Taking Your Confession from Good to Great

Johanna Stamps shares some helpful tools from grief work that she uses to transform her examination of conscience.  

It’s a scrawled list in the back of my journal. I purposefully write it in even worse handwriting than I usually use, so no one could easily decipher what it says if they found it. It’s my secret list of moments when I noticed something was coming between me and God. It’s tough to look at, and oftentimes, I only look at the words as quickly as I write them, and then quickly in my examination of conscience before rushing through the spoken words with my priest.  

I want to hide this list.  

I want to hide from this list.   

And yet, that’s not serving me, and it’s not aiding as well as it could in my continued spiritual growth.   

Perhaps you have a list like this.   

And maybe you, like me, want to take your Confession from good to great!   

A Good to Great Confession 

I can check all the boxes of a good Confession:  

• Make a comprehensive examination 
• Spend time in quiet to feel God’s love  
• Allow adequate time to hear what is grieving God’s heart 
• Review the Ten Commandments and Beatitudes 
• Arrive early enough to be first in line (maybe that’s just me)  

Check, check, check.   

However, I still want to go deeper in transformation. I know it’s possible.   

I want to not just acknowledge what has come between me and God but also allow myself to feel it.   

Too often, my Confession is more of a cerebral exercise and less of a heart exercise.   

I want there to be more heart. I know God wants my whole mind, body, and spirit. So far, I seem to just be incorporating a small part of my mind.   

An Unlikely Tool  

My help came from an unexpected source.  

I’m a student of grief and grieving, and in that area of passion, I’ve come across some incredible tools for doing the main work of grief: Integrating the head and the heart.   

This was exactly what I was looking for in my Confession!   

Most of us think grief is the work we do in our minds: shifting our thinking toward more positive thoughts.   

The real work of grief entails allowing yourself to truly feel the emotions associated with a loss and communicating those feelings to a safe, listening person.   

One of the tools I use to do this is a simple completion statement. The fill-in-the-blank version looks like this (adapted for use in Confession):   

God, when I ________ (action), I felt _______ (emotion), and I _______ (apologize/acknowledge/thank you) for ___________. I will no longer let this hurt me, [or] I want to be healed to _____.   

Often, I will use this type of statement to complete a communication to someone I love who has died or with whom I no longer have the opportunity to connect.   

One day, I imagined what might happen if I could use an item of confession and put it in this format and share it with my lovely, trusted priest.   

The result was something like this:   

God, when I yelled at my child unnecessarily in a moment of frustration, I felt disconnected. I felt like I was using my own child as a punching bag for what was happening in other areas of my life. When I saw his eyes well up in tears, I felt shattered and broken. I apologize for allowing my misguided ambitions to hold back the outflow of love that you lavish on me. God, please help me to see what is most important to you and make my life an act of worship, especially as a mother.  

Can you feel the head/heart connection? Can you feel the emotion and the momentum toward divine healing?   

This is crying out to God. It can sound like David, Job, and so many others. It goes deeper, and not only shows us what is disconnected and painful, but also what God wants to touch — what is possible.  

This is very different from what was originally on my list: “I yelled at my child when I was frustrated.”  

God wants us. He wants all of us. This small but significant shift has been a way for me to feel not only the goodness but also the greatness of God.  

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Copyright 2025 Johanna Stamps
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