"Return to Me with all Your Heart"
Lenten Pastoral Letter on Sin and Forgiveness
Dear Brothers and sisters in Christ.
“Return to me with all your heart” says the Lord…Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2) These are God’s words to us as we begin Lent. They are words of love spoken to us who have been chosen to be God’s beloved people. Yet we are a beloved people who have in one way or another chosen to separate ourselves from God who still calls to us: “return to me with all your heart.”
Parents take care to teach their children that our choices have consequences. Some of our acts separate us from God. These acts are at the heart of the destructive divisions that alienate us from one another as individuals, as families, as parishes, and even as nations. The root of these divisions is our sinfulness: “beginning with original sin, which all of us bear from birth as an inheritance from our first parents, to the sin which each one of us commits when we abuse our own freedom.”
Wanting to be like God
We do not like the word “sin”. We want to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. We do not welcome voices that criticize our behaviour. As contemporary as this may seem to our Canadian society, this is not new in our history as human beings. Indeed this was the sin of Adam and Eve who “wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3:5) Their choice brought death into our world. The terrible words of God revealed to Adam the inevitable consequences of his choice: “You are dust and unto dust you will return.” Instead of eternal life, we now return to the ground out of which we were made. Only a miracle of God’s love saves us from the barren dust of death’s inheritance and lifts us up with the Risen Christ to life.
So it was that Moses gathered together the whole people of Israel and said to them: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him…”
“Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Deep within each of us we know that we have chosen to commit sins. We have chosen our own wants, our passions, and our selfish desires in place of God. We have moved apart from God, we have held up our hand and turned God away. None the less, equally deep within us is the longing to be reconciled to God, to return to God with all our heart so that we can hold out our hands to be embraced in the eternal and unbounded love of God for each of us. In this embrace we find life in its fullness, the life that Jesus promised us. In this embrace we regain the life that our first parents lost for us. To be able to welcome this embrace we must first of all recognize our sins and the divisions they cause within us which shatter our friendships, our families and our world, and indeed the peace and wholeness of our own souls.
St. Peter is the rock of faith upon which Jesus would build his church. Yet at the very moment when he was about to be called to follow Jesus, Peter said, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Before you and I, dear sisters and brothers, can live the call that Jesus gives to us as members of his Church, we too, like Peter, must recognize that we are sinful people.
The truth is that, in matters small and large, there are times we have not heeded God’s word and we have chosen “death and adversity” when we refused to love God, to obey God and to hold fast to God. These choices are not without consequences for us. Like the foolish bridesmaids, we can find ourselves turned away from the feast of God’s Kingdom because of our own foolish actions. As we read in Jesus’ parable of the man at the King’s wedding feast for his son, we can find ourselves thrown out into the darkness because we are not clothed in the white garment of good deeds.
“Do not be afraid”
We are perhaps afraid, dear friends, to admit our sinfulness. We are afraid to truly trust God’s word that speaks the amazing grace of forgiveness to us. We are afraid to believe that God really and truly loves us, and that God’s laws, rather than diminishing our freedom, actually give us more freedom and a fuller life.
In our fear we choose what St. Paul called the works of the flesh. By Adam’s sin, the future of the flesh is simply to return to dust; it is to perish in death. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul listed the works of the flesh: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these.” Paul tells us that if we do these things we will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If we do not believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God and live as such, how indeed can we inherit God’s kingdom?
During Lent the words of the prophets add the sins of oppressing workers, violence, refusing to share with the hungry and the poor and not helping the oppressed go free. Isaiah speaks of what he calls “trampling the Sabbath”, of pursuing our own interests on the holy day of the Lord.
Jesus knows that at times we are afraid to trust that God’s ways are the ways of full life and happiness. Jesus replied to Peter’ confession of sinfulness with words that he would repeat time and time again throughout the Gospel: “do not be afraid.” The season of Lent seeks to free us from fear that we may welcome all that the Resurrection of Jesus has won for us: life, life in all its fullness, life without end, joy unbounded in God’s eternal kingdom of love and peace.
To enter into this joy we face our sinfulness and place our lives in the hands of our God who is merciful and kind, who is full of compassion and boundless in love for us. We can face our sinfulness without fear and turn to the Lord with true repentance knowing that God is merciful to all and in no way hates us for our sins, but rather blots out our transgressions, washes us from our iniquity and cleanses us from our sins.
“The simple and precious sacrament of faith.”
And so, dear sisters and brothers in Christ, I urge you most sincerely to actively observe this special season of Lent. Let us allow God to purify us of sin and let us grow in closeness to God who calls to us: “Return to me with all your heart.”
I urge you to practice the Gospel disciplines associated with Lent: to pray, to fast according to the practice of the Church, and to share from your resources with those in need. And in light of the final preparation for the Sacred Triduum of the Passover of Christ, I would recall to our Catholic people the gift of Christ to the Church in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
It is our Catholic faith that “the sacrament of penance is the primary way of obtaining forgiveness and the remission of serious sin committed after baptism.” We believe that Jesus willed that this “simple and precious sacrament of faith would ordinarily be the effective means through which his redemptive power passes and operates.”
The healing touch of love.
My dear sisters and brothers, we are well aware that our sins involve not only error but also human frailty and weakness. It is not by chance that the Christian people have always seen Christ’s forgiveness in the context of his healing of people afflicted with the physical frailty of illness and disease. Christ reaches out to us in all our weaknesses with hands that bring us the touch of health and wholeness in the absolution given by the priest who acts in the person of Christ; for Christ is the healing Lord and Saviour acting in this sacrament which celebrates continually the healing forgiveness of God in our lives.
Through our observance of Lent may we come to the glorious celebration of the Resurrection of Christ with hearts and lives turned towards our Risen Lord, healed of our sins and with hands and hearts open in welcome to receive the limitless gifts of God who says to us: “You are precious in my sight and honoured, and I love you.”
Sincerely yours in Christ, the merciful, compassionate and healing Lord,
Most Rev. Daniel J. Bohan
Archbishop of Regina |
