Confession is one of those "Catholic things". This post is not to justify the sacrament, perhaps other than to say that as humans we have a deep-seated, human need to hear another human say "You are forgiven".
Catholics are strongly encouraged to go to Confession/Reconciliation at least twice a year...Advent and Lent.
My adherence to that has not been very good.
During the course of rattling off my sins for the past two years (or so) I said I had not killed anybody since my last confession, unless you include the people I have killed on the written page.
That body count weighs in at about 300,000,000 and counting.
My biggest sin is that I struggle to look at some people (you can guess who) and see them as fellow children of God.
Father Dwight dug a little more deeply.
...one of the brilliant things about how Catholics approach sin is that we realize that sin is just too tempting. The way to avoid sin is not to be strong but to avoid putting ourselves within the shadow of temptation. In archaic language, to put ourselves into "the near occasion of sin".
That would be like the alcoholic never driving down the street where his favorite watering-hole was.
Father Dwight gently suggested that I avoid watching the TV news (easy since I only watch TV at Mom's) and visiting the websites that trigger less-than-Christian attitudes (crap, crap, crap, crap).
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to filter out all news pieces based on a list of words? For example, I would be a better Christian if I never saw the words "Pelosi", "Biden", "Fauci", "Occasional-Cortex", "Whitler", "Sabin" and so on.
On the wall here near my desk I have "Angelus" by Jean-Francois Milet. I find it very calming and a reminder that these present situations are transitory and there are things much more eternal which God will provide for us.---ken
ReplyDeleteMay I suggest that we are all created by God but we are not children of God until we accept Him as our Lord and Savior.
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