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Conscience: “. . . a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right.”
—Catechism of the Catholic Church
As she faces daily torments of dementia, this author finds strength and peace in prayer.
When I became a Catholic at the age of 20, I loved the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Now, more than 40 years later, my behavior is morally acceptable, but I am tortured interiorly by inappropriate thoughts, lacking focus and concentration. While polite and kind outwardly, I get irked or offended by others’ behavior. I am impatient, judging inwardly in my mind.
A lot can happen in forty days and forty nights.
The key to loving your neighbor is learning how to love yourself.
The forty days and nights of Lent are about simplification, purification, getting priorities reestablished and remembering that God, not my ego, is the center of reality.
The word discipline comes from the Latin discere, meaning “to learn.”
Slavish imitation is not what holiness is about, but rather it’s about learning to love God in our own time and place with its own sensibilities and ways of following in the footsteps of Jesus with all our heart and mind and soul. It’s about doing and making choices commensurate with our own capacities, our own strength and/or weakness of mind and body. We don’t have to be nutty to be a saint, but being in love with God will sometimes move us to do things that others will consider nutty or unbalanced.
Francis’s own song defined love for him. It was to live and be in God’s most holy will. And Francis has learned from Christ’s own words in the Gospels what God’s will is for those who love him. They are to feed the hungry, give drink to those who thirst, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. And they are to do all that for love of his love who did the same for us when he walked among us. He remembered when he was hungry and thirsty, and a stranger, and naked, sick and in prison.
Viewing Scripture as “love letters from God” causes us to pause and reconsider the significance of the Bible in our personal and communal lives of faith.
