Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 387


Let him who is wise understand these things; let him who is prudent know them.
Straight are the paths of the LORD, in them the just walk, but sinners stumble in them.


The prophet Hosea began his reflection with, "Return, O Israel, to the LORD, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt." He capped his reflections with encouragement to the wise: "Let him who is wise understand these things." 

Our liturgies -- the Mass and the sacraments -- always begin with a reminder of penance as we pray, "Lord have mercy; Christ has mercy; Lord have mercy." There is nothing more foolish than presuming to enter God's presence without an awareness of our unworthiness.

During my Dad's funeral, we children remembered how he entered the church. After getting his little flock situated in the pew, he would kneel with his head bowed and quietly strike his breast three times. He never told us what prayer he said; and, unfortunately, we never asked. But the the attitude of this Marine Veteran of World War II was transparent, "O Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

 

"Take with you words,

and return to the LORD;

Say to him, “Forgive all iniquity..."

I suppose any American Catholic of my generation could name a dozen historical and cultural reasons for the disappearance of "confession." We remember the lines that formed every Saturday afternoon in the churches. Men, women, and children stood on both sides of the church, approaching "the confessional boxes" from two directions, waiting patiently for their two-minutes exchange with the priest. No one wanted to take very long; that would draw attention and arouse curiosity, if not suspicion. No one ever discussed what they had said or what they had heard from the priest. After confession each would spend a few extra minutes in the church, "saying his penance," and then depart, prepared to attend Mass the following day.  

The ritual had seemingly been handed down through many generations and each person knew what to do. We were sure the Lord was satisfied by the ceremony; we didn't ask if He were pleased. 

In the 1960's, perhaps with the appearance of the Civil Rights Movement and the dawning awareness of something deeply wrong with our way of life, the rite of confession with its whispered secrecy suddenly seemed irrelevant. How does one confess to doing what everyone regards as normal and blameless? 

Changing sexual mores also challenged the traditional practice. What is wrong, unusual, or dangerous about sexual "thoughts, words, and deeds?" Can these ubiquitous, persistent impulses be regarded as "mortal sins" which condemn one to hell for all eternity? Why should we not use "artificial means of birth control?"  

Meanwhile, according to the Surgeon General, millions of people were seriously crippling their health with tobacco, and the Church raised no objection to this massive industry and its ad campaigns.  

A church which judged an individual's particular sins as venial or mortal but had no categories for systemic injustice floundered in irrelevance. Some Catholics with their priests and bishops protested in civil rights demonstrations while other clerics resisted desegregation. By the early 1970's the same Church issued conflicting statements on America's engagement in the Vietnam conflict, sometimes patriotically supporting the effort, sometimes counseling resistance. 

Someone might ask the Prophet Hosea, "What words should I take into the confessional?"  If I am guilty why don't I feel it? Who accuses me of sin and what standing do they have?

 

Jesus's words in today's gospel add a bit of irony to the quandery: 

When they hand you over,

do not worry about how you are to speak

or what you are to say.

You will be given at that moment what you are to say.

For it will not be you who speak

but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

 

If, as I approach the Sacrament of Penance, I do not worry about how I am to speak or what I am to say, will the Spirit of my Father, or the ghost of my dad, speak through me, confessing my sins and revealing the exact dimensions of my guilt?

During this troubled time, coping with a pandemic that, because we live in an antropogenic world might be called a "plandemic," -- if humans are responsible for what we do and what we fail to do and there are no "accidents," then plandemic is the right word --  the individual penitent must ask the Holy Spirit of our Father to breathe in our hearts, open our minds, show us the words, give us the wisdom, and guide us in the Way of Penance. 

Straight are the paths of the LORD,

in them the just walk,

but sinners stumble in them.