“A clean machine is a running machine!” My 83 year old neighbor John said this to me as he handed me car polish and a rag. He had purchased me a riding lawn mower to cut his lawn, my neighbor Josie’s lawn, and my own lawn. After a couple months of use, he noticed that the mower had lost some of its fresh-off-the-lot shine. So he gave me polish with the instruction to keep the riding mower in mint condition.
But I didn’t. Whether it was other responsibilities, or not making cleaning the lawn mower a priority, I didn’t get around to it. After a month, John jokingly reminded me about the polish, and I gave him the excuse that we have all given at some point: I hadn’t had the time.
It struck me that the way I treated the lawnmower is the same way many Catholics (myself included) can treat the sacrament of reconciliation. Unlike the Eucharist which comes with the moral obligation of Sunday and Holy Day mass attendance, the sacrament of reconciliation is a come-as-needed experience of grace. Faithful Catholics are given the suggestion of going once a month, and many go more frequently than this. But the onus of going to confession occurs whenever we are in the state of grave sin or at least once a year. This means there is a variance amongst faithful Catholics as to how often they go to reconciliation which can be a beautiful thing in its own right.
Yet, many more go less frequently than a month – if at all. And this is where John’s oft repeated statement can apply to our spiritual condition. “A clean machine is a running machine!” The sacrament of reconciliation is often referred to as a ‘cleansing of the soul’. While this analogy can fall short in many ways, it is true that we must take the time to enter the sacrament of reconciliation to ‘clean’ the soul. Sin makes our soul a ‘sluggish machine’ rather than a ‘running machine.’ God is constantly calling us to do His will daily and the sinful soul is slow to respond to or completely ignores the call of God. We know that our soul could use the ‘cleansing,’ but sometimes we don’t get around to it. Life is busy, and we do not make it a priority. We think that our sins are not that bad and reconciliation can wait. Before we know it, it has been months since our last confession, and if we have paid attention to our spiritual life, we find that we are most likely a little more selfish than we were before.
The importance of going to confession frequently is essential to the life of a faithful Catholic. This is because the ‘cleansing of the soul’ is more than a spiritual carwash. The sacrament is not meant to be something that we do ourselves in order to present ourselves pure and holy in front of our God. Rather, it is a humble act of reunion with God, our heavenly Father. We bring forth our self inflicted wounds, and He heals them. We can do nothing but be humble in the face of His love and grace. We sin (even if they are minor sins) so much more than we realize, and we consistently need His healing to sustain us on our journey to eternal life.
So as we enter into this ordinary time, all of us should reevaluate whether or not we frequent spiritual healing in the confessional enough. If so, great! Let us go to our Father as humble as the Son is. But if we do not go enough, let us find a way to prioritize our relationship with God because, “A clean machine is a running machine!”
