Vulnerability and Not Liking Confession

In the winter of 2024-2025, I just slightly fractured one of my ribs. I only knew this because pressing down on one end of it caused a sharp pain at the other end, near my sternum. (Later, my doctor felt a small healed fracture through my skin.) Thankfully, I had no pain while breathing, but the fracture did necessarily change the way I received chest percussion therapy while I healed. For decades, my caregivers have formed one of their hands into a cup and struck it against the front and back of my chest on each side. This makes a cupping sound, and the percussion helps loosen the mucus inside of my lungs, which are squished by scoliosis, in order to keep them clear and avoid pneumonia. While waiting for my rib pain to go away, we switched to a massager that has a cup at the end of it and sends waves of vibration through my lungs.

Though now healed, I have not returned to the old hand cupping method of chest percussion therapy. Why? Because I feel too vulnerable.

It sometimes aches in that spot when pressure is applied, a reminder of what happened, how I caused a slight fracture in one of my ribs by simply being rolled over onto my arm, such a minor fracture that I didn’t even realize it had happened right away. But what if something caused a larger fracture? I need to take deep breaths — deep, lung filling breaths that cause stretching throughout my chest — multiple times an hour, sometimes, multiple times a minute, so I cannot afford any kind of major rib fracture. The possibility scares me. I’m fragile enough as it is, and have been for as long as I can remember: joints held together by atrophied muscles, fingers and toes so tiny and weak that they could easily catch and sprain when I’m being dressed or transferred, and a respiratory system that gravely struggles with a simple chest cold. But the actual fracturing of one of my bones, as slight and minor as it was, has made me feel this anew, feeling even tinier and more helpless.

I necessarily continue to put myself at the mercy of others in order to live fully and well.

I’m offering this portrayal of physical vulnerability to underline the difficulty that so many of us have with the sacrament of confession.

Naked and Afraid

After Adam and Eve intentionally went against the will of God, they covered themselves with fig leaves to hide themselves from each other, and then they even tried to hide themselves from God. That’s what sin does. In committing a sin, we put ourselves at the center of life, willfully doing whatever we want to do, with little or no thought of whom it may hurt. When, through the grace of God, we recognize the sinfulness of our act and our own bad decision, we realize how fallible we are, how easily we can be wrong, choosing to do things that end up hurting people we love or even hurting ourselves. We see our weakness, our foolishness, and realize how easily we can fracture bonds of trust and love, how many moments of grace we have broken.

And no one enjoys feeling this vulnerable state.

Sometimes, this knowledge of vulnerability — vulnerable to mistakes and pain caused by those mistakes or the mistakes of others — may cause us to harden our hearts, stiffen up and lash out at others. We mess up, so we become more apt to point out when other people mess up and, instead of getting angry at ourselves, we get angry at others. We humans, in general, don’t want to admit that we are wrong, finding excuses, blaming others, acting like there is no harm, no foul. Bullies become bullies because they are cowards, afraid to acknowledge the depths of their faults and failings, afraid to feel vulnerable.

Sometimes, just our vulnerability to time — the body is mortal, physical appearance and ability are subject to aging — can cause us to desperately pretend that this vulnerability doesn’t exist, seeking every death-defying thrill or fountain of youth that we can find, or gilding ourselves in manufactured beauty.

It’s all pride, of course. Like Adam and Eve, we want to be all-powerful and all-knowing. Recognizing that we are not, we quiver in our vulnerability, naked and afraid.

Taking off our fig leaves to admit that we are flawed, weak, mortal, mistaken, can be a frightful prospect.

Confession Is Good for the Soul

I don’t like going to confession, I’m nervous just preparing to go to the confessional and lay bare my soul to God through His priest. No fig leaves are allowed in there. Only vulnerability. And I always want to protect myself.

It’s no good to make a confession with good words well thought out beforehand. Who am I trying to impress? Why can’t I let myself stumble and fumble if that’s what happens in the moment? A humble and contrite heart is all that God requires. God is simply happy that I’m not hiding from Him anymore, trying to avoid His presence because of my sinful tendency. It’s foolish to think I could hide. God always sees me and, in the confessional, I let Him see me, exposing the state of my soul fully to Him, because He is God and I am not.

It’s no good to find the right priest who doesn’t know me so that he won’t think of my confessed sins every time he sees me. God called each priest into the confessional first, to recognize and accept his own vulnerability, his own weakness and need for God’s merciful love. Are we not all sinners? God knows my sins, every tedious detail of my sins, but when I confess them, God knows only joy. It is pride that would keep me out of the confessional if all I cared about was what the priest would think. My concern in life should only be about what God thinks.

The priest is merely a conduit, anyway. A speaking tube through which we communicate intimately and courageously to God, and God communicates to us. Yet, this out loud confessing of my weakness, of my faults and failings — knowing that a flesh and blood person can hear me — is the best way to allow myself to be vulnerable, even exposed to cruelty if cruelty exists, and in that vulnerability, trust God and have my pride overcome with real humility.

Absolution heals every wound of the soul and strengthens the spirit. That broken bones once mended are twice as strong may not be true — but it’s definitely true that fractured relationships and broken moments of grace need perpetual healing, which strengthens our relationship with God.

We are all vulnerable. God knows. So let’s not be afraid to go to confession.

© 2026 Christina Chase

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Feature Photo courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash; Paradise Lost: Adam and Eve Driven out of Paradise 1824–27 John Martin (British, 1789–1854) England, 19th century mezzotint