loss of faith – Northcoast Antiquarian

A Liturgy for Those Who Have Forgotten the Words

Confessional — Photo by Arina Krasnikova on Pexels.com

Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned,
It has been… we cannot count the years—
since we knew what sin meant.

We mouth the words the nuns and priests once taught us,
but the syllables taste foreign now,
like prayers in a dead language
we pretend to understand.

We have forgotten why we kneel,
though still our knees recall the stone.
We have lost the thread of what was broken,
but feel the weight of something severed.

We built cathedrals out of doubt
and filled them with our questions.
We replaced altars with algorithms,
confession with comment sections.

We are no longer sure You are listening—
or if listening is something we invented
to make the silence bearable,
the vastness less vacant.

We have sinned—we think—
though we are not sure against what.
Against nature? Against each other?
Against some half-remembered covenant,
written in a script we can no longer read?

We recite the forms like actors
who have forgotten their motivation,
performing the ancient motions
because they feel like muscle memory—
like DNA calling us home
to a house we are no longer certain exists.

Still we gather, still we whisper
these inherited incantations,
hoping they might still hold power,
hoping the words might remember
what we have forgotten.