Catholic activist and journalist Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) once received feedback that her writing was "too grim, too realistic." Indeed, if you open her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, it is quickly clear there is no embellishment, nothing that could be equivocated with aesthetics. Day relies on the purest of words to tell the story of her conversion to Catholicism, her life as a journalist and activist, and her deep love and empathy for those in need.

The Long Loneliness is, as you might now realize, a confession.

Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are 'giving yourself away.' But if you love, you want to give yourself.

"It is the stripping away of protection..." poet David Whyte defines confession and other words that have become innocuous with overuse. This act traditionally associated with Christianity is available informally to all humans as a means of self-confrontation and reconciliation. "The telling of the truth" and what one gains from it, according to Whyte, is "freedom from deception."

Dorothy Day, head of Catholic Worker inside the worker office at 175 Christie Street. Photograph by Judd Mehlman.

In Christianity, the sacrament of confession began as an assertion of one's faith, to stand and "confess" one's humility before God. Today, as frequented by Day, it is used more to express and atone. It is still, however, a means to self-understand. Or, as Day poignantly stated, it is a way of dragging out truths into the light of day.

When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness. There is another sound too, besides that of the quiet movements of the people from pew to confession to altar rail; there is the sliding of the shutters of the little window between you and the priest in his "box."

At the end of the 1950s, in his collection Life Studies, Robert Lowell unleashed what would be known as "confessional poetry" to reflect on the state of the ostensible perfect family home life. In a collection of soul-bearing prose and poetry, Lowell opened up a well-known and deeply respected Boston family (who have a Harvard building in their name) to the voyeuristic eyes of the public.

All was not well here, he confessed, page after page.

The development of the word "confession" has changed rapidly even since Lowell. I return to Day's depiction of the wooded space, the care she put into describing what it was like to go to confession, and how it required place and audience. How often do individuals use the space of social media as a confessional? Does it have the same effect as the traditional act of confession?

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

"Confession is not passive," continues Whyte. "It is not the simple ability to face up to past wrongs - an active dynamic is foundational to the original meaning."

This active dynamic is not only historically significant; it makes confession complicated.

Day continues:

Going to confession is hard-hard when you have sins to confess, hard when you haven't, and you rack your brain for even the beginnings of sins against charity, chastity, sins of detraction, sloth or gluttony. You do not want to make too much of your constant imperfections and venial sins, but you want to drag them out to the light of day as the first step in getting rid of them. The just man falls seven times daily. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," is the way you begin. "I made my last confession a week ago, and since then..." Properly, one should say the Confiteor, but the priest has no time for that, what with the long lines of penitents on a Saturday night, so you are supposed to say it outside the confessional as you kneel in a pew, or as you stand in line with others. "I have sinned. These are my sins." That is all you are supposed to tell; not the sins of others, or your own virtues, but only your ugly, gray, drab, monotonous sins.

John Steinbeck used to write daily letters to his friend and publisher Pascal Corvici - some sent, some not - in which he'd admit his scathing self-doubt, bitterness at others, and monotonous sins.

Well, not sins per se, but indeed aspects of Steinbeck's psyche he wanted cleansed. Letter writing was a formidable form of self-expression, even reconciliation throughout Steinbeck's life. These particular letters (gathered here) functioned as a meditative breakthrough that allowed Steinbeck to spend the rest of the day writing his fiction.

The two are closely related: notes Day, writing, and confessing. They both contain the act of heaving something internal into the light of day, exhaling all that we are into the ear of another.

When one writes the story of his life and the work he has been engaged in, it is a confession too, in a way. When I wrote the story of my conversion twelve years ago, I left out all my sins but told of all the things which had brought me to God, all the beautiful things, all the remembrances of God that had haunted me, pursued me over the years so that when my daughter was born, in grateful joy I turned to God and became a Catholic. I could worship, adore, praise and thank Him in the company of others. It is difficult to do that without a ritual, without a body with which to love and move, love and praise.

 Rouen Cathedral stairs. Is there a more beautiful journey upwards?

Writing is saying what is often impossible to say, admitted Rebecca Solnit in her guide on the narratives we use to structure our lives and consciousness. It is a fleeting, difficult illumination, and, as Day articulates, brought into being through ritual.

Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are "giving yourself away." But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man's problems are the same, his human needs of sustenance and love. "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" the Psalmist asks, and he indicates man's immense dignity when he says, "Thou hast made him a little less than the angels." He is made in the image and likeness of God, he is a temple of the Holy Spirit. He is of tremendous importance. What is man, where is he going, what is his destiny? It is a mystery. We are sons of God, and "it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God." I can write only of myself, what I know of myself.

Is confession to protect ourselves from the truth? A humbling before that truth, perhaps not doing it again?

What of the self-referential autobiographies of Stephen Fry, who leads with an apology for apologizing... even though we know the book we're about to consume is full of the same. Or the deeply honest, personal, and at times shocking essays of David Wojnarowicz, or the more produced yet still truthful notes of Andy Warhol?

However we arrive at confession, formally or otherwise, it is not a single act, nor a multiple act. It is a lifelong series of repeated, meditative, consistent acts done so sequentially they become habitual. Strung together collectively to ease the burden of being human, flawed, and gorgeous.