“Josemaría, you should only be ashamed of sinning.”
I have been thinking about something today…
Suddenly it occurs to me that I experience a very strange thing in my life.
While I am sinning in the moment, I can look other people in the eye, stand up in front of a crowd and say and do whatever I think will make me look good in a crowd. When I am angry I can say and do things – without shame – that I would never say or do otherwise. When I am tired or stressed, I experience the same thing. And when I do those things, I – very easily – justify them to myself. I tell myself that I am justified in that behaviour, because even though it was bad behaviour, the reasons for that behaviour are acceptable reasons. And for those reasons, my anger or distress, my meanness or dishonesty, are completely acceptable. If I were calm that would never happen. But I am not calm and because I am not calm – I am stressed or angry or sad or hurt – all of that behaviour is somehow acceptable.
And yet – in the moment of confession – in that moment of reconciliation, I experience a shame so deep that I cannot hold my head up high, and I cannot make eye contact with the priest.
When Saint Josemaria was a little boy, he used to feel ashamed and embarrassed to try on new clothes. When his mother saw this trait in him, she would remind him, “Josemaría, you should only be ashamed of sinning.”
There is a story that is told of the Evil One visiting a priest who was administering the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The priest asked him what he was doing hanging around the people who were waiting in the queue. The Evil One replied, “I took from them their shame of sinning, and now I'm giving it back to them, so that they feel ashamed of confessing.”
And I have been reflecting on that today, because it seems that everything is backwards in this regard. Where the shame really should sit is with the sin, but where I experience the feeling of shame is only in the moment heralding redemption. And that is a terrible thing. Because that means that I am creating hurdles and roadblocks to my own salvation (and I am doing that needlessly).
And when I stop and think about that today it occurs to me that there are just so many things that I am doing to damn myself…
And today – right in this moment – it needs to stop. Because the shame that I feel in reconciliation is merely a weak reflection of the true shame I should be feeling in the moment of sin, where I myself and responsible for nailing my Beloved God to the Cross…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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