The other day I was watching Mohammed Amer’s new Netflix show, Mo, which I overall enjoyed, even if parts of it made me think that the “autobiographical comedy that shares a name with (and stars) its creator” genre is starting to curdle into a shtick, regardless of whether (and sometimes because) it aims for cultural specificity. I gritted my teeth through some of the more perfunctory moments (mom jokes, food jokes, race jokes), because once it stops trying to establish itself and relaxes into the plot, the series reveals an intriguing personality, delving into some dark subject matters (lean addiction, drug-related violence, illegal border crossings) without losing its soft lovable core. Even when the balance wasn’t perfect, I admired the show for going for higher stakes than the usual “will this person finally listen to their therapist” of most half-hour comedies.
Which brings me to the point of this newsletter, another Francisco Rant™: while clearly needing to see a therapist to deal with the grief over losing his father in traumatic circumstances, Mo acts like every other non-white protagonist on TV and refuses, so his Catholic girlfriend suggests he go to confession instead. The show acknowledges the absurdity of a practicing Muslim man going to confession, but sends him anyway, and Mo has a nice vulnerable chat with a priest (endearingly played by Bun B) who basically tells Mo he’s not guilty of his father’s death. This scene really irritated me, because I wanted to be in the emotional moment with Mo, but couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid the setup was—and how much TV loves to tie up the concepts of confession and therapy together, when in my mind they are completely separate.
I’d be tempted to say the show did that scene because they don’t have Catholic writers in the room, but a) I don’t know that for sure, and I’m too lazy to look it up, and b) I know a lot of Catholics who strive to portray Catholicism as a thing that makes sense in the modern world, downplaying the religious angle to make it seem cool and self-care-y, so I can 100% imagine that there was a Catholic writer in the room who pitched this scene. I’m not one of those people, though, so be warned—the moral of this essay is not “come to Mass, it’s basically hot yoga!” One of the most refreshing parts of Catholicism, in my opinion, is precisely its disconnection from our current beliefs; in a world where we’re all living our own truths, which are growing increasingly disconnected from one another (society’s really giving Tower of Babel), I feel a certain comfort in the fact that I believe in something that does not need me in order to exist or be the way it is. While I (strive to) have a personal relationship with God, my religion is not one in which I put my little touches and make it my own—there is no Francisco’s Catholicism, just Catholicism.
(That being said, my religious knowledge comes from having attended Sunday school from ages 6 to 11 and then having read a couple of books later in life, so please don’t take any of this as legit Catholic teaching but rather more as my experience of it… Church, if you’re reading this, please don’t excommunicate me if I get something wrong! I have a lot on my plate at the moment and would not be able to deal.)
To be fair to all parties, I have to say the confusion goes both ways, and to ingratiate myself with my (most likely majority) non-Catholic readers, I should start with that: I’ve also heard a lot of Catholics say you don’t need to go to therapy if you go to confession (the last time I heard that, though, was in a conversation in which someone else said that once the 5G towers were turned on, all vaccinated people would explode—which, as someone who’s vaxxed and owns a 5G phone, put me on high alert. Happy to report I have not exploded yet!)
To say you don’t need to go to therapy if you go to confession is, in my opinion, akin to saying you don’t need to go to the dentist if you go to confession: what? Sure, both therapy and confession involve telling someone else things in confidence, and yes, the fact that priests don’t charge $200/hour makes confession seem more appealing—but therapy is a medical practice! I don’t go to my therapist for his God-given power but for his university diploma; I don’t tell him my sins, or if I do, I don’t do it so he’ll grant me forgiveness—I tell him so that he can help me identify patterns of behavior and think through better ways of responding to situations that activate my trauma, leading me away from self-destructive coping mechanisms.
I think the reason some religious people think therapy is a poor man’s religious practice is because of two misconceptions:
“Only crazy people need therapy—what you need is God.” To which I say: we’re all crazy! Accept it and get help! God probably wants you to go to therapy!
“If therapy worked, people who go to therapy would be happy, and they’re not.” THERAPY IS NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE YOU HAPPY, at least on its own. Therapy is just a tool. Just because you buy a screwdriver doesn’t mean you’ve actually fixed shit around your house—you have to use the screwdriver! Yes, I also know people who have been in therapy for years and are miserable, and it’d be easy to point and say “see, therapy doesn’t work, what this person needs is to go to confession and get right with God,” but the way I see it, that person’s just not putting therapy to good use. Therapy is class, the rest of life is homework: it’s kinda useless to show up for class if you haven’t done the homework… I also know religious people who go to church every Sunday and are still miserable!
My life is far (FAR) from perfect, but I have seen a measurable change in myself over the years, and a lot of it is due to therapy. It has helped me make peace with painful things, it has helped me move on from toxic situations, and it keeps me on my toes about becoming lazy with healthy practices—and hopefully will continue to do so well into the future (another misconception: “Therapy doesn’t work because X person has been in therapy for years and they’re still not ‘cured’”—which, to go back to the dentist analogy, would be like saying brushing your teeth doesn’t work because you have to brush them every day and are still not “cured.” So many analogies in this essay!)
The fact that I go to confession regularly in no way has made me feel like therapy is pointless—quite the opposite, sometimes therapy has led me to a better confession, just like confession (and its obligation to commit to stop sinning in order to receive absolution) makes me go back to therapy, as a tool that can help me on my (long and winding) path to being a less shitty person.
Watching that scene in Mo, I was so irritated by Mo’s girlfriend suggesting he go to confession. Not because I think Mo shouldn’t turn to God (I’d be a terrible Catholic if I thought that), but because he was having a panic attack and seemed to need a trained mental professional at that moment. And, more importantly: if his girlfriend was gonna recommend a priest, it should be because she believed Mo’s problem was spiritual (which arguably it was) and needed a spiritual solution—not because confession is a place where you go to air your feelings if your culture frowns on therapy. Which brings me to the second part of the essay.
It’s not that I don’t understand why people today could only access the experience of confession by comparing it to talk therapy. Truly grappling with the nature of confession requires a belief in God as a real, existing identity—not a Santa-like legend that brings people together, not a Jimminy Cricket-like inner voice that reminds you to call your mom on her birthday. Only by believing in a God that exists outside of ourselves, has created us, and is the beginning and end of everything can we begin to understand why confession is necessary—and that’s a tall order. An even taller order is believing that such a God isn’t a super chill presence that loves us no matter what and wants us to do whatever we want; while yes, I believe God loves me no matter what, I also believe I’m only in connection with Him when I follow His law—and that when I trespass against it, there’s a real debt that is accrued. So, the way I see it, to compare confession and therapy is like comparing confession and paying your credit card bills: no.
If you think about it, that’s how it goes for most of our life: in our personal relationships, and society in general, it’s usually accepted that there are rules to interacting with each other and that, when we violate them, at the very least an apology is required, if not some form or reparation (paying for the medical bills of the person you ran over with your car, for example) or punishment (going to jail for killing someone—and I don’t have the energy to discuss the penal system so let’s just leave that there). According to Catholicism, the same logic applies to our relationship with God—even more, actually, because while it is possible to sin against God without hurting anyone else, to hurt other people is also an affront to God, as stated by Jesus in Matthew 5:21-24:
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment… So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”
Believing that I was created by God and that, because of it, I answer to Him for my behavior is why I go to confession—not to feel better about myself, or to discuss how to deal with grief, or to bitch about that friend that continues to ignore my Venmo request for tickets to the movie we saw a month ago and I don’t know how to bring it up without sounding like a selfish asshole.
“But why do you need to tell your sins to a priest? Can’t you tell them to God directly?” Good q! I kinda wish it was that simple, but Jesus closed that loophole in John 20:23 when He appeared to His apostles after the Resurrection: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” (Granted, the Church does say that our sins are forgiven, even without confession, if we have perfect repentance over them—but that, like most of our intentions, is very hard to ascertain, so off to confession we go).
In conclusion: while a priest could be terrible at interacting with people and not have anything near the skills that Bun B displayed in that scene when he helped Mo access his grief, he’d still have the God-given power to forgive sins, and that’s what he would do. He could, of course, also have gone to school for psychology or just have an innate talent for digging into people’s trauma, and you could end up having a super transformative confession in which you realize your aunt is activating harmful childhood memories when she comments on your weight, but that would be a cherry on top of an experience in which they main thing that happened is that God forgave you for calling your aunt the c-word.
None of this is to say that some people don’t treat confession like it’s therapy. If you’re a Catholic who goes to confession regularly, you know the pain of having someone in front of you who stays there for a long-ass time, and you’re like “what the fuck did you do???” and it’s usually not murder or anything like that, but more like the person won’t focus and keeps telling the whole story instead of just saying the sins (I’ve heard many a priest remind the faithful during a sermon to just stick to the facts when they go to confession).
For my part, my experience with confession is completely different from my experience with therapy—save for the parts that come from me.
For therapy,
I don’t prepare in advance, other than sometimes thinking “I should bring this up in therapy” and then totally forgetting to do so;
I talk the whole time and barely make room for my therapist to say anything until he forcibly stops me and, because I say pretty much the same things every time, has to find new ways to encourage me to not be a stupid bitch;
In the end, I (hopefully) walk away with an enhanced understanding of my behavior and some tools to try to change the outcome of repeating situations.
While, for confession,
I have to do an examination of conscience in advance (which I’ve started doing every night to avoid having to spend too much time on it day of) in which I list all my sins;
I talk half of the time, listing my sins and their respective quantities in order of gravity (I go worst ones first, to rip the band-aid off) and only providing more context if it feels necessary to understand their gravity (or lack of);
The priest talks the other half, asking any follow up questions or, because I say pretty much say the same things every time, finding new ways to tell me to stop being a piece of shit, to which I nod in a way that communicates “I never said I wasn’t, but I’ll try to stop;”
Then I say my act of contrition (your sins can’t be forgiven if you don’t regret them and you’re not committed to stop doing them, at least in that moment) while the priest says the absolution, effectively forgiving me;
In the end, I walk away with a penance, which is how I am to offer reparation for my sins. (Sidenote: In olden times, penances would be these big things like doing a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but at some point the Church softened and started handing out prayers instead—you know you did some bad shit when the priest is like “A WHOLE ROSARY.” I wonder if this was a mistake? Maybe we’d all stop doing bad things if we knew what was waiting for us on the other side was an international pilgrimage… or, most likely, we just wouldn’t go to confession anymore, which might be the reason the Church softened).
“Okay, Francisco, but why did we have to hear about this? If you’re so confident that these are separate things, why does it bother you that other people confuse them? We signed up for this newsletter for the short stories. Then you made it into recommendations and we were like ‘uh, okay, let’s see where it goes.’ Now it’s not even recommendations anymore, it’s just you talking about random shit!” Okay listen, you uncultured brutes: no one forces you to read my newsletter. And if I felt compelled to write about this, it’s because, I don’t know, it bothers me that people wouldn’t seek the spiritual or medical help they need because they’ve been told to seek it in the wrong places. I joined a twelve-step group a year ago (another tool!) and I hate it when people in the rooms say “I tried religion and it didn’t work” or “I tried therapy and it didn’t work.” It’s not either-or, guys! Abundance! Everything has its purpose!
So, what I’m basically saying is: hire me to write my own autobiographical comedy that is named after me and in which I star, and I will give TV the accurate depiction of confession it so sorely needs.