Offered by Dcn. George Kelly

 

In his book How the Light Gets In, the late poet and essayist Brian Doyle reflects on “the one sweet thing about being Catholic”: Confession, asking for and receiving forgiveness….  Doyle learned, the “crucial part” of the sacrament comes “after you leave the church.”  He wrote: “. . . You walk To the river and while you are pretending to watch for herons You envision each person against whose holiness you did sin, And to each you apologize, and ask for forgiveness. Some of Them are long gone from this world but not from the Infinite Mercy who remembers all levels and forgetteth not a sparrow.

 

You are absolved not when a man says so but when you have Asked, with every fiber of your being, to be forgiven, to walk Home clean, to start again, to be possible. What we really ask For in the sacrament of reconciliation is to be a question mark Again, to be verb, to be not what we did but what we might

Yet be able to do; a map of the unknown, an unfinished song.”

 

When Jesus calls us to “repent,” he’s not calling us to cease and desist; he’s not

calling us out for our sins and failures. “Repentance” is a call to change, to look at our lives and our world in a new light, to become the person of hope and faith we seek to be. The Eastern Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware writes that, correctly understood, repentance “means, not self-pity or remorse, but conversion, the recentering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look, not backward with regret, but forward with hope — not downwards at our own shortcomings, but upwards at God’s love.

 

It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that need to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.”   [From The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware.]

 

Today give thanks for the grace of forgiveness that God has given you look forward to today with Hope and Awareness of God’s great love for you.

 

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saint Andre Bessette intercede for us.

May God Be Praised!