The season of Lent prepares us to renew our baptismal promises, which we will do on Easter Sunday. A good Lent should help us recommit ourselves to that seeking for holiness, which should be what our life in Christ means for us as Christians, as Catholics. If we seek holiness, as St. John Paul II reminded us, then “it would be a contradiction for us to settle for a life of mediocrity marked by a minimalist ethic and a superficial religiosity.”
Through the special tasks of our Lenten observance, that is through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, we are to work on resolving “those contradictions” in our life that divert us from the pursuit of holiness. Like the Hebrews who were slaves in Egypt, we are called to “exodus” — to come out and leave behind the fleshpots of Egypt, to leave behind habits of sin, those attitudes that harden our hearts to God and to our neighbor. This “exodus” is necessary if we are to “pass over” from death to life, from sin to forgiveness, from slavery to vice to freedom.
We read in the lives of the saints how they often spoke of their sinfulness. This was not some false humility but simply a statement of stark reality. The Gospel calls us out of that reality into a new one. As Pope Francis wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium,” “The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts of all who encounter Jesus; those who accept the love of God and his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness.”
There are those who think that they have made such a mess of their lives that God wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them. They are, of course, quite wrong. Zaccheus and Levi, the tax collector, had taken wrong paths but Jesus ate with them; the woman caught in adultery, and the Samaritan woman had made messes of their lives and yet Jesus loved them.
He loved them in truth; that is, without either the sentimentality or false compassion that would excuse the sin or pretend that it didn’t matter. He wanted to restore them to wholeness, to bring them back into a wholesome way of living. That was news to their ears, indeed, very good news.
Some people accuse Catholicism of laying “guilt trips” on people. You hear some fallen away Catholics speaking about “Catholic guilt” — and they brag about “growing out” of it.
Nevertheless, the church dares to speak about unpopular, politically incorrect things like sin. She dares to invite us to consider our participation in sin and to seek God’s forgiveness. But this is not about a “guilt trip”; it is about a “reality check,” which can also be called an “examination of conscience.”
Such an examination of conscience should challenge us to change our minds about the way we think, to change our hearts about those Gospel teachings we might prefer to ignore and to change our ways about those habits of sin that hobble us along the way that Jesus points out. But God never gives up on us. For this reason, if it is true that every saint has a past, it is also true that every sinner has a future. The door to that future is always open for us: it is the door of the confessional where sins committed after baptism are forgiven.
Of course, guilt can burden us; but, get rid of the sin, and you get rid of the guilt. Go to confession and receive the Sacrament of Penance this Lenten season. God never gives up on us until he has forgiven the wrong and overcomes our rejection with compassion and mercy.
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