A while back, I hadn’t been to confession in a month and a half. That might not seem like a long time, but I’m used to going twice a month, sometimes once a week. But for that month and a half, I neglected confession because of my experience with the priest.

My Worst Confession

That Saturday, I ended up at a parish far from where I lived. I knew all the priests nearby, so it felt weird to go to them. Whenever I visit a parish for confession I enter sheepishly, feeling the strangeness of a new place, a new priest, and confessing my sins to a stranger.

When I began, the priest seemed like he was in a hurry and rushed me through. Then I mentioned a struggle my fiancé and I were going through. That piqued his interest and he asked me to explain.

When I did, he started monologuing advice. Terrible advice, actually. Like life-altering, stop-everything-you’re-doing advice.

It was stupid. He didn’t know me at all, and I knew that meant I shouldn’t listen to him. But even though I knew it was terrible advice, it still stuck with me. It struck me how potent bad advice is. Which made me think about how import it is to give good counsel.

Good and Bad Counsel

When I was in high school, I had a high opinion of my gift of counsel. Often, I gave rather wise and insightful advice to my friends. But sometimes, I would just give my knee-jerk opinion as if it was advice.

I loved it when my friends came to me for advice on their relationships (even though I had never been in one.) Sometimes, I was giving advice and helping them, other times I just gave my opinion on what they should do and patted myself on the back.

Obviously, my advice was good because people kept asking me, so I thought I had a strong gift for counsel. But the gift of counsel is not about giving advice. It’s a gift of the Spirit rooted in Wisdom.

Any good counselor will tell you that the job isn’t about giving advice. It’s about leading someone to discover the truth on their own. When I was younger, I would just judge the situation based on what little information I had and give my verdict. Just like that priest did.

Counsel is a gift of the Holy Spirit rooted in Wisdom. Wisdom involves knowing when to speak and when to listen. It involves a knowledge of yourself and the other person, and most importantly, knowledge of the Cross.

You need to know yourself and your sufferings, the other person and their sufferings, and Christ and His sufferings.

Counsel of the Holy Spirit

The wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and therefore His counsel, is not rooted in the wisdom of the world, but in the Cross of Christ. It counts suffering as the greatest thing you could do for a loved one, even when love is hard.

The Spirit of Wisdom embraces suffering on behalf of others. It doesn’t take the self into consideration AND it leads not to permanent death but to resurrection.

Immediately after that confession, I was able to talk to a priest friend of mine. He didn’t respond by telling me what to do. He just asked me a question: Have you felt God calling you in this direction before? This question snapped me out of emotional decision-making and helped me see the movement of God in my life. A movement inconsistent with what I heard in confession.

He was reminding me to focus on God’s plan and not my own judgments (or someone else’s). That’s true counsel: reminding another person of God’s plan and helping them see it.

Most often, counsel consists of asking questions, not giving commands. Often, the most damaging advice is advice that comes from our own woundedness, cynicism, and distrust.

Next time you give someone counsel, don’t try to see into their heart. Ask God to help you see into your heart and help them see into theirs.