Full of Grace

We all have regrets.  Those things in our past we’d change if we could.  Maybe it’s a relationship we let slip away from us.  Or that job we didn’t take in the career we’d always been drawn to.  Perhaps we spoke harsh words to a friend that we’d wish we could take back.  Or maybe it was something we didn’t say or do that could have mended a broken heart, or healed a wounded relationship with a family member.  Sometimes we might even imagine going back in time and changing things.  We can fix what we wished had turned out differently and make everything right.  But would it?  Even if time travel was available and we could go back and change things, what effect would our meddling with the past have on the present?  It’s an intriguing fantasy that’s inspired thinkers and writers for ages.

In all of human history, only one person has experienced a kind of rupture in time.  And the story surrounding her is both miraculous and rooted in everlasting love.  You’ve heard the term we use to describe it but many of us, even many Catholics don’t understand it.  It’s the Immaculate Conception.  No, it doesn’t describe Jesus’ conception by the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing of the young Virgin Mary (Luke 1:26-38).  While Christ’s Incarnation was indeed divine, the Immaculate Conception describes Mary’s own beginnings in her Mother Anne’s womb. My point isn’t to compare our own human regrets about the past with the actions of God in Mary’s conception.  God has no regrets because His divine will is perfect in all things.  And since He exists outside of time, everything and every moment is perpetually present to Him.  But talking about time and the past and traveling “back” to “fix” stuff makes it a bit easier for us to understand God’s unfolding plan of salvation.  So my flawed analogy about time travel is just that:  flawed.

Since the beginning of the Church, Mary’s title of “full of grace” (Luke 1:28) was celebrated and contemplated. She was the vessel chosen by God to bear His Son, the Ark of the New Covenant, Who is Christ.  How “full” of God’s grace is “full enough” to bring Christ to earth?  Completely full.  Free from all sin, even the stain of original sin which we inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve.  Over the centuries, the Church’s understanding of God’s grace in Mary’s conception deepened.  Finally in 1854, Pope Pius IX wrote a beautiful document called “Ineffabilis Deus” which defines the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.  The very title “indescribable God” expresses our human graspings at the truth of God in our limited abilities.  I have to share a bit from the Pope’s description of God’s love for the Blessed Virgin:  “He [God] attended her with such great love, more than all other creatures, that in her alone He took singular pleasure.  Wherefore He so wonderfully filled her, more than all the angelic spirits and all the Saints, with an abundance of all heavenly gifts taken from the treasury of the divinity, that she, always free from absolutely all stain of sin, and completely beautiful and perfect, presented such a fullness of innocence and holiness that none greater under God can be thought of, and no one but God can comprehend it.”

Did Mary need Christ for her salvation? Yes. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception reinforces that all salvation is through the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. How God accomplished that saving grace in Mary is a singularity of His love. Mary was the first person saved through the Cross. Here’s where our early discussion of traveling back in time comes in. Christ’s victory over death and sin was applied by God to Mary at the moment of her conception. Original sin never stained her spotless soul. Did God have to do this? No. He did it purely as a gift of love for her. Of course even time itself is no constraint to God since He invented it. Out of love, God’s grace is always sufficient and in Mary, His grace was most fully-realized. She continued to grow in grace throughout her life, cooperating completely with God’s will in the Incarnation and life of her Son, til the very end as she stood at the foot of the Cross. Her life was and is, an overflowing of God’s grace. Across time, beyond time, the love of God beckons to us, calling to us to offer us His lasting peace. God’s love isn’t bounded by time or space or sin or death. His endless love seeks out a very small and humble home: your heart.

“…You renew the face of the earth.” — Psalm 104:30

Love Like Jesus

We can take something as simple as “love your neighbor” and make it incredibly complicated. Those of us who follow Jesus Christ know that love is the heart of His message and He went about showing us how to live that love during His ministry here. We see Him healing sick people, bringing dead people back to life, comforting folks who are grieving and befriending folks most people avoided, like tax collectors and lepers and adulterers. And He ate and drank a lot, with anyone He could find. Loving other like Jesus loves seems pretty simple when we read the Gospels, but when we look around today, sometimes it feels like Christianity is more of a business than a love affair.  

And that’s understandable since any time a group of people come together for a common purpose, an organization will grow up to provide oversight. Girl Scouts have troops, baseball players have teams, churches have pastors and bishops. But I’m not talking about churches or denominations. This is about how we Christians, as individuals, have made our faith overly-complex. I’m pretty sure none of the twelve Apostles had advanced degrees in theology. And yet they took what Jesus had taught them and the grace He shared with them—-and changed the world.  

Love your neighbor. That’s what Jesus did. His neighbors were the people He came across in His daily life. They were His family, the folks at the synagogue, the fishermen and farmers and shepherds that He encountered each day. They were the sick people who came to Him to be cured and the Pharisees who came to Him to condemn Him. He met them in the moment, where they were, with an openness of heart. He listened to what they had to say. When they were in the wrong, He corrected them. Remember, “go and sin no more”(John 8:11). How about “you serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell?”(Matthew 22:33). He cut through all pretense and social convention to meet their needs.  

How do we love like He loves? This is one of the great questions we should be asking ourselves every day. It never gets old to ask it. And it never feels as if we know the full answer. Maybe the answer is one of the things St. Paul was writing about when he said, “For now, we see through a glass darkly…”(I Corinthians 13:12). While that may be true, right now, we’re here on earth, trying to love, trying to get it right. So I have a challenge for all of us this week. This week, we’re going to love like Jesus.  

Let’s talk less and listen more. When we’re tempted to judge, let’s remember our own sins and lay that rock back down. When we see a problem that we can solve, let’s solve it. Pick up the trash, hold open the door, meet up for lunch, visit the nursing home, and make that overdue phone call. Connect with the friends and family and neighbors that we’ve been neglecting. Mend the fence. Right the wrong. Forgive the slight. Help someone else when it isn’t convenient or easy. And then keep that helping to yourself. Be a pushover this week and see how it makes you feel. As St. Ignatius prays, “Lord, teach me to give and not to count the cost.” Just for this week, let’s try not counting the cost of our love—either in time or in energy or effort. Just for this week, let God keep score of how well we’re doing.  

“I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, He will NOT ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?” Rather, he will ask, “How much LOVE did you put into what you did?”

—-St. Teresa of Calcutta

Forgiveness

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me why Catholics don’t go to confession anymore.  She’d been to Mass with family members who are Catholic and no one had gone to confession beforehand.  My friend had noticed what has come a sad and unfortunate trend in many Catholic parishes.  People just aren’t going to confession like they did a generation ago.  In fact, a study conducted by Georgetown University revealed that 30% of Catholic go to confession less than once a year and 45% don’t go at all.  This reluctance has given confession the nickname of the “lost Sacrament.” The lines for Communion are long, but there’s often no line at all for the confessional.  So what’s changed in the last 20 years?  Certainly not the teaching of the Church.  Catholics are still taught that grave or serious sin wounds our relationship with God and it must be confessed.  We have to feel sorry for our sin, promise not to commit it again and ask for God’s forgiveness.  If any of those three elements are missing, then our sin remains with us and we are separated from the grace of God in a way that can have eternal consequences.  Why do we believe this?  Because Christ gave His apostles the power and authority to forgive sins (John 20:23) and this same authority has been handed down through the bishops.  Church law asks every Catholic to make a thorough and complete confession at least once a year.  The Church asks us to do this because, like any good parent, it’s for our own good.  In confession, we encounter the love and mercy of Christ and we’re strengthened by God’s grace to resist sin and overcome our attachments to it.  Confession is a Sacrament of healing.  It heals and restores our relationship with God and our faith family.

Often, people stay away from confession because of unhealthy (and even sinful) pride.  They rationalize that whatever sins they’ve committed are trivial or unimportant to God and don’t rise to the level of serious sin.  We can be very very easy on ourselves.  And Jesus knew our human nature very well when He instituted the Sacrament of confession.  Speaking our sins aloud to a priest exercises our humility which is the foundation of all the other virtues.  Humbly asking God to forgive us in the presence of His priest puts Christ in the center of our hearts and not our own pridefulness.

Sometimes people avoid confession because they have forgotten what sin is.  They no longer look to the Ten Commandments or Church law to guide their behavior.  So long as they haven’t robbed a bank or murdered anyone, they think they’re okay.  They’ve adopted a “follow your own conscience” point of view.  If they don’t happen to believe that missing Mass on Sunday or using artificial birth control or lying in their business dealings is sinful, they why would they need to go to confession?  The problem with this kind of logic is that you can use it to justify almost any action.  This is the relativism that says you can do whatever you want so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.  Where exactly is THAT point of view in the Gospel?  You end up turning yourself into the ultimate moral guide and you take away God’s proper role in your life as King and Savior. 

Finally, people may avoid going to confession because they’re embarrassed to tell their sins to a priest.  Believe me when I tell you that priests have heard it all.  You couldn’t possibly confess a sin that they haven’t heard dozens or even hundreds of times before.  The priest isn’t going to condemn you or chastise you.  He’s there to listen to you and offer you the love and mercy of God in absolution.  Confession is for our own good  as members of the Body of Christ, which is His Church.  God is always waiting for us there, in the “forgotten” Sacrament of love.  He’s calling to us to come to Him and experience His mercy and forgiveness.  When we stay away, we not only hurt our own souls, but we hurt our Lord as well.

“If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”

—-John 20:23

Refuge of Sinners

We’re all sinners. That’s one of those euphemisms we sometimes use when what we really mean is: I am a sinner. I sin. I sin every day. I struggle with particular sins that seem to have a lasting hold on me. Maybe you know what I mean. Whenever I examine my conscience as I prepare for confession, I find myself struggling with the same, familiar, unwelcome stumbling blocks. About a year ago (yes, it took me that long), I decided enough was enough.

Most of my readers know that I was raised in the Baptist faith and entered the Catholic Church while I was in college. Like many protestants, I had to learn a lot about Mary and her role in God’s plan for our salvation. I love how Catholics have so many titles for Mary. She’s the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of Mercy, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, The Immaculate, and Star of the Sea, among many others. The title that draws me in these days is “Refuge of Sinners.” I’m a sinner of need of refuge, surely. So I asked Mary to be that refuge, to let me hide my troublesome, habitual sins within her immaculate heart. I begged her to take my desire and my will and to conform it to her Son’s will for my life. It took me so many years to run to Mary for help.

Was this because I didn’t grow up in the Church? Would I have more easily embraced Mary if I’d met her in my childhood? As a Baptist, we only talked about Mary at Christmas and then only in a limited and supporting role. Otherwise, she didn’t seem to have any part in our lives. Coming to know her as an adult has been a bit of a process for me. And she has never given up on me—her slow, stumbling child.

Mary is “full of grace” (Luke 1:28). Her role is to bear Grace to us, just as she bore Jesus under her heart. Understanding the bounty of her love and her motherly desire to lead her children to Jesus finally became clearer to me And I don’t think this was so much because I didn’t grow up knowing her, as it was due to my protestant understanding of grace and salvation. As a Baptist, this was completely and utterly personal. Once you’d accepted Christ as your savior and been baptized, it was all between you and The Lord. If you later struggled with sin (as we all do) it was because you’d lost your way (backslider!) and would need to examine whether or not you’d truly been saved. There was no sacramental confession, no absolution, no penance. It was such a completely personal and internal process that I could find neither my way in nor my way through it. My sins were “covered” by Christ’s victory, but how could I grow in grace so that sin had less and less of a hold on me? Where was my refuge?

The Sacraments of the Catholic Church have been my roadmap and my source of grace. This is why Christ gave them to us–to fill us with His love and draw us to His heart. And Mary has become my refuge. The sins I’ve struggled with for so long, I’ve given over to her. That was last summer. Have I become sinless now? Hardly. But I will say this: The Blessed Virgin mothers me and holds me so close to her heart that my old sins, those terrible and persistent ones, can’t seem to find me anymore. When I feel the least temptation, I cry out to the Virgin. I know many Saints who recommend Mary as our refuge. She’s held that title since the 8th century, after all. But it’s taken me most of my life to come to know her and accept her help.

God gave us a Church to teach us about Jesus and to lead us to salvation. Nowhere in Scripture does He tell us to find our own way or to figure things out on our own. The Apostles, the Saints and God’s own Blessed Mother are our family of faith. When we fail to embrace this family, we overlook a great gift that The Lord has offered to us. He loved the disciples with all His heart and He gave them His Body and Blood at the Last Supper. He chose Mary to be His mother; chose her arms to shelter and raise Him to manhood; and gave her to us as our Mother as He hung on the Cross. To all my protestant brothers and sisters, I pray you’ll come to know your heavenly mother, too. Just ask her Son to introduce you.

“Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Mother too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.”

—St. Maximilian Kolbe

(1894 – 1941)