Low Sunday 8.4.18 Body and Soul
The greatest thing that can happen to us is to be forgiven
of our sins.
Forgiveness brings life to our souls. We each have a body
and a soul. They can both be alive, both be dead, or one alive and the other
dead.
The body being alive means your heart is still beating etc.
The soul being alive means you are in a state of grace. (The
soul is what sort of a person we are.) If you had to choose between them, it is
the soul that really counts.
This is not widely understood. People are usually more
worried about their bodies than their souls. Emergency departments are full,
churches empty.
‘I came that they
might have life, and have it to the full’ Our Lord says (Jn 10,10). He
means both bodily and spiritual life, envisaging the glorious resurrection of
the body. But first we have to do something about those sins.
Sins kill us (mortal), or wound us (venial). We can come
back to life, or full health, and this is better than even physical healing.
This is our message as the Church to the world: Come back to
God, or come for the first time.
He will forgive you and you will know true life.
He will put his life in you, and you will have the vitality
of someone who is truly alive.
Your body may be old and weak through illness. You may not
feel any better physically for being forgiven but you have attained the highest
level of life.
He will always grant mercy to the sincere penitent, even if
we have committed the same sin many times before.
We can grow in our contrition, and we can reach a point
where we may have confessed a hundred times before, with greater or less
degrees of conviction, but this time we really mean it! Our sins can be less
than one year, or five years ago. Less of them, less serious.
We can go only so far with our own willpower or thought
processes. Some things are deeply engrained in us, and we cannot deal with them
by our own efforts, or just by wishing them gone.
For more stubborn sins, encrusted on our soul, we need the
grace of God to blast them away.
These sins impede our progress. They tie us to the earth
when we want to soar aloft.
He will do all this if we ask for it, which we do in every
Mass, Confession, Rosary, Divine Mercy chaplet, and many other prayers and
devotions
If we are dead His mercy brings us to life. If we are alive
we become more so. And we pray to go further and further into life.
What if we have no sin? Some people claim that status. It is
highly unlikely, but even if it we could be so, we still need to pray to stay
in a state of grace; and always we must pray for other people.
The Divine Mercy devotion activates our sense of hope and
urgency.
It is urgent because there is so much sin around. It is
hopeful because we know the power of God's mercy to work wonders.
We are trying to bring dead people back to life (spiritual),
and that is no small matter.
Praying for others is limited insofar as each person has a
sovereign will, and can resist or reject any graces directed towards it.
However, as we see, many people do convert as a result of
the prayer of others, so we press on with renewed enthusiasm.
We are trying to create an atmosphere favourable to true
conversion, as in Fatima and similar places. We are not just trying to catch
this or that fish, but the whole sea!
Whose sins you
forgive, they are forgiven (Jn 20,23)
May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and
bring us to everlasting life.
No comments:
Post a Comment