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Christianity seems to have been, for quite a few centuries, a question of morals and ethics. A Christian doesn’t do this, and a Christian doesn’t do that. But that’s not Christianity. That’s a juridical approach to love. If you want to kill love, approach it juridically.
It’s relatively easy to go to confession and to say, “I have been angry,” “I didn’t say my prayers,” “I committed adultery or fornication,”: and so on; to get absolution and feel as clean as if I took a sauna instead of just a cold water bath without soap. For that’s what it amounts to.
Our confessions can be superficial and not go deep enough. If they are superficial, we haven’t really gone into the caverns and caves of our souls. We’ve wrapped a lot of things in cellophane and stuck them on the shelves of the caverns, when they should have been brought forth.
But we let them be, and like splinters, they fester in our souls.
We are pilgrims of the Absolute whether we realize it or not. Think about the youth who come to Madonna House.* What are they looking for? God. Modern youth realize that they are missing something.
To find it, they go into drugs and sex, and they go travelling. Everything so far has left them dissatisfied. They are pilgrims of what they as yet do not know is the Absolute. Their desire is the same desire we all have in us: for God, for Jesus Christ.
When you begin to be a pilgrim of the Absolute, you want to change everything around you. It takes long inner pilgrimages and much pain to find out that the first thing you have to change is yourself.
Lots of people never get started, because they don’t even know that they are in an alien country, not their eternal home. Many find it out too late.
But as long as we are alive, we can say, “Lord, have mercy on me” and he will save us. The Lord is compassionate and merciful to sinners. After we are sorry for a sin and turn to God, it becomes a glorious fault.
Eastern Christians weep over their sins because they see their sins as an offence against charity, against God who is love, and against other people.
For when I commit a sin, be it hidden in the dark recesses of my personal life or apartment or wherever, I sin against the whole Body of Christ, against all the people of God.
Not matter how hidden my sin, it reverberates across the rest of the world. For I am so deeply united with all of mankind that what I do affects the whole world, and what I don’t do also affects the whole world.
Let’s stop for a moment and think what has been given to us by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Our Lord: a new life! It is so fantastic!
With God, every moment is the moment of beginning again! At any given moment, your life is renewed. The light of repentance, the “Lenten Spring,” has come.
For this we pray. The moment we accept this repentance, the new life is in us. We are so blessed!
*Catherine was talking about the youth of the ‘60s. But those coming to Madonna House now, though very different in many ways from those of the ‘60s, are also hungry for God..
Excerpted from Season of Mercy, (1996), pp. 61-62, available from MH Publications
