Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Sr.AnneMarie Walsh’s Zoom Meeting
Time: Sep 9, 2024 07:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
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Becoming a True Prepper
There is a whole industry today built around people’s anxiety to be prepared in the event of a catastrophic disaster, both natural and man-made. How would you survive if there was a nuclear war, if there was an asteroid hit, or if the grid was completely knocked out? It’s the dilemma of Lazarus. Jesus raised him from the dead at his sisters’ pleading. But his reprieve from death was temporary. He eventually had to be prepared to die again. You can bet, though, that the time between his first death and second death served to detach him even more from this present life so that he was fully ready when it came time to die again.
You start thinking about these things when you assess the real-time threats we face. It is true that we are called to read the signs of the time and be responsibly prepared. But our goal has to be more than saving ourselves and our life here. Jesus warns us that seeking to save ourselves alone is a futile exercise.
“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?” Mt 16: 25-26 In other words, we can’t save ourselves. But if we give ourselves to Jesus, He can. Only Jesus has the necessary ransom.
Jesus also reminds us that, practically speaking, the Father knows what we need and providentially provides for us unless we reject his help. Yes, he expects us to do our part, but at the same time, we understand that not a detail about us and our needs is overlooked by the Lord. Instead, the Lord wants us to focus on the better part that Mary recognized before Martha did. That would be listening to and following the Master Himself instead of trying to “manage” everything on our own.
To be a real prepper means you are prepping not just for time but, more importantly, for eternity. Yes, we are responsible stewards of the gifts we have here. But the eternal gifts we seek are in the care of Jesus, Whom we must follow, constantly aware that it’s the spiritual treasures we seek to store up and the earthly treasures we let go of in order to carry the Cross.
One measure of preparation can be found by looking at your relationships. Would you feel at peace and happy with all your current relationships if God suddenly called you?
Would you be prepared to see people in heaven you may consider enemies at the moment? This is critical. We are not forgiven unless we forgive. If we have any unforgiveness in us, then we are not ready. We need to do some real prepping. A friend who was struggling in a marriage had a dream she died along with her husband. They both ended up in two different lines, one obviously headed into Heaven and the other not. She said she couldn’t believe her husband ended up in the “saved” line while she did not. Her immediate reaction was: How did he end up in “that” line? Her perspective in eternity was not the same. Nor will our perspective be the same at the end of our lives.
Imagine being on a plane that suddenly starts to go down. Everyone believes they have minutes, maybe seconds, to live. What would be important to you in that moment? All your belongings and possessions? Your relationships? Your spiritual state? One of our priests related such an incident. He was on a plane struck by lightning, and the plane began a dive, which, fortunately, the pilot was able to pull out of. But in the moment when everyone thought they were about to die, he said he sprang into action. Not being able to imagine what that meant, his audience asked him: “What did you do?” His answer: “I gave everyone General Absolution!” That’s a true “prepper!”
Time is a sort of dress rehearsal for eternity. We work to get things right in time so that we can live them in eternity. If we’re prepping for the here and now, we’re thinking short-term only. And unless we learn to prep for eternal life, none of the other prep will matter.
It’s often been said that God gives us the leaders we deserve. If that’s true, we should then do everything in our power to become worthy of good leaders. Everyone who grows anything knows that the stock you start out with is very important. If the stock is not healthy, it will not produce good fruit. Simply saying this, in a political season, can bring about the pressing temptation to pivot to our leaders and complain about our options.
But the point is that reform begins with ourselves. If we want good leaders, we have to become good ourselves. It’s as simple as that. As a people, we produce our own leaders. But if we are trying to produce leadership without any connection to or real reference to God, and if the criteria for a good leader have become completely secularized, we are going to run right up against the impossibility of bringing anything good out of it. God the Father is the source of every good gift, and if we are honest, we soon recognize that without his gifts, we can do nothing.
Someone will immediately suggest God is the one Who has withdrawn his gifts from us and that is the reason we are in the trouble we are. But really, God does not like to take back His gifts once He gives them. And upon honest reflection, we have to admit that God has not withdrawn his gifts, but rather, we have rejected them. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say we want the gifts, but we don’t want the conditions that go along with the gifts, such as striving to live a life that is without sin and that is really pleasing to God as the source of our real happiness
This does not mean we will see perfection in those who acknowledge God, but rather that God will use present weaknesses for His purposes and to manifest His power. David was such a man. Chosen and anointed by God, he struggled mightily at times with his own weaknesses. Yet his relationship with the Lord was so strong that he never became separated from God but turned to Him immediately in his falls (seducing Bathsheba, killing her husband Uriah, calling for a census whose repercussions resulted in the death of 70,000 people.) One of the most beautiful prayers of contrition and repentance is found in Psalm 51. “Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness. In your compassion, blot out my offense.” This is David casting himself upon the Lord’s mercy. This is David manifesting his heart but also revealing the heart of God at the same time. David’s relationship with the Lord was so intimate that God Himself said of David that he was a man after his own heart! Imagine entering heaven and hearing the Father exclaim: “Here comes a daughter (a son) after my own Heart! What living soul wouldn’t thrill to hear those words? These are the leaders we really need!
Leaders often think it is their business to create new morality. It is not! God has given His people a morality to follow, and any leader who tries to replace it commits the original sin on a massive scale. Adam and Eve rebelled by deciding they and not God should determine what was right and wrong. Likewise, any leader who rejects God’s sovereignty in this area will lead his people to doom. That would be Lucifer taking his followers down to hell. Make no mistake: a leader has the capacity to set you on one of two paths only: a path to heaven or a path to hell. That’s it! Because the authority of leaders comes from God himself it doesn’t matter if you reject God’s order. You will, in the end, be judged by it.
To be authentic and faithful followers of Christ requires courage. Unanimity can be very compelling, and resisting that force when it is a moral question can be very difficult for one individual against the crowd. Perhaps if we kept the words of Dwight D Eisenhower in mind: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups,” we would be more cautious in blindly following the latest “advancement” or “progress” proposed to us by our “leaders.” And, please God, we would be far more prayerful, discerning, and cautious in actually choosing our leaders according to the purposes for which God has put them in their position!
Please note: Leadership permeates every aspect of our lives. Think outside the box. Don’t focus primarily on politics. Politics simply manifests gross problems that have developed over time in many other areas. They are not the root of the problem.
Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Monday, July 15, 2024, 6:30 pm mountain time; 7:30pm central
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Living life by a particular motto can have untold benefits. Many of the saints had mottoes to which they oriented their entire lives. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?” That motto spoke to St. Anthony of the desert as the conversion or turning point of his entire life. We may be familiar with other mottoes, such as Padre Pio’s “Pray, hope, and don’t worry.” Or, Pope St. John Paul II, who entrusted his life to the care and protection of Our Blessed Moth and encapsulated this in his papal motto: “Totus Tuus,””, meaning “Totally Yours.” St. Junipero Serra’s motto was “Always forward, never back.” Padre Miguel Pro, who was martyred for the faith in Mexico during the Cristero uprising against the government and who died by firing squad, proclaimed the motto he lived his life by: “Viva Christo Re!” or, “Long live Christ the King.”
Each of us lives our lives according to our beliefs and the way we understand life in general. At the end of our lives, we are generally tagged accordingly. “She was so kind.” “He was a good father.” etc. Someone whose motto for life is “Be a friend to everyone” will live their lives much differently than someone whose motto is “Success at all costs.”
When the idea of mottoes was presented to a group of grade school children, and they were asked to come up with a motto for their lives, the usual answers were given: “Do unto others. As you would have them do unto you.” “Say only the good things people need to hear,” or in Mom language: “if you don’t have anything good to say, keep your mouth shut.” But one little girl had another take, which amused the teacher. Her motto was: “Ladies go first!”
We can overlook the natural egocentrism of a child. Norm, we grow out of the more blatant forms as we mature both humanly and spiritually, though the tension is always there. It’s the tension again between what Bp. Barron calls the Ego-drama vs. the Theo-drama. Whose script for our lives are we following? God’s or one of our own making? Imagine you are watching a performance of Swan Lake but something is really off. You begin to notice that one of the ballerinas seems to be out of sync with everyone else. After a while, you realize she is improvising her own choreography to grab some attention for herself. That is the mark of ego. Self-exaltation can mar even the performance of a masterpiece.
In God’s sovereign drama (salvation history), we have crucial roles, especially as Catholics! Many saints bemoan the fact that if Catholics only lived the way they should, the world would be in much better shape. But sometimes, it’s precisely Catholics who are unforgiving, filled with ambition, and unwilling to drop rivalries that witness more to secular concerns than the building up of the Kingdom of God. Discovering our actual place in the Theo-drama on the other hand is exciting and eternally productive even if the rest of the world never recognizes it. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen noted, no one comes into the world not caring if their life has a meaning. Everyone wants to be known or remembered for something. Committing yourself to playing your part within God’s drama will take you beyond yourself into living out the deepest significance your life could have. Simply striving for holiness uplifts the whole Body of Christ and changes the world for the better.
It’s always a good time to stop and ask yourself what the real driving force in your life is. Sometimes this means being brutally honest with yourself, acknowledging any discrepancies between what you say and how you actually live. Sometimes it means acknowledging where you have drifted away from the ideals you committed yourself to at one point, so you can get back into the Divine drama unfolding all around you. It almost always involves humbling ourselves so that God can lift us up to where we belong. We’ll never be able to do it alone. To serve that end, a short little motto can give us the direction we need. Ask God to show you the unique motto for your life!
Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Tragedy and the Power of Prayer
Monday, May 13, 2024 7:30pm central time/6:30 pm mountain time
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Meeting ID: 651 696 9698
Tragedy and the Power of Prayer
A dear friend of mine recently lost a grown daughter to suicide. The daughter was a wife and a mother of two teenagers. My friend, who is a devout Catholic, has been almost inconsolable so much has this death shocked the whole family. None of them saw any signs that this was coming. There was no explanation for this sudden happening, only unfiltered speculations on what brought the daughter to this point, none of which could touch the acute pain they have been in since her death.
One expression (which is roundly rebuffed by those suffering this tragedy) is the oft-repeated, almost trite observation that suicide “is a permanent answer to a temporary problem.” It may be ok to make this remark to someone currently struggling with suicidal ideation. But to use it with the “survivors” is insensitive and even cruel. It hangs in the air like a judgment, words weighted with hopelessness. When one is actively mourning, what is one to do with words like that? They are like a weight that can cause people to drown, that can destroy marriages, and that can take the light and joy out of family gatherings and individual hearts.
Over recent years, the Church has moderated its position in relation to those who commit suicide. Though the act itself is gravely disordered and immoral, the culpability of the person who commits suicide is greatly affected by their interior state and whether or not they actually fulfilled the three conditions that make a sin mortal. The first condition is that objectively speaking, the action is gravely serious. Murder is the obvious example, though there are plenty of other sins that are objectively mortal, such as marital infidelity, destroying another’s reputation intentionally, deliberately missing Mass, etc. The second condition is that you must know something is gravely sinful. And third, you must freely choose to do it.
The third condition gets the most attention in this context because we’ve come to recognize that many people who choose to commit suicide are in such interior pain that they see suicide as the only escape, the only way to make it stop. People can be led by all sorts of emotions, psychological difficulties, and imbalances. The key is whether they freely chose or were compelled by the influence of sickness, pain, or mental illness.
Henry David Thoreau famously said: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.” And this is why we may never judge another. We do not know the secrets of their hearts and the torments that are stored in their memories. And we can never know fully their current distress. Our call is always and only to love them.
So how do we love our loved ones who choose such a devastating course as suicide? By loving ourselves first and taking refuge in the Lord’s promises and gifts. We believe that no one is beyond Redemption and that our prayers, even now, are efficacious for our loved ones who’ve already gone into eternity. When a soul is presented before God at the end of life, God takes into account many factors; key among them are the prayers that have been and will be prayed for that person. Padre Pio explained that for the Lord, the past and future do not exist. There is only an eternal present. Thus, Padre Pio regularly prayed for his grandfather who had died many years earlier. God knows how many people will pray for a soul, and sometimes the difference between eternal life and eternal death hinges on those prayers. Our Lady at Fatima said that so many people go to hell because they have no one to pray for them, no one to implore grace for them, graces which will be used to save them. To this end, we are invited to pray special prayers with special power and promises attached, in particular the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Masses and the Rosary are among the most powerful channels of grace as well. At these times, our refuge is prayer and the hopeful belief that God will allow our love to follow those we have lost even into eternity, where the Lord’s timeless love can fully redeem them!
FACING OUR IMMORTALITY Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Finding Our True Selves
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FINDING OUR TRUE SELVES
Blessed Carlo Acutis, the young Catholic, Italian website designer who died of Leukemia at 15 years of age while living a holy life in the modern world, observed that “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.” This is a problem if we understand that God has a master plan for our happiness but that many people do not, knowingly or unknowingly, choose to follow it.
Blessed Carlo understood this. His plan for life was to stay close to Jesus and allow Jesus to unfold his life and its unique purpose. It wasn’t a long life, but it was one in which he could say: “…in eternal life, something extraordinary awaits us.” “I am happy to die because I have lived my life without wasting a minute on those things which do not please God.” He also understood that to know himself, the best way was to come to know Jesus more and more deeply in the Blessed Sacrament and that Jesus would then teach him about himself and lead him to heaven.
So, how do we become fake versions or photocopies of someone else? First, by following the natural interference our own egos cause in this area. Second, by disconnecting from Christ. Third, by listening to the enemy of our soul. He devotes his time to isolating us from the Lord. He is always about the work of trying to thwart God’s plan in every way he can. The devil is a consummate meddler and he excels in deception, in offering us cheap knockoffs of the treasures and riches the Lord offers. Counterfeits!
Everything that God does for us and wants for us, is targeted. The evil one will offer us anything to keep us from following Our Lord because he knows how powerful a true believer is against his kingdom. The Holy Spirit of God in the believer comes up against the kingdom of darkness and stands as an implacable wall against the reach of satan into our lives. There will be, nonetheless, incredible opposition and, at times, almost relentless attempts to divert and distract us.
How often the roots of a problem can be traced back to the fall. The attempt to offer a cheap alternative to God’s gifts for the sake of deception is evident from the beginning. Dan Burke (founder of the Avila Institute for Spirituality) points out that the original temptation is clearly worded in this kind of language. Regarding the forbidden fruit, the devil says to Adam and Eve, “Eat this, and you will become like God.” We know this happens only in the Eucharist! So, what is the devil doing? He’s offering a false Eucharist! Already in the Garden, his modus operandi is revealed, an MO that is powered by lies to divert and isolate the gullible and spiritually immature. You can believe that for every gift, every mystery of God, there is something lifeless, deadly actually, that the devil promotes in its place.
In Resurrection, Jesus makes all things new! The Easter season is a perfect time to let the Lord divest us of all of our facades, our pretenses, our unreal aspirations, wherever they come from, and to allow Him to ground us in reality, the reality that our Risen Lord has given us everything He has to give and withholds nothing from us. To fall prey to the temptations of the world, our own vanity, or the machinations of the evil one, simply means we are not rooted in reality but rather in fantasy and base appetites and desires that hold us back from the true glory God waits to bestow on us.
This kind of self-examination requires the Lord’s help. GK Chesterton wryly noted that going to Church every Sunday isn’t enough. It doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. We don’t readily recognize the subtle lies on which we have constructed parts of our lives. Jesus needs to show us, just as He did the disciples in Resurrection, a concrete vision of a truly transformed life in Him. That’s where we’re headed. Jesus risen is what true life looks like! May your own life come to manifest his glory and proclaim His wonders eternally! Alleluia! He is Risen!
Please join us! We meet Monday, March 11 at 6:30 pm Mountain time; 7:30 pm Central time
Sr.AnneMarie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: I Can Love Myself Better
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“I Can Love Myself Better?”
Certain things are just obviously ridiculous. It’s hard to fathom how anyone could believe them. Yet today, there are so many examples of people believing patently false ideas that you wonder how they have become so estranged from the truth.
If someone showed up seriously promoting the idea that The Encyclopedia Britannica was created by the random explosion of a typewriter, most people would laugh. Yet people readily accept things much more ludicrous than that. Many people believe that there is nothing greater than ourselves, that the universe in all its infinite, delicate, micro and macro details just happened, and that one day we (or “Science”) will figure it out, but that basically, there is a human explanation for it. God is not necessary. Man is the real measure of things.
This kind of atheism allows for the unbridled reign of the ego. It effectively relegates God to the realm of superstition and religious fundamentalism, which may be the main reason people embrace it. It allows them to override the voice of their own conscience and its warnings so that they may pursue the attractive lie at the heart of our own history of existence, which is that if we disregard God and “eat” whatever appeals to us, we will be like gods ourselves. We will be happy.
Even believers succumb to this when shopping around for a Church that will allow them to live the life they want without complete adherence to the laws and counsels of the Gospel. One woman openly admitted this when she left her more traditional Church to become Unitarian. She explained that in the Unitarian Church, she was free to divorce without question, and it was not a big deal.
From the beginning, the struggle has always been to subordinate our ego to God. In its fallen nature, the ego is an incredibly tenacious force powered by a kind of arrogance and selfishness. It makes itself the reference point for everything, usurping God’s sovereignty and right to be honored and revered as the source of all that is good, beautiful, and true. One of the ill effects of pride is blindness. How often we lament over those who can’t see. How can it be, we say, that they can’t see how ridiculous their position is? Pride. It takes away our vision.
So, how does God break through our obstinate and exaggerated self-sufficiency? He humbles us. Through sickness, failures, suffering of various kinds, and seemingly irresolvable challenges and difficulties. He shows us over and over again that we have no power of our own, that we need Him, and that the control we convince ourselves we have is an illusion. He doesn’t do this to dominate us or control us. He does this to liberate us from our own arrogance and blindness so that He can take care of us and introduce us to the deeper mysteries of His love for us, the unveiling of our real identity in Him, and all that He so impatiently wants to share with us as Our Creator, Lord, and Savior.
It will be important to remember this during times of great suffering when God will seem to abandon us even as a people. St Augustine reminds us that “…God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.” Anything that increases our humility is efficacious for us because it brings us back to Truth. And Truth is incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ. Everything aligns itself in the light of His gaze, which is why Eucharistic Adoration is so powerful. You submit yourself to the greatest power on earth when you humbly, simply, and confidently come before the Lord and allow Him to love you as He so much desires.
The healing of the world will come when enough people return to God and allow His love to blossom in them. At his core, the atheist basically does not want God to love him. His attitude, like the popular song, is: I can buy myself flowers…I can love me better than you can…”. That’s the miserable life we choose until and unless we give up the pretense and surrender to the One who truly can love us better than we can.
2. Pope St. John Paul II pointed out several times that there is a connection between love and obedience. We obey, yes, because of love. But also, in obeying, we are actually allowing God to love us. When we surrender to Him, when we comply with what He asks, He is able to increase His gifts in us; He is able to give us His gifts and to love us to the perfection of union with Himself. Why do you think we struggle with obedience even when we know it’s good for us?
3. People talk about the rise of narcissism in the culture today. In light of these considerations, what do you see as a major contributing factor?
4. What examples of pride and blindness do you see today? This can be personal or from a broader scale.
Sr. Anne Marie Walsh is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting for Facing Our Immortality online support group. Join Zoom Meeting: Please use the link below. Included are the meeting ID and password. Our meeting begins at 6:30 pm MT.
Topic: Definitive Questions
Time: Feb 12, 2024 07:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada); (NB) 6:30 pm Mountain Time
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Prayer: Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary…
Definitive Questions
The saints often cast our meeting with God at the end of our time on earth in terms of a life review in which certain questions are implicit. How have you loved? Have you kept my commandments? What do you have to show for the gifts you’ve been given?
There is another plausible question that the Lord might ask us and which we may not be expecting: How many disciples have you made?
Currently, there are about 1.3 billion Catholics in the world (which boasts an 8.1 billion population). If every Catholic devoted time to making at least one disciple, one convert, it would go a long way toward fulfilling the mandate Our Lord gave us to make disciples of the nations. Converts and reverts are often so fervent that they set off a momentum of interest, which in turn draws other people in. So, your conversion of one person can often indirectly result in the conversion of many more.
Jesus laments that the harvest is plenty, and the laborers are few. In other words, there is no reason to argue about how many are lost vs. saved because it ultimately becomes an indictment against ourselves. So many need not be lost if we are doing our job as Catholics.
Yet, evangelization is a word that scares the ordinary person because it is often misinterpreted. Most people do not see themselves in the light of the common definition of a missionary. Most people dismiss the concept as meant for “professionals,” priests, religious, etc.
However, in our Baptism, we are all called to go forth and make disciples. So, it is something we need to take seriously. One way to understand how we might proceed is to look at the early Church and learn how they understood this mandate and how they moved to fulfill it.
What becomes obvious in reading the Acts of the Apostles is that the early Church practiced evangelism in several different ways. The Apostles went out to the corners of the earth and founded communities of disciples whom they formed and equipped for ongoing growth. However, the members of those communities practiced what has been called “oikos” evangelism. Oikos is a Greek word which means house or household. Household referred to immediate family but also included extended family, friends, business and social associates, and even servants or slaves and their families. How often do you read that the conversion of one person often led to the conversion of the whole family, the whole household?
Oikos has to do with your sphere of influence, those people you share something in common with either through kinship, work, or social connections. It was the basic social unit and one by which the Church grew because of the immediate links of relationship, influence, and communication. This is the realm in which the ordinary person practices evangelism.
Today, one of our most popular pastimes is to sit around and argue about the state of the world, the state of religion, the state of our culture, etc. Yet, how many people have the right to hear the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ but have not heard it because of the passivity of believers?
This Lent might be a good time to dip your toes into the work of evangelism. Strengthen your own faith through prayer, and then consider one or two people you know who need to hear the truth of Jesus Christ and His saving power in their lives. Begin praying for them daily and asking the Holy Spirit to give you opportunities to invite them to a deeper relationship with God, to show them what peace faith in God brings even during trial and difficulty, and to lead them to the deeper meaning of their life.
St. James tells us there is a tremendous reward when we work with Jesus in this way:
“My brothers, if anyone among you should stray from the truth and someone brings him back, he should know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” James 5: 19-20. That’s the kind of heavenly return Jesus gives us for our little efforts. There are no better deals in the whole universe!
Life’s burdens come in many forms. What is a burden for one may not be a burden for another. But what is certain is that everyone either carries or has had to carry burdens in their lifetime.
Of all the possible burdens that may come to us, it is wise to consider which are the heaviest, the most debilitating, and really the most unnecessary. There is a difference between those that are essential in our lives and those holding us back from the life we were meant to live.
Essential burdens revolve around commitments and responsibilities necessary for growth, development, maturity, and our humanity in general, such as family and community demands, personal obligations, charitable outreach, care in times of illness, etc.
A story from the life of St. Jerome illustrates a kind of burden that is the opposite, that holds us back from the future that Jesus has for us.
St. Jerome had just finished decades of work on translating the Bible from Hebrew to Latin. It was around Christmas time, and Baby Jesus appeared to him and asked him what gift he would give to Him for his birthday. Jerome responded by offering Him the work he had just completed. Jesus was pleased but told Jerome He wanted more. Jerome then offered Him his life, his heart, his prayer. But each time, Baby Jesus asked for more. Finally, Jerome asked Him, “What else can I give you?” Jesus smiled and said: “Jerome, give me your sins!”
This is probably the heaviest burden people bear today: the sins, guilt, and regret of things chosen and done in their lifetimes. This can be true even of those who regularly go to Confession. We come out again, not really understanding our sins are gone. We confess like Protestants who believe only that their sins are covered over. Catholics do not believe this. We believe that once our sins are confessed, they are gone forever. God remembers them no more; even the devil can no longer access them to accuse us.
While penance and reparation are good and necessary, they are meant to strengthen us in our resolve and, in the grace of repentance, not become a new burden to carry. Jesus does not stay stuck in our sins the way we do. He does not constantly revisit them the way we do. He wills to remember them no more. They are gone. Instead, Jesus beckons us to follow Him into the future. It does us no good to stay back, clutching our forgiven sins as though they are still there. And it is even more deleterious not to confess at all. Unconfessed guilt can make us sick and so unbalanced psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually that we become incapable of building and living the kind of life that would make us and those around us happy.
The movie The Mission illustrates this dynamic well. Captain Mendoza, one of the main characters, a mercenary involved in the slave trade, kills his brother in a duel after finding him with his fiancé. His regret is so powerful that it becomes a force for his own conversion, even bringing him to the point where he joins the Jesuits as a missionary to the native peoples. His self-imposed punishment/penance is to drag a large net full of heavy armor and the tools of his mercenary life as they travel through the jungles to establish a mission among the people who live there. At times on the journey, his brothers try to free him of his burden by cutting the rope that continually drags him backward. But he doesn’t believe he is forgiven until finally, the native people he has exploited demonstrate forgiveness by cutting the rope that binds him to the past.
Rather than dragging the burden of sin into the new year, we also can be done with it once and for all. In the Confessional, the Priest who hears our Confession “in persona Christi,” in the Person of Christ, takes the sword of the Spirit and severs the sin, the regret, and the guilt of it from our lives. This causes great rejoicing in heaven and, at the same time, fills our souls with the energy, hope, and joy in which Jesus can begin fulfilling His promises in us.
Facing Our Immortality 