Frank Amberger, of Ohio, has talked about how his vocare as priest dovetailed with his childhood wish to be a garbage man.
He’s why I have the metaphor in the first place.++++
Fr. Amberger works in beautiful Southwestern Ohio’s Brown County along the Kentucky border, renowned for its rich Catholic history and stunning geography in Southwestern Ohio.
The Brown County Catholic website tells how God fulfilled his childhood wish:
“After completing his year of graduate school, he entered seminary and was ordained in 1996. Fr. Amberger humorously reflects on how God brought his journey full circle—calling him from a childhood dream of being a “physical garbage man” to a “spiritual garbage man,” removing sin through the Sacrament of Penance. “God has a perfect sense of humor!”
Walk into a Catholic church or Cathedral, and you’ll see wooden empaneled confessionals built within the church’s side or back walls.
When I watch a Catholic priest enter the confessional wearing his purple penitential stole I imagine I can a faint familiar sound of a garbage truck backed in reverse as its driver picks up the trash.
(Purple is the Catholic liturgical and religious symbol of mercy.).
That’s the good Catholic priest. He takes away your spiritual trash.
A last thought:
Two of the best days in an ordinary Catholic’s life:
1. Any day he or she stands in a confessional line to dump his, or her, spiritual garbage whether cardinal sins that led to death: murder, rape, manslaughter or venial sins: lying, being mean, acedia, sloth, gluttony that besmirch one.
and
2. Any morning a Catholic wakes up, praises God, and says, “Yes!” to whatever God asks; called the Heroic Moment by Opus Dei I write of it here.
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NOTES
+ In Exodus 3:14, God said to Moses, "Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I will be what I will be)," and He said, "So shall you say to the children of Israel, 'Ehyeh (I will be) has sent me to you.'" and in Hebrew,
ידוַיֹּ֤אמֶר אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶל־משֶׁ֔ה אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה וַיֹּ֗אמֶר
כֹּ֤ה תֹאמַר֙ לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֲלֵיכֶֽם:
++”with El are unique to Genesis: El Olam (God the Everlasting One), El Bethel (God Bethel), and El Roʾi (God of Vision). An additional peculiarity of the patriarchal stories is their use of the phrase “God of my [your, his] father.” According to Brittanica online here
+++and cross referenced in Matthew 16: 18-19 to Peter, and by him, to the twelve disciples who are persona Christi: “And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” And in Matthew 18:18 : “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
++++In 2001, we had been sitting outside a north Chicago 3 day Catholic conference on John Paul II's Theology of the Body instruction, which you can find here on the Vatican's website.
We Catholics have schools, including West’s, dedicated to the goodness of human sexuality – at the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC as well as as well as Christopher West's school called Theology of the Body Institute
As interpreted by Dr. Christopher West, PhD, we were learning, in detail, the natural, wholesome, biblical Catholic anthropology of marriage, sexuality and love in a 3-day conference entitled “Naked Without Shame,” a nod to Adam and Eve in Genesis who walked and worked with God in the Garden without shame in their nakedness and spiritual purity.
Myself, then Vincent Benander and now priest Fr. Alan Benander, o praem., were looking for very good teaching, insight, philosophical understanding, and biblical, catechetical teachings and teaching strategies on sex, sexuality, love, and marriage.
In the hallway, before the next talk we were sharing our stories of conversion, faith, and vocation. “I always wanted to be a garbage man when I was a kid – and now I am,” explained Catholic priest Father Frank Amberger to then Vincent Benander and (now) Fr. Alan Benander, o. praem (who discusses Catholicism and sports, specifically, baseball in the video below) and us, the freelance writer and book author at carolthecatholic.substack.com
Theology of the Body, John Paul II
“Theology of the Body is the term used to describe the teaching of Pope John Paul about the human. person and human sexuality given during his Wednesday Catechesis in St. Peter’s Square between September 5, 1979, and November 28, 1984. John Paul II says that this catechesis could be called “Human Love in the Divine Plan” or “The Redemption of the Body and the Sacramentality of Marriage.” Before Michael Waldstein’s rediscovery of the original Polish manuscript and notes, there were various framings of the structure of the TOB. Waldstein has helped us see what was in Wojytla’s mind,” writes Father Roger J. Landry Espirito Santa Parish, Fall River, MA in his cliff notes on Theology of the Body, updated 2014.
*Pronounced Boring the school lay near Middlefart - pronounced exactly as is; Danish movies conclude? One sees SLUT, or “END” in big bold letters.
Language, is hilarious. I digress.