Cure What Ails You

By: Todd Inman, Catholic Evidence Guild of Guam

      If you, having cancer, were offered a bitter pill that was certain to cure you, you would not hesitate to swallow it.

      Indeed, many of us willingly suffer the pain that comes with exercising to make us healthier, stronger, and even more handsome. Yet we often resist the disciplines demanded by Christ to make our spirits healthy and strong. Sin does to the spirit what cancer does to the body: deforms it and makes it weak. Sin, like a cancer, can ultimately even kill the spirit. And sin, like a cancer, can require the strongest of medicines to cure it. Through the Sacrament of Penance we are offered the medicine necessary to restore our spirits.

      I confess that I do not like confessing my sins. I resent the humiliation of relating to a priest my weaknesses, and my shortcomings – frankly, my sins. The effort (finding a priest, examining our consciences) and the humiliation of confessing are, after all, why many of us avoid the Sacrament of Penance. The only way to overcome our aversion to effort and pain is to look forward to their good result. If we consider what the Sacrament of Penance really accomplishes, we see with the eyes of faith how glorious the results will be.

      The Sacrament of Penance not only reconciles the sinner with God, it sanctifies him. It transforms him from a defiled sinner to a new creation, one righteous before God. As G.K. Chesterton wrote,

"...The Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned. When a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into the dawn of his own beginning, and look with new eyes across the world... He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has already remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. Thus the Sacrament of Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do. The gift is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession. In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which also may be called Reality; but it is facing the reality of oneself."

      If we begin again as if we had never sinned, why are we so prone to sin again? Just as the effects of original sin remain in us after baptism, the effects of our life-long development of habitual ways of acting remain after confession. By worthily participating in the Sacrament of Penance, however, we have begun to transform our characters. Through the cooperation of God’s grace, freely given in the sacrament, with our own efforts to recognize our sins and repent of them, we have begun the process of transforming our characters.

      Because our character has been developed over years through many free acts, it must, barring a miracle, be improved slowly over time. From a superficial view of the matter, it seems unfortunate that God rarely provides a quick, miraculous transformation of one’s character. Sometimes our strength is in our weakness, and we must recognize our weakness before we can become strong. As Saint Paul said to the Corinthians, “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor12: 10).

      If God transformed our weaknesses, which cause us to sin into strengths without our own cooperative effort, we might become proud of our strengths. Acting as though these strengths came from us, we would quickly fall into worse sins than those we would avoid. God himself told Saint Paul “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”(2 Cor12: 9). In struggling to overcome our sins, we become strong (that is, holy), recognizing that they were overcome only through the grace of God.

      The Sacrament of Penance is one of the great tools God gives us to effect change in our lives. Even when we fall into the same sins over and over again, we must not despair of correction. Through frequent confession, continuous effort, and ultimately God’s grace, we can slowly attain the holiness to which we are called. Refusal to humble ourselves in the Sacrament of Penance, however, will be our undoing.

      We cannot remake ourselves by ourselves. We cannot transform our character without grace. While God always provides the grace to transform our character, God’s work in us is hampered if we not cooperate with Him. The effort we must exert in cooperation with God’s grace to change our sinful character is our cross to bear, our penance, our contribution to our own holiness. God does the rest in His time.

[Next week: The Second Major Reason People Avoid the Sacrament of Penance.]