In Good Company Joy to the world

Dec 21, 2010

Yesterday I headed down to Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C., for a pre-Christmas shrivening. Nothing lightens the heart and the mood like sacramental confession.

Confession is confession and grace is grace, but some priests unquestionably have a gift for it. Last afternoon my "favorite" Franciscan was in the box. Call no man happy before he dies, but he has the marks of holiness: joy and utter simplicity.

No matter how down you are about what you tell him, no matter how "stuck" in the same stubborn fault, he manages to do three things: take your sin seriously; lighten your heart by reminding you that grace is stronger and helping you laugh at yourself (everyone comes out of his box laughing, and you can hear them laughing while they're in, too, though of course you can't hear what's being said); and make you feel that he accompanies you in your struggles.

He's modest, too.  When I tried to thank him for helping me through a rough year, he wouldn't take the praise. "Thank the Almighty," he said in an aw-shucks tone, "…and pray for the priest."

I don't know this man at all.  He's not my spiritual director or even my regular confessor. I've barely seen him, since we usually meet on opposing sides of a screen, and only on the occasions when our schedules happen to intersect. But I love him! He is a sign in the world of God's goodness and an instrument of his mercy.

At the beginning of Advent I had the opportunity to host some 40 Jewish kids fulfilling a unit of comparative religion as part of their religious education program. I got to make a basic presentation on Catholicism, gave a tour of a chapel, and took the kids’ questions.

This year, for the first time since I started giving these presentations, their rabbi came along. Interestingly, the only time he chose to intervene during an almost two hour session was on the matter of original sin.

When it came up, the rabbi intervened to say that there is no corollary for the doctrine of original sin in Judaism and the kids should take special notice of that fact.

He did not explain himself, but I intuited that he wanted to protect his beautiful, intelligent charges from the notion that there was somehow something wrong with them, something defective.

Ordinarily I take the doctrine of original sin so much for granted I hardly notice it. On this evening though, looking into the eyes of precious souls made in God’s image and telling them that in fact there is a defect was profoundly hard to do.

“For Judaism, the sons don’t carry the weight of the fathers’ guilt,” said the rabbi in response to a question about how a baby could sin.

At that point I tried to clarify that the condition of original sin is not personal guilt – but having lost the life of grace within themselves, our First Parents lost the ability to transmit that life of grace.

I don’t know how effectively I explained the subtleties of Church teaching for my young friends, but the experience of having to try became for me a days-long meditation on the profound hope springing from Mary’s Immaculate Conception: the first glimpse we are given of salvation!

I didn’t like telling precious kids they weren’t perfect just as they are – but deep down I expect they already know it. They are old enough to have experienced the frustration St. Paul describes of doing the evil he knows he shouldn’t do and failing to do the good he knows he should. Isn’t it more merciful and comforting to know such weakness is not ours to bear alone, but part of the human condition – that something accounts for it?

Isn’t it wonderful, when we experience our own weakness and frailty, to be able to call on a Savior?

Pope Benedict  teaches: “Christ comes to destroy only evil, only sin; everything else, all the rest, he elevates and perfects. Christ does not save us from our humanity, but through it; he does not save us from the world, but came into the world, so that through him the world might be saved.”

That is truly Good News! Merry Christmas to all!