How do you handle confession?
I'm divided on whether or how to go to confession. My background is I'm a gay 40-something marriage gay man with two kids, and the church I go to in NYC is fine with LGBTQ people as far as I can tell (my kids were baptized without any issue, etc.).
The problem isn't the parish, it's the wider Church and how I'm supposed to fit into it. Showing up at Mass lets a lot of stuff stay implicit. Confession forces it to be explicit. My understanding of the theory is that you confess everything the Church counts as sin and get a full reset. I can't confess on those terms. At minimum I think the sex I have inside my own marriage is fine, and honestly I think much of the sex I had outside marriage before that was fine too.
So what do I even do with that? Do I tell the priest up front, look, there's other stuff the Church would call sin but I don't agree, so this is a partial confession under your rules? Is he even allowed to work with that? Do I spell out what I'm counting as wrong and not wrong, or leave it vague and let him assume whatever he assumes? I don't know. Curious what other people here actually do. To be clear, it's not like I did something particularly wrong, but I just feel like it'd be good to periodically go to confession and I just don't have a workable way of doing so.
My sense is the best way to do this is just confess the stuff I actually feel bad about and leave the rest out completely. At its most fundamental level, confession is for what your conscience tells you is a sin. If I don't think it's something I really need to confess, there's no reason to make a whole announcement about leaving it out. Fine, maybe a conservative views it as an invalid confession; but it's the closest workable solution I can think of.