shrive
If you’ve never wandered around the weird old section of google books, I recommend it forthwith. There, I found a book which I will not attempt to refer to by its excessively long title, and only as An Universal Etymological English Dictionary by Nathan Bailey. I found this word shrive, which means “to make a confession to a priest or to hear a confession.” There were actually a second and third definition as well, being “to meet or reveal,” and “to write lifted up in a Roll” (whatever that means? the book was published in 1775, haha), but I was only able to confirm the first.
Shrive, according to Webster Dictionary, meaning “to either receive a confession of sins or to offer absolution and penance,” comes from the Old English scrifan through the Middle English shryven. The oldest variant, scrifan, is more removed from the religious connotation, and deals mostly with passing judgement and decrees. An interesting aside, apparently the phrase, short shrift, is from the noun form of scrifan, and referred to the time condemned individuals were given for confessions before their executions.
The English words are borrowed from a derivative of the Latin scribere, which is even further removed, meaning strictly "to write." The connotation here, however, is of carving words into stone, or clay. The Proto-Indo-European root is skribh-, which means “to cut, separate, tear or scratch,” and that connection is pretty clear.
