Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 1
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The Art of the Confessor: A Conversation with Rev. Michael Prieur / Matthew Ryan Smith
Matthew Ryan Smith (MRS): I encountered your seminar course the "Art of the Confessor" during my research on confessional art and culture which led me to you.
Rev. Michael R. Prieur (MP): I've been teaching that seminar for almost forty years, and getting students ready for hearing confessions when they're in ministry.
MRS: Much of the artwork I research engages with a sort of materialized confession, and much of so-called "confessional art" often references distressing subject matter: disease, sexual abuse, murder, and other occasions of trauma. For instance, I think here of the American artist Hannah Wilke, who was diagnosed with lymphoma and photographed herself throughout the stages of her illness-she passed away in 1993. You have over fifty years of experience in the confession [the sacrament of reconciliation] as a subject area of moral theology?
MP: Yes, teaching, and how to hear confessions, and how to help people make an experience, a change of heart, and a change in their life; to bring it out and talk about it, to grow and experience God's forgiveness, and what that does.
MRS: What does confession mean for you, exactly?
MP: First of all, I'm a Catholic priest. The word in the tradition has two meanings. When you say I confess it can mean: I 'bless' or I 'praise God.' So a confessor of the faith is a witness to the faith. That's in the tradition, there's a whole category of people called confessors. People who witness the faith with their life, lives, try to show people what God wanted them to do, wanting to be like Jesus Christ. "I confess" also means I confess my sins or my thoughts. I go to you, or a priest, or a counsellor, and I admit what I've done wrong or what I need to grow in. It has two meanings, I bless and I praise, or I admit my guilt. That's the word: "I confess." And therefore, confession, and the way the church has handled guilt, has been very interesting. There has been public penance…
MRS: I wanted to ask you about the difference between confession and penance.
MP: Yes, well, this whole development in the church is very interesting because if you committed a murder, say in the early church, you would have to talk to the Bishop, and it would be known. But the Bishop would also handle you as a member of the community saying, this [act] was terrible, and you would have to do some kind of public penance. You would be enrolled in the early church in what was called "The Order of Penitents." And you might do penance from anywhere from Lent (forty days) or a more rigorous one up to five years. Then you went through various stages in five years of penance. They took this very seriously.
MRS: Of course.
MP: Murder or denying your faith, burning incense to the emperor, say, but that was wrong, you don't burn incense to anyone except God. And especially if you spent five years becoming a Christian, and years down the line, to hear you're burning incense downtown. "Ya, but you know, they don't really believe in their gods, I'm just doing it externally but inside I still believe." Oh no. The inside and outside have to correspond. For big sins you had to do this public penance, sometimes it meant wearing rough clothes, sack cloth, ashes which meant your life is a mess, not taking a bath…
MRS: What would be the approximate dates for this?
MP: Roughly, 200-600 AD. This was the period where this was the regular practice, and you were enrolled in these orders of penitents. On Sunday you would appear outside the church asking people to pray for you. As you go through the stages, you were allowed in for the first part of mass, the first reading of the gospel. Then you would have to leave, have people pray for you, that you would have a change of heart. That's what they were working on, and then on Holy Thursday, in the morning, the Bishop would be there in the church and there would be a ceremony where you would lie on the floor and he would say prayers over you. You'd kneel down and put his hands on your head implying the Holy Spirit coming to you. And then you were reconciled in the morning and you were sent home for a bath to get ready for Holy Thursday night when you went back for the celebration of the last supper. Your reconciliation was in the morning, and then in the evening you would celebrate the Eucharist and you were allowed to go to communion for the first time because you weren't allowed to while you were doing this public penance. And by the way, this was patterned on baptism. When people became a Christian, they had to go through this process, I don't know about you, are you?
MRS: Baptized Anglican, as a newborn however.
MP: Well, baptism, even to this day, is a process. You go through a process called RCIA (the Right of Christian Initiation of Adults). To this day, it's called that. And that's what they did in the early church. Now, they modelled penance on that. They used the word 'being forgiven' again. It's like the second plank after the shipwreck of sin, the first plank was baptism; rescuing us from our sins. The second plank came through reconciliation. You could only do this once in a lifetime, this public penance. After that, if you started burning incense again, "hello! You're in the hands of God, you aren't very consistent, you'll have to work this out with God. We can't do this again." So you see, that was the public penance, but people were delaying doing this, they delayed it until their death beds. It was just too severe. But they found another way of getting their sins forgiven. The monasteries had something going. The monasteries, the monks could go to the abbot and confess their sins or their faults. And the abbot would give them a penance to do, and they were given a kind of forgiveness or reconciliation and they could carry on. The people living around the monasteries started doing that, "we could start going to the abbot. And we'll talk to him and he can give us forgiveness and give us a new beginning." So they were bypassing the official solemn penance of the one on one. And St. Patrick picked up on that when he was in Marseilles, he brought it back to Ireland and then it went over to continental Europe, and then that started in 600AD. By 800AD you have the two of them side by side. You have the public penance and this one on one, and you can go more than once, more than once, you've got the two of them going side by side. Eventually, the solemn penance just fell out of use and we got into the individual confession, one on one, go into the priest, and you know, confessing your sins, and then getting a penance, and then even during your penance after you went to confession. In the solemn penance, you did your penance then you were reconciled, you to go communion. You went to the priest one-on-one and he would absolve you. And then he would give you your penance, and then away you go. Bishop of Oxford Kenneth Escott Kirk writes of confession very favourably and positively and their thinking and the Roman Catholic way is identical. Even with regard to the seal of confession, the priest can't say anything. We have to die rather than say what you've told me. All this is identical with Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, to this day. Having studied Anglicanism myself, I know they're identical. What individual confession has held onto is that value in getting the inside outside.
MRS: This leads to something else I wanted to ask you: what are the consequences of retaining something within, inside? Whether it is sin, or…
MP: Just talking about what is really troubling you or worrying you? This is universal. You see it today in the self-help groups like A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous).
MRS: To this I'd add talk radio, social networking, reality television, etc.
MP: That's right, and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and any of the shows where people share anything going on in their life.
MRS: There are many venues for confession nowadays if we look to the Internet, but it truly became commonplace in the 1990s. That is about the same time when artists took up this form of material or object-based confession in contemporary art discourse. Perhaps there is a parallel there?
MP: There really is. It's interesting because you're dealing with a fundamental human value: people have to talk.
MRS: Yes, there's a compulsion.
MP: There is, you've got to say what's inside you or you'll explode. In marriage, the advice we give is to never go to sleep angry, meaning, at night, lying in bed, we make-up. Open confession. In the morning, wake up, I'm sorry, I apologize, and you start-off fresh. It's deep in our psyche and we need to do that. All cultures have this. It's part of being a human being. It has to be done, especially for serious things, for someone who can speak a word of authority for forgiveness. Something serious needs a key person to bring about not only the forgiveness we need and alleviating the guilt but also to help us out with the consequences of what we've done. Call it what you want-evil, bad actions, sin, has its consequences. Forgiveness is Christianity to its fingertips. This idea about serious sins having serious consequences, one of the consequences of that is about the implications of what you've done and then deal with it. And in the church, a good example of consequences is if you've stolen something, you've got to give it back, restitution, and that has to be worked out. If you've taken away somebody's good name, through what we call calumny; calumny is saying something untrue about another person and destroying their reputation. If you've admitted that, you've got to go back to every person you've said that to and say I was wrong and take it back. A person only has one good name. You destroy that, you've got to do everything you can to restore it. "What I said was false about so and so, why I did it, whatever the reasons are. That's where the confession comes in. It's the priest saying, "friend, Matthew, you've got homework." Okay, and you...
MRS: Get started.
MP: Get started, and start apologizing to everyone you've said that too. You can't just walk away from this. Sin has consequences. It's about having responsibility for your actions and the implications of that and try to right the wrong that you have done. You see this idea of confession and look at what this person needs is deep in human beings, human beings as social creatures.
MRS: I want to start from the ground up here. Confessional art is not necessarily a controversial topic, but it has a weight to it, maybe because it's, as you say, deeply human…
MP: And people will recognize that. Lady Macbeth, you remember?
MRS: Of course.
MP: "Out! Out! Damn spot!" I mean, powerful! She had to say it. She had to get it out in the open. She felt dirty! And people do when they've done wrong, whatever it is. And that's why this business of confession is invaluable as a human being. Being a confessor, people come in after years and they say what sins they have and you can see (heavy sigh).
MRS: So there is a therapeutic or cathartic emotion value to confession.
MP: It's like a thousand pounds taken off your shoulders. I've seen that time and time again. (Heavy sigh). I did not know what to do with this guilt I was feeling. And in this space of five or ten minutes, it is cathartic. That's the word, it is cathartic. They got it out. And maybe they've been carrying this around for years and what do I do with it?
MRS: And what is the confessor's role in this?
MP: When the priest is hearing confessions, you are Christ there and you are listening to them. And when you say the prayers of absolution over the person, you are speaking in the name of Christ. And something happens, you are forgiven. I've heard psychologists say and psychiatrists say, "you guys can do more in ten minutes sometimes, than I can do in thirty hours!" Now I'm not playing down psychiatry or psychology at all, but it goes right down to the heart of the matter. I would say, when someone's going to confession with me, you're looking right into their soul. It really is amazing, you know. Often they're crying. I've had great big truck drivers balling their eyes out. I let them cry, that's good. It's their heart, coming out, they're talking from the heart. They're not putting up anything phony because, remember, they're talking to God.
MRS: But what about truth? Where is the room for truth in confession?
MP: Well, if you're B.S.-ing, who's the loser? You're the loser. God knows what you've done. And by the way, God doesn't need confession, the person does. You need it, I need it. I got to go there to get it out in the open. God knows what we've done. Well, some will say, "I can confess to God." Partly true. We can. But yet God works through human beings because we're human and when you hear when you're forgiven, like rarely is God going to come through the Angel of Gabriel and say "I forgive you," that rarely happens. But you do hear it through the sacrament with a priest. "I forgive you." So there's the therapeutic value of it, getting the inside out and then, what do I got to do? That assurance of morally speaking, you're doing the best you can to make up for this. Now there's no way you can restore a life, murder is murder, and you can't bring that life back.
MRS: Can you comment on the personal toll of hearing confession day in and day out?
MP: Good question. And I'll use a word here: we can be "contaminated." We can be contaminated. This sometimes can happen in spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is working with people in areas that are very personal. Sometimes you're dealing with evil in a person's life. And we're not afraid to use words like "evil spirit"; it's evil what is happening. Afterwards, we can be upset and tense and anxious. Things are not right, and we're feeling it, and we've been contaminated. How do we decontaminate? Usually it can come. Now in confession, we cannot identify the sin or the sinner. We can't say because we're bound by the seal of confession, we have to die rather than break that seal. No exceptions. We can't say, "God, I just had Mr. So-and-So, he said this thing to me and that." No way. But what you can say is that I've been hearing confessions and I'm feeling upset and whatnot, and you can be generic. You can say, "desolation, people have been experiencing some really heavy things." You can say that, you're bringing it out in the open.
MRS: But you can't be specific?
MP: No, you can't be specific but you can talk in general about what you're feeling to another person, maybe even a priest. And in getting it out in the open what you're doing is-the devil can't stand light. The devil works in darkness. Evil spirits, secrets, "don't tell anybody." Like all this child abuse. The perpetrators: "don't tell anybody." Red light, red light. So parents should be suspicious when people say, "don't tell anybody." Red light should go on, get suspicious. So, by bringing it out in the open and sharing your own personal distress that you're feeling, almost invariably, "Poof!" Now people have to do that. Police officers have to decontaminate… You have to share this. For example, working in the courthouse and particularly with the sex abuse stuff. You come home and you're wiped. You've been inundated with all this horrible stuff… why did this person do it? Now you've got to talk it out. It's a courtroom, you can talk about that, a courtroom is public. "God, the things I've heard today were awful." You get it out of your system.
MRS: Could you talk more about personal consequences?
MP: Let me say a good personal consequence. Yes, we talked about the negative. But I always say, "when the Holy Spirit is at work, it's good to be in the neighbourhood." Now the Holy Spirit is God. In confession, it's the Holy Spirit working. When people come and open up, when they're sharing their heart, when they're experiencing forgiveness, when you're able to give them these words of encouragement, words of conciliation, and sometimes you wonder where it's going to come from. You'll say, "where did that come from?" I marvel sometimes. It's God. I tell the students it's the Holy Spirit right there with you. People may say: "what do I say about this?" The best prayer is: "come Holy Spirit." Three words, that's all. For a Christian, that's a powerful prayer. You use that often in your work too, "come Holy Spirit," and you'll see. At the end of it all, you go away feeling phenomenal. You may have had a tough day, a lot of this and that and whatever. "Lord, help me to clear that out now. I'm going to be hearing confessions now for the next half-hour, hour." You come out of that box: "Wow, God is powerful." You're marvelling on how these people are struggling, some with tremendous family difficulties, marital problems, physical problems, and you know they're confessing to being impatient, getting angry, uncharitable, struggling, and maybe quarrelling. But when they go away, they say: "Thank you Father, I have more hope now."
MRS: Now, there has always been an aspect of confession in the history of Western art. There was a very successful artist named Artemisia Gentileschi, a Renaissance painter. She was the first woman accepted into Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. Gentileschi was raped by an artist and, as a result, she was tortured during the criminal trial of the rapist because there was suspicion that she falsified the charge. The alleged rapist was eventually charged and convicted. Her work thereafter was completely different: more violent, more intense than before. Take, for instance, Rembrandt's series of self-portraiture. Or even Van Gogh who cut off his own ear is often said to be confessing his mental state through the means of self-portraiture. So, there's always been that kind of confessing in a way, but "confessional art" gets its name from the 1990s, particularly the yBa (Young British Artist's) movement. I would argue that it has been around for centuries.
(Hands an image of Tracey Emin's My Bed to MP).
Now, I have an image. This artist is Tracey Emin and she is currently Professor of Confessional Art at the European Graduate School. This particular work, from 1998, is called My Bed. What happened was that Emin suffered a nervous breakdown, stayed in her bedroom for a number of days, and then, quite literally, moved her bed into the gallery as a kind of installation. She was, in effect, confessing a personal event from the ebb and flow of the quotidian. I'm really interested in getting your take on this, your immediate reaction.
MP: In other words, that is an artistic representation of what she went through?
MRS: Yes, exactly. It's a manifestation. Confessional artists load images, photographs, and objects with a truth, no matter how raw or how explicit. But it's real-life, hyper-honest, hyper-realistic experience. In the work, there's a vodka bottle, there's…
MP: There's a whole story in the clutter at the base of her bed.
MRS: Precisely. So this is confession, or the sacrament of reconciliation, in material form. I'm interested in how the audiences view such art, how the audience reacts to this work. How do you see this work considering your background in moral theology and confession?
MP: In a way, it's a bit abstract in the sense that the person is not in it. They're using an image to stand for what they've been through.
MRS: This is the thing with confession today. People are confessing through social networking websites like Facebook or Twitter, they say where they're from, how they're feeling, they make notes, they're blogging, which is still confession, in a sense.
MP: You're absolutely right. Confessional was once with a friend face to face. Now, there's a distance there.
MRS: Now people confess in cyberspace.
MP: But what are they doing? They want to say it? But now they're saying it to the world and you're going, what's wrong with this picture?
MRS: When you put that information on the web, potentially, anyone in the world can see it. Confessional artists confess to people in the gallery, face-to-face, but when something is on the worldwide web it's even larger than the gallery system.
MP: And you have to ask yourself if this is a benefit or a loss, both to humanity and to the question of intimacy? When I go to confession, I don't confess to the whole world. If I'm going to share my deepest thoughts that are bothering me, especially temptations or whatever, I'm not going to tell the whole world. But I want to get it out to you. And that's where the healing comes because again, the devil can't stand light.
MRS: And cyberspace may not heal the confessant in an emotional sense?
MP: That's right. You made a good statement there. "Cyberspace may not heal." Telling the world isn't hearing 'I absolve you, I strengthen you, I give you the power or the help to fight this now and purify your mind.' In a way it can feed it more than heal it. See, what you're coming at here is a real good implication in what we've got ourselves into with technology and the proliferation of it. What are we doing to our young people? And then what are we doing with their ability to relate to their family, to their personal friends?
MRS: Well, when you're confessing to cyberspace, what have you, you're taking the physical embodiment of a person out of it.
MP: Whereas when we heal, we not only absolve the person, you're not only reconciled with God, but you're reconciled with the church. There's a community rejoining that takes place. So, in a way, the church put them outside the community for a while to do their penance, but then welcome them back. There was a reconciliation. That's why the word[s] we use now for confession is the sacrament of reconciliation.
MRS: Yes, because it seems like these works, although they're putting it out, they're not being reconciled. That's a great point. This seems like a half-step then, in a sense.
MP: And what is it we yearn for most? We yearn for unity, peace, acceptance, forgiveness, love. Now, I'm talking about fundamental values that go with how God made us.
November, 2009
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