A retreat
is incomplete if we don’t talk of the destructive power of sin and the healing power
of God’s love. [Cf. Archbishop Angelo Comastri, VG of His Holiness for Vatican City,
“Jesus Filled Death With Love!” Text of the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum, 2006.]
We need to meditate on what is the fundamental contradiction of our lives: the “opposition”
between sin and God’s love – the opposition between God’s desire to integrate us
firmly into his Church and the sinfulness the destroys our relationship to the Lord
and to the Church.
Destructive Power of Sin
The Bible
never tires of repeating that evil is evil because it hurts us. Sin is self-punishment,
self-destruction. There is nothing nice about sin. Nobody actually enjoys being
in sin. Sin hurts us; it makes us suffer. Sin destroys us. “They went after worthlessness,
and became worthless themselves” (Jer 2:5). Sin is missing the mark (hamartia). It is ultimately nothingness.
Recognition of our weaknesses, failures, sins... that itself
is a great start. Awareness is control, awareness is strength
(Nouwen, Inner Voice of Love).
Henri Nouwen: Praying means
giving up your false security, no longer looking for arguments which will protect you
if you get pushed into a corner, and no longer setting your hope on a couple of
lighter moments which your life might still offer. To pray means to stop expecting
from God the same small-mindedness which you discover in yourself. To pray is to
walk in the full light of God and to say simply, without holding back, “I am human
and you are God.” At that moment, conversion occurs, the restoration of the true
relationship. A human being is not some who once in a while makes a mistake, and
God is not some one who now and then forgives. No! Human beings are sinners
and God is love. This conversion brings with it the relaxation which lets
you breathe again and puts you at rest in the embrace of a forgiving God. - Nouwen,
With Open Hands. (See also Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing, 130.)
We are a mix of right and wrong, holiness and horror. Tragic
beauty.
Recognition of our sinfulness is very essential for growth, conversion.
At the same time we need to understand/recognise that God is mercy, God is love.
It is not that God is only now and then merciful. It is not that we are iniquitous
only now and then, but we are sinners always. And God is merciful always, He forgives
us always. Breaking this narrow-mindedness is conversion. Understanding this, becoming
more and more aware of this is itself conversion.
Metanoia.
Beyond the mind. Into the heart. This is conversion. Falling into the heart.
One of the definitions for evil is militant ignorance, or militant unconsciousness. (Similar to
Carl Jung’s definition: refusal to meet the shadow. Evil is not the shadow itself
but the refusal to meet this shadow.) [Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less
Travelled, 25-26.]
Healing Power of God’s Love
If the
Bible is certain about the destructive power of sin, it is equally certain about
the healing power of God’s love. In Jesus we can see these two certainties. Jesus,
the incarnation of God’s love, entered into this history ravaged by sin, and took
upon himself the burden and brutality of our sins. When we look upon Jesus, we clearly
see the destructive power of sin and the sickness of our human family. Our own sickness!
Yours and mine!
Yet Jesus
countered our pride with humility; he countered our violence with gentleness; he
countered our hatred with the Love that forgives. The Cross is the event which enables
God’s love to enter into our history, to draw close to each of us, to become a source
of healing and salvation.
For our
sake he was crucified. From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus spoke of “his hour.”
He welcomed it joyfully at the beginning of his Passion; he cried out: “The hour
has come!” (John 17:1).
God is
not whimsical: He is not a being that loftily decides to love good people and punish
bad people; instead, Absolute Love stands revealed as the very name and shape of
Being itself. [Rohr, The Divine Dance,
79.] God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the
righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45). Nothing human can stop the flow of
divine love; we cannot undo the eternal pattern even by our worst sin. [Rohr, The Divine Dance, 43.]
We need
to root out the evil of sin from our lives. How? Through the healing power of God’s
love. Can we root out? We who are miserable cannot do this. We are powerless. Only
He can. We need His help. He can heal us. He, only He, can root out the evil of
sin from our lives. But our efforts are needed… as a response and as an openness,
yes.
Conversion
Whatever happens in your life, it has got a meaning. God
has a message through everything that is happening. Why should I preach this retreat,
not Fr Thelekkatt? Nothing happens by chance. Everything is planned by God, we can
only second this motion of God.
Luke
13:1-5. Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus
about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered,
“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans
because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will
all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do
you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell
you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
We need to interpret reality like Jesus; we need to interpret
Scriptures like Jesus.
Conversion, transformation and repentance, is a process. We need to be converted
again and again. We need to be born again and again and again. Don’t ever say: “I’ll
remove sin, then I’ll start to pray, to love, to live a religious life, to believe,
to do good.” Repentance goes hand in hand with life. If you want others to smile
back at you, then you smile at them first. You want others to do good, then, first
of all, be kind to them. You want change, but don’t you want to change? (Be the
change that you want to see.)
According to an old Indian story, there was a mouse which was
in constant fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat.
But then, it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Then
it began to fear the tiger. The magician took pity again, and changed it into a
tiger. But even then, it was afraid of the hunter. At this point the magician got
tired and gave up. He turned it into a mouse again. He said, “Nothing I do will
help you because you have the heart of a mouse.”
Conversion
is a process of changing, transforming the heart. It is a heart transplant, a
painful process of heart transplant. To remove the heart of stone, and replace it with the heart
of flesh.
“The
greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart,
a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest
places, to wash the feet of others, to love our sisters and brothers with that burning
love, that passion which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’”
– Dorothy Day.
Conversion is not mere change, but radical change. Metanoia, an about-turn, about-face. Metanoia
means beyond the mind. Beyond the mind, into the heart. Falling into the heart.
Sin
takes aim directly at our heart, our hope. Our heart is that which gives us cohesion. And sin targets our heart,
our hope. Sin leads us to hopelessness. In other words, what disintegrates our heart
is hopelessness. [Pope Francis, Open Mind,
Faithful Heart, esp. ch. 11 “The Hopelessness of Sin” 78-86 at 80.] As sin lead
us into hopelessness, hopelessness leads us into impatience (restlessness).
Our
impatient heart, then, gradually yields to human ways and grows weary of asking
for pardon. God never tires of forgiving us; but it is we who don’t approach Him. Even before
the God who never tires of forgiving, our impatient heart becomes tired of asking
for pardon. [79] So, the classic Jesus prayer is useful – helps us to approach God
and avoid desperation and restlessness: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on
me a sinner.”
Sign of Jonah is Jesus’ primary metaphor for transformation in the gospels.
[Rohr, Everything Belongs, 43-47.] It
is the paschal mystery.
We try to change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. We must learn
to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days
without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer. [Rohr,
Everything Belongs, 46.]
Hopelessness
and impatience causes disintegration. Our families can get disintegrated. Our confidence
disintegrates. Our solidarity disintegrates. The constancy of apostolic leadership
destabilizes. This is the disintegrating force of hopelessness. [82-85]
Growth
is a long process, time-bound, needs favourable conditions... You can’t fast forward
this process. You need a lot of patience, a lot of waiting, a lot of hoping. But in attempting
to skip over the stages of growth, the impatient heart ceases to be a creature;
it becomes instead a creator of shallow projects of protest that are inherently
self-seeking. You want everything all at once. Impatience and hopelessness can deform
the project of a people; they can distort the image of the Father who calls us to
be a people; they can undermine our maturity, our ability to struggle, our apostolic
stamina; they can turn us into gossiping busybodies. They tempt us to trust in the
illusion of magic as a way of controlling God. On the cross, Christ assumes all
these spurious challenges born of impatience and hopelessness. In him we learn that
God is great above all, that sin is ephemeral, and that patience and constancy are
born of hope. [81-82]
Conversion
is a grace we should ask for; we should spend much time in such prayer of petition.
Our heart becomes enclosed in its sin; it becomes hardened. So we need to pray and
beg for the conversion of our hearts. We must ask God for the grace of growing,
for the grace of intense sorrow and tears for our sins. (Ignatius of Loyola) [79-80]
We
need to ask the Lord for the grace of conversion (not just for personal
conversion, but also for the conversion of our structures, our communities, our
working committees, our tribes, our linguistic groups, our cultures, our societies,...),
for his goodness reveals to us that even “the best structures and the most idealized
systems soon become inhuman if the inhuman inclinations of our hearts are not made
wholesome, if we who live in these structures or who rule them do not undergo a
conversion of heart and of outlook” (EN 36). Do we think of a conversion of the
provincial council, of the general council, of the management, of the general
body of the school/college...? Our structures too need conversion.
Having said all this, conversion is God’s action primarily,
His initiative, He has a tremendous, first role in converting our hearts. Though
we have already mentioned about the “grace” of conversion, we need to reiterate
that it is God who is “doing” the conversion, and the human person “accepting” the
gift. It is God who removes the heart of stone and puts in a heart of flesh to love.
(Ezek) It is He who performs the painful heart surgery, almost violently to pull
out the heart of stone. Conversion is both operative grace and cooperative grace.
“The God who created you without you, will not save you without you.” (St Augustine)
In fact,
religious experience = religious conversion. St Paul’s conversion. Dramatic. Ours
may be slower, gradual, not as dramatic as St Paul’s.
Discouragement is one of the worst sins. Encourage (cor)
– to give ‘heart’; opposite of this is discourage, to take away ‘heart’. Heartless,
hopeless.
Intellectual conversion, moral conversion, psychic conversion, and religious conversion.
(Not about converting others, but about undergoing conversion oneself. In whatever
stage or wherever you are: process of conversion/transformation is for everyone.)
Transformed
people transform people. “All the conflicts and contradictions of life must find a resolution in us
before we can resolve anything outside ourselves. Only the forgiven can forgive,
only the healed can heal, only those who stand daily in need of mercy can offer
mercy to others. The cosmos is mirrored in the microcosm. If we let the mystery
happen in one small and true place, it moves from there! It is contagious, it is
shareable, it reshapes the world” (Richard Rohr). I shape my own inner world. That’s
the only way I can impact the world outside. All is well in my world.
Transformed
persons transform others and transform the world effortlessly—without having to
trying to convert and heal and fix others. She or he is concerned about converting
oneself always and everywhere, not about converting others with her or his ego.
Conversion
is related to “cleansing the lens.” Though it’s God’s works, I need to keep myself
open to the Spirit. “When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive.” Only sin
that can’t be forgiven is the sin or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Without
my being open, the Spirit can’t do anything. If I am hard-hearted, I can’t be converted.
If the person wants only the “heart of stone,” the “heart of flesh” will not be
given.
Repentance, conversion, metanoia,
transformation is a process. We are all wounded healers, involved in the process.
The story of the wounded healer (Henri
Nouwen). As still wounded people, we become healers at the same time. Bandaging
our wounds one by one, so that I am ready and prompt to help others who need bandaging.
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