One day a young man went to confession to an elderly priest. It was a very difficult confession for him. He had been in a relationship with a girl and she became pregnant. This pregnancy was going to disrupt both their lives and, of course, the life of the child.
The wise priest quickly understood that he should not blame the young man for his foolishness. He made no effort to explain himself, to make excuses or to run away from his guilt. He acknowledged in the open that he had sinned. He also recognised that the situation was irreversible. Things had been destroyed that would never be the same again. At the end he said with deep sadness: “I will no longer be able to live a normal life. I will carry this cross for the rest of my life“. He recognised that from then on he would forever hold a dark secret inside him. He would live the rest of his days marked by this mistake.
Episodes of this kind occur more and more often: a marriage break-up, a love affair, broken religious vows, a betrayed trust, a serious mistake… Sometimes they are accompanied by a feeling of sin, sometimes not. But they always lead to the despair of having to endure irreversible grief.
There is a mentality that continues to feed these anxieties. We are too often taught the strict law of karma, according to which we have only one chance in life. Therefore, salvation can only be achieved if we do everything right. We will be happy if nobody has anything to forgive us for.
Those of us who were brought up in a moralistic Catholicism, when sin was called sin, may be brutally defending these intransigences: still believing that there is no second chance, that there is no room for failure; that a serious mistake is a stigma, indelible like Cain’s, that will accompany us to the end.
Is this really the way things are, is there no other way out? But beware, the way out cannot be the moral relativism of “anything goes”… Those who grow up driven by whim or desire are to be pitied. They will pay a high price. Sooner or later, emptiness and weariness will come to them.
The only way, the true way, is a spirituality that teaches that every time we close one door, God opens another. A spirituality that takes sin seriously, but one that also drives into our souls that when we make mistakes, He gives us the opportunity to take refuge among the failures, among those whose lives are not perfect, among the beloved sinners, those for whom Christ came into the world. We need a spirituality that tells us that there is a second, a third, a fourth, a fourth, a fifth… chance. That mistakes are not eternal … because time and grace purify them. That nothing is irreversible, because God loves us, being sinners, as no one can imagine.
Juan Carlos cmf
(PHOTO: John Lockwood)
