Christian spirituality: A good way to return

Cara Delevingne once appeared at the Met Gala dressed as a confessional. Not simply inspired by it but enclosed within it – a structure worn rather than entered. The image was striking, even unsettling.

The confessional, traditionally a place of hidden speech, became something explicit, performative, almost theatrical. What is normally approached in silence was instead placed on display.

And, yet, something in the image resists easy interpretation. The structure resembles not only a confessional but a kind of enclosure – even a cell. What was once a place of return begins to look like something one might wish to escape from.

We often imagine freedom as the absence of structure – as the ability to move without constraint, to define ourselves without form. In this light, the confessional can easily appear as a limit: a place of judgement, enclosure, or control. But this assumes that freedom begins from a position of clarity and strength. It rarely does.

More often, it begins after failure – after we have already stepped back from what we had recognised as true. If this is so, then the question is not whether structure limits freedom but whether freedom is possible without it.

Without structure, failure does not lead to freedom – it leads to repetition

For what allows us to begin again? Not simply feeling differently, nor expressing oneself more fully but returning – deliberately – to a form that can hold what one can no longer hold alone. Without structure, failure does not lead to freedom – it leads to repetition.

The confessional belongs to this kind of structure. Not as constraint but as a place where truth may be spoken again without being mastered.

It is not surprising, then, that such structures sit uneasily within contemporary culture. The relationship between the Church and the artistic world – visible again in recent collaborations at the Venice Biennale – continues to oscillate between attraction and resistance. Forms that once mediated meaning now risk appearing as impositions upon it.

And, yet, the question remains; not whether structure restricts us but whether we can do without it when we falter. For if failure is not the exception but the condition from which we begin again, then freedom cannot be sustained by expression alone. It requires a way of returning that does not depend on how we feel in the moment.

The confessional does not resolve this tension. It does not eliminate ambiguity, nor does it restore innocence. What it offers is more modest and, perhaps more demanding, a place where one may speak again without having first resolved oneself. A structure that receives what is fractured without requiring it to be whole.

The confessional can be worn, reimagined, even resisted. It can appear as a constraint, or as something to outgrow. But when freedom falters – as it often does – what remains is not the need to express more but the need for a way back that does not depend on strength.

Such a way does not impose itself. It remains, quietly, as a possibility. Not as a solution  but as an opening – one that asks not for certainty but for the courage to return without resentment.

jean.claude.attard@maltadiocese.org