The Pedagogy of Fire: On Confession, Switchfoot, and the Theotokos

It has always struck me as one of the stranger features of my thoroughly Byzantine Catholic religious life that we persist in telling God things He already knows. We kneel in the confessional and recite our failures with all the gravity of a man delivering welling soul facts (which is true), when, of course, the Recipient of our news has known its contents since before the foundations of the world were laid. We, the penitent arrives breathless with revelation—I have been impatient with my children (again), I have neglected prayer in favor Instagram, I have entertained thoughts unworthy of my baptism—and yet the God to whom these confessions are addressed has, if we are to believe what we profess, been watching the whole sorry business unfold in real time, with rather better seats than we ourselves enjoyed.

One begins to suspect that the entire exercise has been designed for someone other than its ostensible Audience.

This suspicion, once entertained, proves remarkably clarifying. The confessional is not, as the anxious imagination would have it, a kind of ecclesiastical courtroom in which evidence is submitted and verdicts rendered according to the preponderance of sins. It is something far stranger and, I think, far more beautiful: a schoolroom in which the student learns by speaking aloud what the Teacher has known all along. We do not inform our First, Fast, Last Friend¹; we form ourselves. The inventory of our failures is not evidence but a curriculum, and the absolution that follows is less an acquittal than a graduation—a sending forth into a freedom we could not have discovered without first naming the chains.

The French Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard, who understood these matters better than most, insisted that reconciliation in the biblical sense was never the erasure of a record but rather the restoration of a friendship. One does not restore a friendship by pretending the rupture never occurred; one restores it by naming the rupture, by acknowledging the distance that has opened between two persons who were once intimate, and by discovering—often to one’s considerable surprise—that the other party has been waiting all along for precisely this conversation. The confessional, then, is less courtroom than front porch: the place where the prodigal rehearses his carefully prepared speech, only to find that his Father has been scanning the horizon for months and has no interest whatsoever in the speech, only in the son who has finally come home.

There is a song by the rock band Switchfoot—and I confess that the phrase “rock band” makes me feel rather like someone’s grandfather attempting to describe the wireless—called “On Fire,” which captures something essential about what happens when finite creatures wander into the presence of Infinite Love. The bridge is simplicity itself:

I’m standing on the edge of me

I’m standing at the edge of everything I’ve never been before

And I’ve been standing at the edge of me

Standing on the edge

And I’m on fire when you’re near me

And I’m on fire when you speak

Now fire, as anyone who has sat before a hearth on a winter evening knows, is a curious thing. It transforms everything it touches—wood becomes ash, ore becomes steel, the impurities burn away, and what remains is purer than what entered—and yet the Fire itself remains what it has always been. It does not accommodate itself to the materials it encounters; the materials accommodate themselves to it, or they are consumed. The Fire simply burns, and everything that enters its presence is remade according to its nature, whether the entering party had any intention of being remade or not.

This is, I think, a rather exact description of Divine Love in the form we, as Catholics, believe it to be: Resurrectional. It does not change; we do. It does not waver; we discover, sometimes with considerable discomfort, that we have been wavering all along and simply failed to notice until we encountered something that didn’t. Moses, standing before the bush that burned without being consumed, still didn’t understand this until he was told to remove his sandals, which is why he hid his face. The Fire did not need his reverence. But Moses, being finite, being a creature formed from dust and animated by borrowed breath, needed to give it. The gesture was pedagogy, not tribute. He was learning what it meant to stand in the presence of I AM WHO AM, and the learning required his whole body, not merely his intellect.

The confessional works in precisely the same way, which is why I find myself returning to the Switchfoot song whenever I try to explain the sacrament to people who imagine it as a kind of spiritual accounting exercise, a quarterly review in which sins are tallied and penances assessed according to some invisible rubric. The point is not that God needs to hear our list. The point is that we need to speak it—to stand in the presence of unchanging Love and discover, by contrast, just how much we ourselves have been changing, drifting, accommodating ourselves to false flames. We see ourselves truly only in the Light of what does not flicker.

And then there is Our Lady, the Theotokos, which is where things become genuinely strange.

“Mary, Did You Know?” is one of those songs that some of us find vaguely embarrassing and congregations find inexplicably moving, which suggests that we may be missing something important. The song consists almost entirely of rhetorical questions addressed to the Mother of God (as Wordsworth says, mankind’s solitary boast²). Did you know your Baby Boy would one day walk on water? Did you know He would save our sons and daughters? Did you know that your Baby Boy is Lord of all Creation?

The answer to all of these questions is, of course, yes. She knew. The angel told her explicitly at the Annunciation, and she responded not with confusion but with fiat—let it be done to me according to your word—which is not the response of someone who has failed to grasp the situation. She was at Cana when water became wine, and it was she who set the miracle in motion with a confidence that suggests she had been waiting for precisely this moment. She pondered these things in her heart, Luke tells us, which is the scriptural way of saying that she understood far more than she was letting on.

So why do we keep singing the song? Why does it persist in the repertoire of Christian devotion when its rhetorical structure is, on its face, a kind of catechetical absurdity?

Because—and here is the strange part—She lets us. The Theotokos permits us to borrow her posture, to stand where she stood, to gaze at the infant Christ with something like her eyes and ask the questions whose answers she has carried in Her heart for two millennia. The song is not for her education; it is for ours. We are the catechumens, blinking and uncertain; she is the Icon, serene and knowing. When we sing Did you know that your baby boy is Lord of all creation?, we are not informing the Mother of God of anything. We are teaching ourselves what she already understood, using her as the lens through which we might finally see clearly what has been in front of us all along.

This is the Marian mode of catechesis, and it is stranger and more beautiful than most of us realize. We enter imaginatively into her experience—the weight of the child in her arms, the smell of hay and animal warmth, the impossible collision of infinite divinity and finite flesh—and in that entering, her knowledge becomes, by slow degrees, our own. The questions are scaffolding. The repetition is pedagogy. She does not need to hear the answers; she has known them longer than we have been alive. But we need to speak them, because the Word became flesh precisely so that our flesh might learn to carry words too heavy for it—and the Fathers understood that this speaking is itself a participation in the Logos, dust learning to echo the Voice that first called it into being. The Word became flesh, Athanasius insisted, so that we might become God; and if that is true, then every stammered confession, every borrowed Marian question, every lyric about burning is the flesh learning to do what it was made for, which is to speak back to the One who first spoke it into existence. We do not merely internalize the truth. We become, syllable by syllable, the truth's own body. Gregory of Nyssa called it epektasis, the eternal stretching toward what we cannot yet grasp, and he meant that the reaching is not preliminary to the union but is the union, enacted in time by creatures who will spend eternity discovering that the Fire into which they are falling has no bottom.

Three encounters, then, and in each case the same strange grammar.

In confession, we speak our sins to a God who has known them since before we committed them and Whose love for us has not changed in the interim. He seeks to help us remember Who He Is and bring us back into that deeper relationship that we shared before.

In “On Fire,” we name what it is to be changed by the Unchangeable, to enter the presence of a Love so constant that our inconstancy is illuminated, so Infinite that our finitude is thrown into sharp and ofttimes unflattering relief.

In “Mary, Did You Know?”, we ask questions of someone who holds all the answers, and in the asking, we receive what she has always asked for: complete coherence with the will of Being, in which all our freedom lies.

Our God does not need our words. But we—finite, forgetful, perpetually distracted by lesser concerns—we need to speak them. The Fire does not require our presence. But we require its heat, its light, its purifying attention. Mary does not lack knowledge. But we lack hers until, by her generous permission, we sing ourselves into something like understanding.

This is what the sacrament of confession truly offers, and it is not at all what most people imagine when they picture the darkened box and the sliding screen. Not a transaction—sins submitted, penance assigned, ledger balanced, see you next month. Rather, an encounter with a Love so constant that our inconstancy cannot help but be revealed, so Infinite that our finitude becomes, for once, visible to us, so Unchangeable that we cannot emerge from its presence without being changed ourselves. We enter the confessional not to inform God of anything but to be formed by Him—to let the Fire do its work, to let the curriculum of our failures teach us what we could not otherwise have learned.

The Fathers had a word for this slow burning: theosis, divinization, the gradual transformation of the human person into something more like the God in whose image we were made. It is not comfortable, this burning. It is not efficient. It does not proceed according to any schedule we would have chosen for ourselves. But the Fire is always burning, the invitation is always open, and the Theotokos is always there at the threshold, permitting us to ask the questions whose answers she has carried in her heart since before we were born.

We are the ones who need to speak. And in the speaking—awkward, halting, never quite adequate to the mystery we are attempting to name—we are set on Fire.

1. https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/classic-poetry/episode-eleven-the-lantern-out-of-doors-by-gerard-manley-hopkins-classic-poetry-with-jonathan-roumie/

2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45563/the-virgin