Confiteor

confiteor - I confess

Luke 13 is a chapter of parables, a healing, and Christ encountering His people, calling them to repentance, as He does so often. He is forthright and firm.

"If you do not repent, you will perish!"

He boldly declares this truth to those He meets, and it is no easy pill to swallow. My weak, broken flesh goes through this litany when I am faced with the necessity of repentance, especially in the moments when I am painfully aware that I have failed:

"Why does God only care about the rules and whether or not I follow them?"

"Following rules is hard. Why are there so many?"

"And hey - isn't Jesus supposed to love me? Why would He ask me to change and do so many tough things?"

That selfish internal monologue brought to its end begs one question and one alone. Does He really love me?

And, as I hope with all of my heart, you know He does love us. Me and you and all of us, each so intimately and completely we can hardly begin to fathom how much. But then why does He call us to recall our sins, what we have done and what we have failed to do, and ask for absolution, for pardon from Him through the Sacrament of Reconciliation?

He asks us to do this because, friends, He wants to heal us and show us the real love we so crave. Real love, the kind that wants to bring about what is good for us. The kind that does excruciatingly difficult things, you know, like dying on a cross and defeating death, to reach us and heal us. That is His love. It is not what is easy, but what is good.

He wants to bring about healing for our souls and bodies, and that requires us to own up to our pride and our forgetfulness and our disordered desires that are not in accordance with His will. He will freely give to us His Blood and Body, His Soul and Divinity, just so we might know what it is to be whole again, to be healed. However, we have to cooperate and freely choose to be healed.

At the very end of this chapter of Luke, Christ describes what He does when we ask Him to forgive us and allow Him to love us back to life:

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!" Luke 13:34 NABRE

He takes us under His wing. With no record of our wrongs, because we have humbled ourselves at His feet and begged for His mercy, He shows us our heart's true home, which is His heart. Yes, with prayer and reflection and earnest resolve, we can return to and remain in His little brood of chicks.

As a new member of his brood of Catholic chicks, I am so very thankful for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Just before my conversion, I partook in this Sacrament for the first time. I was the crippled woman to whom Christ cried out, "Woman, you are set free of your infirmity!" Luke 13:12 NABRE. With a face washed by tears of peace, I entered the Church a new woman, a whole soul.

Do not forget this Sacrament, friends. Do not forget how good and how merciful is He who loves us truly.