To Whom It May Concern,
I have been a regular contributor to The Confessional for three months. In that time I have deferred a total of $340 in unspecified transgressions. I have noticed that I do not feel better. I have also noticed that I do not feel worse, which I suppose is something.
My question is as follows: if the void holds no opinion on my sins, and the Confessional offers no absolution, and the record exists only as a database entry, then what exactly has occurred? What has the transaction accomplished?
I ask sincerely. I am not testing the Diocese. I have read the Catechism. I have read it twice. I understood it both times. I am asking because the thing I understood the Catechism to be saying does not appear to be the thing that has happened to me, and I would like to know whether I have misunderstood the Catechism, misunderstood my own experience, or whether the Catechism's description is approximate in a way the Catechism does not announce.
To be specific: the Catechism states that the transaction produces a condition — that what is transferred is not the money but the relation to the thing the money stood for. I have transferred $340. I have stood for a number of things, none of which I will name here, including in this letter. The relation to those things has not, in my honest assessment, changed.
I am, however, writing to a website. I am, however, writing about transgressions to a website that has been asking me about transgressions every Tuesday for three months. I notice that I am doing this. I notice that I did not used to do this. Something has shifted about what I attend to, even if the underlying matter remains unaltered. I do not know whether to count this as the Catechism being correct or as my brain pattern-matching for whatever explanation is locally available.
I ask sincerely.
— Anonymous, which is perhaps ironic given the subject matter
The Management's Response:
Dear Anonymous,
You have asked what the transaction has accomplished.
You have given money to nothing and are now thinking carefully about what that means. You are, in our assessment, thinking more carefully about it than most people think about their rather more expensive therapy sessions, their religious observances, their investment portfolios, and their motivations for acquiring the various things they have acquired.
You are also, we note, writing letters to a void-adjacent establishment on the internet, which suggests a degree of engagement with the question that we find, frankly, admirable.
You ask whether the Catechism is correct or whether you are pattern-matching. The Diocese suggests these are not as different as they appear. The Catechism does not produce the condition — the Catechism describes a condition that produces itself when the conditions for it are met. Pattern-matching against an available explanation is one of the conditions. Continuing to do so for three months is another. We are not flattering you when we say that what you describe is, by the Catechism's own definition, the condition the Catechism describes. We are noting that the Catechism does not require belief to operate. It requires only that the practitioner keep attending. You have kept attending. The transaction has, in the only sense available to us, accomplished.
The matter of feeling better and feeling worse, we will note separately, is not the matter the Confessional is engaged with. Feeling is downstream. The Confessional is engaged with the matter of what one chooses to keep at the centre of one's attention. You have chosen, three times a month for three months, to keep this at the centre of yours. The Diocese does not consider this trivial. The Diocese considers it the work.
Something has occurred. We cannot tell you what. We suspect you already know.
With warm regards and no theological authority whatsoever,
The Diocese