The Priest and the Doors of His Confessional
A tiredness unlike any other
Since the holidays, practically until now, I have been trying to catch up on the sleep I lost during the Triduum. And I know I am not alone in this. I think every priest who has lived through Holy Week in a parish knows exactly what I am talking about.
I have experienced more than one kind of tiredness in my life. I once worked late into the night at a sawmill, so hard that my arms were falling off. I sat up until dawn before exams in the seminary, trying to prepare, even though silentium sacrum is silentium sacrum, but a man is a man. So I knew various kinds of tiredness. I thought I knew them all. Holy Week showed me I was wrong.
Because physical tiredness, tiredness after a sleepless night, is nothing compared to that. Those you could somehow overcome, endure, sleep off. But the tiredness you feel when you leave the confessional after several hours of saying the words "I absolve you from your sins" is a completely different level. It comes from a deeper place than muscles or lack of sleep. And no coffee will fix it. Though I will not deny that there was no shortage of coffee in those last days.
Holy Week is a time that is a little like a retreat. It restores my view of why I became a priest at all. Hour after hour, person after person, and what remains for me then is what matters most. The priest at the grille, a human being on the other side, and God, who is present then far more than we imagine.
A man of the sacraments
A priest is a man of the sacraments. That sentence may sound banal, but the longer you sit with it, the more substance I find in it. It is about something more than celebrating the liturgy or reciting formulas. It is about the fact that through the sacraments a priest understands his place in the Church and in the life of every person who comes to him. It is through them that his identity is defined. It is through them that he finds the answer to the question: why am I here? For whom have I been sent?
On Holy Thursday, during the mandatum, I watched the parish priest wash the feet of our distinguished parishioners. And at that moment, listening to Ubi caritas, I gazed into the distance and thought to myself that You, Lord, wash our feet, and we, in Your name, wash the hearts of people. That is our role. That is our life.
There are different ministries, different charisms, different roles in the life of a parish. And I am grateful for every one of them, truly, with all my heart. People did so much. The sacristy was being prepared, the lads were organising the serving teams and the processions, someone was tidying the altar cloths, someone was preparing the vessels. Things were really happening. Behind each of these services lies love for the community, and without these people much simply would not have succeeded. The parish lives precisely, thanks to them.
And yet, in the midst of all this, there is one place where being a priest means absolutely everything. A place where no organisation, no volunteer, no good person from outside can replace me. It is the confessional. And it is to this truth that I return every Holy Week.
I say this with humility, because it really is not a matter of being special or privileged. It is a burden you take upon yourself with the awareness that it is worth every moment. Because this is about Christ, who bends down over each person individually. I am only an instrument. But an instrument which, at that moment, is the only one, irreplaceable and indispensable.
The queue reaching the fence.
And this is precisely why Holy Week looks the way it does. We see what is external: the processions, the liturgy, the beautiful decorations, the singing. But from the inside, there is an intensity that no pastoral calendar foresees, and that cannot be planned in advance. Though I will say, we did our best to make everything work, so that at no moment of the day would there be fewer than two priests available to hear confessions.
I remember sitting down in the confessional together with the other priests. Each behind his own grille, and in a moment the queue grew from a few people to the length of the entire church. Because standing in it are people who in a moment will come in with their whole lives and their sinfulness. At a certain point I wondered how it was possible that with seven of us sitting there, the queue kept growing and growing, until finally it stretched far beyond the walls of the church. It reached the fence. People stood. They waited. Just like a return to the communist era, queuing for rationed goods. They came from all directions, young and old, confident and frightened, those with calm in their eyes and those whose hands tremble before they even open their mouths. Ecce homo. Behold the man.
Hour after hour passed. Knees stiffen, feet go cold. The throat gives out, and the tiredness makes itself felt more and more. To such a degree that I opened the breviary on my knees at the formula of absolution, because I was slowly beginning to lose my sense of reality. After two hours, the thought comes: five more minutes and I will step out for a moment. And again someone enters, kneels, begins to speak. And again you listen. And suddenly those five little minutes turn into another hour, and then one more. Time woven through with conversations, interrupted by moments for a short walk to clear the head, drink some water and coffee, eat something, and carry on. That is exactly how the ministry of reconciliation works. It dictates its own rhythm, and I learn to trust that rhythm and to keep up with it.
On Good Friday I came out for the liturgy five minutes before it began. Everything was arranged and prepared. I look at the camera showing the Chapel of Mercy; the lads are still hearing confessions, the queue still reaches the church doors, forty-five minutes remain until the liturgy. I say, I am going to help them. Lads, take care of everything; I am going to the confessional. We managed to come out literally five minutes before the liturgy, when the last person stepped away from the grille. Because until the last moment I sat there with my brother priests, shoulder to shoulder.
I came out of the confessional, and I will say honestly, in human terms, I was glad it was over. That we had managed to hear everyone's confession. That we had made it. I looked at the parish priest and saw how he was bending, literally, from those long hours of sitting. That day the confessional became his own cross, and I think he himself knew it better than anyone. And I was grateful to him for that. For enduring.
And you know, I entered that Good Friday liturgy with something I had never felt so strongly before. During the reading of the Lord's Passion, the priest at a certain moment speaks the words of Christ from the cross: "Today you will be with me in paradise." How true that was. Because I knew that the people sitting in those pews had just gone through exactly that: through their own examination of conscience, through their own shame, through their own "I am sorry". And that these words from the cross are for them. Truly for them. Something beautiful. God, thank you that everyone managed to be reconciled with You.
To those who came
I would now like to say a few words to all those who stood in that queue. Because I know you, even if I do not know your faces or names. I know that many of you came with a similar story. More or less once a year. Maybe twice a year. A little uncertain, with the feeling that "I have nothing great to say." That your religious life is, well, so so. That maybe this is not yet the moment, not this parish, not this priest. And yet you came. And that is precisely what stays in the memory most. The simple fact that someone got up, zipped up their jacket, and said inside: I am going.
I also know that some of you said more or less the same thing as a year ago. And the year before that. The same job, the same family, the same weaknesses with slightly modified circumstances. And perhaps somewhere at the back of your mind sat the thought: he has probably heard this already; he probably thinks I am just another twice-a-year type who only comes before Easter. I want to tell you plainly: this meeting is always the first one. Every single time. Because after every confession, a person leaves clean, and everything begins anew.
Christ rejoices at every confession. At every person who rises from the queue and says: I will try. At every stomach knotted with shame. At every "I am sorry" spoken quietly in the darkness of the confessional. At every tear, when you realise how much God loves you. The Gospel is precisely for such moments, for those who come with what they have, not with what they ought to have. This is exactly the moment when Christ says without dressing it up in pretty words: come with what you have. It is enough.
I truly wanted to thank you. I know it is hard to find the resolve. I know that confession is stressful, that thoughts appear: what will he think of me, or why should I say something I cannot change anyway? What is the point? And yet you stood in a queue that sometimes lasted an hour, only for this, or rather for nothing less than this: to receive absolution. Every year you may confess the same things, but you are different; you always have the sense of a new beginning, and you never know whether this might be the moment when something finally clicks.
So thank you. Because every one of those "I am sorry" moments, every moment of conversion, is a meeting with a particular person. There may be one day and three hundred people; everyone may say the same things and the same sins, and I still know that behind them stands a particular human being, a particular word of counsel, and a particular forgiveness. Because we have different characters, and what unites us all is Christ.
Something no one will do for us
This gratitude has its other face: gratitude towards the ministry itself. The confessional is a place that teaches a priest humility in a way no other experience can replace. You sit there and hear human life in all its complexity, and you learn that your role is irreplaceable only because God willed it so, and that your own wisdom is, beside that, truly secondary.
The ministry of reconciliation dwells there, where a person speaks and God, through priestly lips, answers: you are forgiven. Go. Is anything more needed? What use are all those theological treatises to you? This person needs only one thing. To hear that he is loved, to hear that there is a chance of change, to hear that God will never abandon him or leave him. And he simply has to know that here is a place where no one will grind him into the dust, but will help him get up and walk on. The priest is only a voice in all this. But it is precisely this voice that nothing can replace.
That is why those long hours in the confessional have the taste of something absolutely unrepeatable. You could measure them in minutes and hours, in the backache from constant sitting and in the hoarse voice, even in a head full of human weaknesses. But in truth you measure them in faces. The faces of people who came in tense and left lighter. In eyes that arrived carrying a burden and departed with something hard to call anything other than relief. This is a reward no fee can match, and no document can describe. And no one will take it from you. A father's love, when the child returns to the Father's house.
And this is exactly why, when I sit in the confessional tired, with heavy eyelids, and hear the next words of the next person, I understand why I am here. This is priesthood in its purest, unadorned form. Being where a person needs God most. And staying there until everyone has passed through.
This time truly matters. Let us not give it up. Let us not be carried away by the thinking that, after all, it is only for the holidays. Yes, perhaps the reason they come to us is plain tradition. But their contrition, if you bend down over the person, emerges just as in the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman. I have that image in my room, and in it I see people who come and would most gladly say: the usual, please. And you sit down, look into the person's eyes, and ask: what is it that really hurts you? And then you know that the person understands you do not want to "process" him, but to restore to him what he lost long ago. Trust, love, grace. "Through the ministry of the Church... and I absolve you from your sins." Suddenly everything becomes new.
Instead of a conclusion
Holy Week is ending. The tiredness is slowly letting go. What remains are images: faces in the queue, a quiet "thank you" behind the grille, children who came to confession for the first time in a long while and looked with wide eyes, as if checking whether it is safe here. It is. It always is.
Something deeper remains too: a conviction that returns every year and is stronger each time. That the priesthood is real precisely here. At the grille. In that one moment of silence before a person begins to speak. In that one sentence which the priest utters in the name of Someone greater than himself.
And there is a certain paradox in this that strikes me every time. It is you who sit behind the bars. You! Not them! It is you who are shut inside that wooden box, hour after hour. And yet it is those who stand free on the other side who leave the confessional even freer than they came. As if it were their bars that fell away, not yours. As if you, sitting locked in, were opening something in them that they could not open themselves. Such is the confessional. Such is grace.
Holy Week has passed. But the confessional remains. And next year I will sit down again. The queue may be even longer. We will manage. With God we can always manage!
Fr Adam Płonka
Since the holidays, practically until now, I have been trying to catch up on the sleep I lost during the Triduum. And I know I am not alone in this. I think every priest who has lived through Holy Week in a parish knows exactly what I am talking about.
I have experienced more than one kind of tiredness in my life. I once worked late into the night at a sawmill, so hard that my arms were falling off. I sat up until dawn before exams in the seminary, trying to prepare, even though silentium sacrum is silentium sacrum, but a man is a man. So I knew various kinds of tiredness. I thought I knew them all. Holy Week showed me I was wrong.
Because physical tiredness, tiredness after a sleepless night, is nothing compared to that. Those you could somehow overcome, endure, sleep off. But the tiredness you feel when you leave the confessional after several hours of saying the words "I absolve you from your sins" is a completely different level. It comes from a deeper place than muscles or lack of sleep. And no coffee will fix it. Though I will not deny that there was no shortage of coffee in those last days.
Holy Week is a time that is a little like a retreat. It restores my view of why I became a priest at all. Hour after hour, person after person, and what remains for me then is what matters most. The priest at the grille, a human being on the other side, and God, who is present then far more than we imagine.
A man of the sacraments
A priest is a man of the sacraments. That sentence may sound banal, but the longer you sit with it, the more substance I find in it. It is about something more than celebrating the liturgy or reciting formulas. It is about the fact that through the sacraments a priest understands his place in the Church and in the life of every person who comes to him. It is through them that his identity is defined. It is through them that he finds the answer to the question: why am I here? For whom have I been sent?
On Holy Thursday, during the mandatum, I watched the parish priest wash the feet of our distinguished parishioners. And at that moment, listening to Ubi caritas, I gazed into the distance and thought to myself that You, Lord, wash our feet, and we, in Your name, wash the hearts of people. That is our role. That is our life.
There are different ministries, different charisms, different roles in the life of a parish. And I am grateful for every one of them, truly, with all my heart. People did so much. The sacristy was being prepared, the lads were organising the serving teams and the processions, someone was tidying the altar cloths, someone was preparing the vessels. Things were really happening. Behind each of these services lies love for the community, and without these people much simply would not have succeeded. The parish lives precisely, thanks to them.
And yet, in the midst of all this, there is one place where being a priest means absolutely everything. A place where no organisation, no volunteer, no good person from outside can replace me. It is the confessional. And it is to this truth that I return every Holy Week.
I say this with humility, because it really is not a matter of being special or privileged. It is a burden you take upon yourself with the awareness that it is worth every moment. Because this is about Christ, who bends down over each person individually. I am only an instrument. But an instrument which, at that moment, is the only one, irreplaceable and indispensable.
The queue reaching the fence.
And this is precisely why Holy Week looks the way it does. We see what is external: the processions, the liturgy, the beautiful decorations, the singing. But from the inside, there is an intensity that no pastoral calendar foresees, and that cannot be planned in advance. Though I will say, we did our best to make everything work, so that at no moment of the day would there be fewer than two priests available to hear confessions.
I remember sitting down in the confessional together with the other priests. Each behind his own grille, and in a moment the queue grew from a few people to the length of the entire church. Because standing in it are people who in a moment will come in with their whole lives and their sinfulness. At a certain point I wondered how it was possible that with seven of us sitting there, the queue kept growing and growing, until finally it stretched far beyond the walls of the church. It reached the fence. People stood. They waited. Just like a return to the communist era, queuing for rationed goods. They came from all directions, young and old, confident and frightened, those with calm in their eyes and those whose hands tremble before they even open their mouths. Ecce homo. Behold the man.
Hour after hour passed. Knees stiffen, feet go cold. The throat gives out, and the tiredness makes itself felt more and more. To such a degree that I opened the breviary on my knees at the formula of absolution, because I was slowly beginning to lose my sense of reality. After two hours, the thought comes: five more minutes and I will step out for a moment. And again someone enters, kneels, begins to speak. And again you listen. And suddenly those five little minutes turn into another hour, and then one more. Time woven through with conversations, interrupted by moments for a short walk to clear the head, drink some water and coffee, eat something, and carry on. That is exactly how the ministry of reconciliation works. It dictates its own rhythm, and I learn to trust that rhythm and to keep up with it.
On Good Friday I came out for the liturgy five minutes before it began. Everything was arranged and prepared. I look at the camera showing the Chapel of Mercy; the lads are still hearing confessions, the queue still reaches the church doors, forty-five minutes remain until the liturgy. I say, I am going to help them. Lads, take care of everything; I am going to the confessional. We managed to come out literally five minutes before the liturgy, when the last person stepped away from the grille. Because until the last moment I sat there with my brother priests, shoulder to shoulder.
I came out of the confessional, and I will say honestly, in human terms, I was glad it was over. That we had managed to hear everyone's confession. That we had made it. I looked at the parish priest and saw how he was bending, literally, from those long hours of sitting. That day the confessional became his own cross, and I think he himself knew it better than anyone. And I was grateful to him for that. For enduring.
And you know, I entered that Good Friday liturgy with something I had never felt so strongly before. During the reading of the Lord's Passion, the priest at a certain moment speaks the words of Christ from the cross: "Today you will be with me in paradise." How true that was. Because I knew that the people sitting in those pews had just gone through exactly that: through their own examination of conscience, through their own shame, through their own "I am sorry". And that these words from the cross are for them. Truly for them. Something beautiful. God, thank you that everyone managed to be reconciled with You.
To those who came
I would now like to say a few words to all those who stood in that queue. Because I know you, even if I do not know your faces or names. I know that many of you came with a similar story. More or less once a year. Maybe twice a year. A little uncertain, with the feeling that "I have nothing great to say." That your religious life is, well, so so. That maybe this is not yet the moment, not this parish, not this priest. And yet you came. And that is precisely what stays in the memory most. The simple fact that someone got up, zipped up their jacket, and said inside: I am going.
I also know that some of you said more or less the same thing as a year ago. And the year before that. The same job, the same family, the same weaknesses with slightly modified circumstances. And perhaps somewhere at the back of your mind sat the thought: he has probably heard this already; he probably thinks I am just another twice-a-year type who only comes before Easter. I want to tell you plainly: this meeting is always the first one. Every single time. Because after every confession, a person leaves clean, and everything begins anew.
Christ rejoices at every confession. At every person who rises from the queue and says: I will try. At every stomach knotted with shame. At every "I am sorry" spoken quietly in the darkness of the confessional. At every tear, when you realise how much God loves you. The Gospel is precisely for such moments, for those who come with what they have, not with what they ought to have. This is exactly the moment when Christ says without dressing it up in pretty words: come with what you have. It is enough.
I truly wanted to thank you. I know it is hard to find the resolve. I know that confession is stressful, that thoughts appear: what will he think of me, or why should I say something I cannot change anyway? What is the point? And yet you stood in a queue that sometimes lasted an hour, only for this, or rather for nothing less than this: to receive absolution. Every year you may confess the same things, but you are different; you always have the sense of a new beginning, and you never know whether this might be the moment when something finally clicks.
So thank you. Because every one of those "I am sorry" moments, every moment of conversion, is a meeting with a particular person. There may be one day and three hundred people; everyone may say the same things and the same sins, and I still know that behind them stands a particular human being, a particular word of counsel, and a particular forgiveness. Because we have different characters, and what unites us all is Christ.
Something no one will do for us
This gratitude has its other face: gratitude towards the ministry itself. The confessional is a place that teaches a priest humility in a way no other experience can replace. You sit there and hear human life in all its complexity, and you learn that your role is irreplaceable only because God willed it so, and that your own wisdom is, beside that, truly secondary.
The ministry of reconciliation dwells there, where a person speaks and God, through priestly lips, answers: you are forgiven. Go. Is anything more needed? What use are all those theological treatises to you? This person needs only one thing. To hear that he is loved, to hear that there is a chance of change, to hear that God will never abandon him or leave him. And he simply has to know that here is a place where no one will grind him into the dust, but will help him get up and walk on. The priest is only a voice in all this. But it is precisely this voice that nothing can replace.
That is why those long hours in the confessional have the taste of something absolutely unrepeatable. You could measure them in minutes and hours, in the backache from constant sitting and in the hoarse voice, even in a head full of human weaknesses. But in truth you measure them in faces. The faces of people who came in tense and left lighter. In eyes that arrived carrying a burden and departed with something hard to call anything other than relief. This is a reward no fee can match, and no document can describe. And no one will take it from you. A father's love, when the child returns to the Father's house.
And this is exactly why, when I sit in the confessional tired, with heavy eyelids, and hear the next words of the next person, I understand why I am here. This is priesthood in its purest, unadorned form. Being where a person needs God most. And staying there until everyone has passed through.
This time truly matters. Let us not give it up. Let us not be carried away by the thinking that, after all, it is only for the holidays. Yes, perhaps the reason they come to us is plain tradition. But their contrition, if you bend down over the person, emerges just as in the conversation of Jesus with the Samaritan woman. I have that image in my room, and in it I see people who come and would most gladly say: the usual, please. And you sit down, look into the person's eyes, and ask: what is it that really hurts you? And then you know that the person understands you do not want to "process" him, but to restore to him what he lost long ago. Trust, love, grace. "Through the ministry of the Church... and I absolve you from your sins." Suddenly everything becomes new.
Instead of a conclusion
Holy Week is ending. The tiredness is slowly letting go. What remains are images: faces in the queue, a quiet "thank you" behind the grille, children who came to confession for the first time in a long while and looked with wide eyes, as if checking whether it is safe here. It is. It always is.
Something deeper remains too: a conviction that returns every year and is stronger each time. That the priesthood is real precisely here. At the grille. In that one moment of silence before a person begins to speak. In that one sentence which the priest utters in the name of Someone greater than himself.
And there is a certain paradox in this that strikes me every time. It is you who sit behind the bars. You! Not them! It is you who are shut inside that wooden box, hour after hour. And yet it is those who stand free on the other side who leave the confessional even freer than they came. As if it were their bars that fell away, not yours. As if you, sitting locked in, were opening something in them that they could not open themselves. Such is the confessional. Such is grace.
Holy Week has passed. But the confessional remains. And next year I will sit down again. The queue may be even longer. We will manage. With God we can always manage!
Fr Adam Płonka
