`Father after confession is it normal to feel a burden ?
`Why to feel a burden? By a correct confession all the past sins are erased. New perspectives are opened. The Grace of God comes and changes the man completely.
Disorder, cruelty, worry go away and in their place peace and calmness install.
This thing is so profoundly felt even on the outside that I tell some people to take pictures with themselves before confession and afterwards and see the good change, as on the face is shown the inner spiritual state. The sacraments of the Church make wonders. The more someone approaches God – Jesus Christ the Man – the more he deifies himself and it is natural to spread the divine grace and mirror it.
`Father, after a sincere confession you must immediately feel joy?`
`Not always. It may be possible not to be immediately joyful but the joy appears slowly in your soul. After confession it is necessary the acknowledgement with magnanimity. To feel like someone who is forgiven for a great debt and out of his magnanimity he feels gratitude and feels he owed his benefactor. Thank God but in the same time feel the psalm: `: For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.[1], in order not to dare repeat the same mistakes again.
`Father I read somewhere that the devils will torment us in the afterlife even for a bad thought we didn`t confess.`
`Listen, when the man repents and he tells his confessor everything he remembers without having the intention to hide something, it is over. The devil has no more power on him. But when he intentionally does not confess all his sins, he will be tormented in the afterlife for these.
`Father , when someone confessed his sins from his youth but thinks about them and suffers is his attitude right?`
`If he has a great repentance for the sins of his youth and confessed them there is no reason to suffer while Gid forgave them in the moment he confessed them. From that moment on he should not turn back to the past ones especially to the physical sins because he can harm himself. For example in a war a grenade falls near a soldier but God protects him and this doesn`t explode.
After the war is ended the soldier finds the grenade which hadn`t exploded and starts to examine it out of curiosity and in the end he is killed in times of peace.
[1] Ps. 50, 3.
Excerpt from Spiritual struggle – Pious Paisios the Athonite, Evanghelismos Publishing.
