Typical comments range from "There's too much emphasis about sin", "my sins put Jesus on the Cross", "I'm unworthy", "I'm a sinner" to "it's all negative".

This guilt-based old religion mentality, ties us into a God who is tough as old boots and glares down from above noting our every wrong move.

Such held over views from childhood, disrupts us from responding to a God who lavishly loves us to bits, each other and ourselves.

Can you imagine that!

The reality

Sin is real. Grace is real.

The Hebrew understanding of sin translates into khata, which means a failure to fulfil to be truly human. To ‘miss the mark' in living and loving as God's image and likeness as fully human alive men and women.

Sin is about immaturity. The consequences of sin in its various levels of seriousness causes injury to another and to our natural world.

To sin therefore, is that behaviour where we have disrespected relationships, failed to act justly and trashed the environment.

So to dismiss sin, or replace the word altogether with "wrong choices", is to ignore an innate truth of our human condition.

St Paul "gets it"

St Paul gradually realises, as we all do at some point, that we are contradictory figures.

We do live in tension between what is truth or untruth, what is healthy or unhealthy or what is life giving or life draining. He names this an inward struggle.

He says "I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.

"When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me". (Romans 7:19-20)

Yet St Paul isn't on his own. I can identify with what he says - and reckon some of you can to.

Hard to believe that Paul, once named Saul, was a predator killer of Christians. Yet only owning his sin could he come to recognise that his behaviour originated from the Fall.

In the beginning

This Genesis story attempts to offer an explanation in how sin entered the world impacting on our beingness as women and men.

How Eve and Adam were in the very beginning living in right relationships with each other, comfortable in full view of God and in the garden called Eden.

All was blissfully heavenly.

Then antipathy entered breaking the friendship and leaving us all vulnerable to the inclination of sin.

But evil wasn't going to have the last say. God's plan of recovery restored this friendship when Jesus became the willing reconciliatory sacrifice.

It was sin that was destroyed by the cross. Grace never entered the world because grace always was.

Life and liberty

Back to St Paul. He so rightly says in Galatians 2:20. I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with life of Christ lives in me.

Easter changed absolutely everything. The Cross becoming a symbol of liberty enabling us to become our baptismal selves and not victims to this ancestral sin.

That's St Paul's point: - that God is good and not jealous as the serpent claims.

That is why we don't have to be joyless or slaves to our false selves.

As Pope Francis suggests, we don't have to look like we've come back from a funeral or live lives that seem like Lent without Easter (Evangelii Gaudium 6,10) and he is right.

It's often when we come to that place of self-truth, in recognising where we ‘missed the mark' do we encounter simultaneously God's giftedness in Jesus.

Can we name what hampers us from being truly human as women and men of God and being created solely to be God's own image? Can we name those occasions where we have ‘come up short' in our ‘being' the Glory of God.

Becoming our true selves

Pentecost Sunday holds the power to burst with life in our lives. To get excited about who we are.

"We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being." said Pope Francis in article 8 in Evangelii Gaudium.

The Redemption becomes the relationship to continually become a new creation converting over and over and over again to become our whole person.

That we don't have to choose sin. We can say no when critically pulling another down to boost ourselves up. We can so no to blaming another for our mistakes.

We don't have to lose our rag at another. We don't have to kill off those of little account. We can stop and attend to a need we see in front of us.

By integrating sin, by owning our ‘stuff' we are simultaneously claiming God's investment in us - God's intense hope and trust in us to be God's image.

You have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-11)

And that's worth getting excited about.

• Copy supplied
• Sue Seconi (pictured) is a writer and a parishioner from the Catholic Parish of Whanganui - te Parihi katorika ki Whanganui.

The Tibetan proverb, which may be neither Tibetan nor a proverb, stabs my heart a little; at least, the part about walking double does.

Due to osteoarthritis in my right hip, my walking has been curtailed recently.

Which makes me sad. I love to walk.

As my decades have progressed, I have gone from being a committed dancer to an indifferent runner to a stationary cyclist, but I have always been a walker.

I love a good hike, alone or with company.

The kilometres feel good.

The world is beautiful.

I always thought of walking our dogs as a daily therapy to clear out my brain. I took my ability to walk, the smooth cooperation of my feet and legs and knees and hips, oiled cogs in my biological machine, for granted.

I could blame my mother's brittle Irish bones for my condition, but let's face it: my age has more to do with the breakdown of my hip.

Over the years, we wear away the cartilage that cushions the moving parts of our joints.

No one tells us that this precious cartilage does not replenish itself.

It cannot be restored or fabricated or grown in a lab (at least, not yet).

Once we lose it, we experience pain in the joint.

Eventually, we arrive at the need for surgical replacement.

I could blame my mother's brittle Irish bones for my condition, but let's face it: my age has more to do with the breakdown of my hip.

That's where I'm at.

I tried a steroid injection, which seemed miraculous for a time—Look at me, I can bend and walk and dance and kneel again!—but the effects gradually wore off.

Subsequent injections will likely be less effective with each dose. Surgery is in my future if I want to keep walking.

For now, I try to ignore the pain.

I try to carry on with life within my limits.

Now, my husband usually walks our one remaining dog, who is old and cranky (like I am) and doesn't always want to go that far anyway.

I go about my daily activities with a thought to which ones are going to hurt and how to ration my energy to get the most done.

I creak like an old house in the morning, and I need a few minutes to relearn how to walk after a long car ride.

As I navigate the mazes of health insurance costs and surgical options, I set my course for a hip replacement.

And all shall be well.

My doctor says I am a good candidate, and my surgeon cites a 96 per cent success rate. ("What's the deal with that 4 per cent?" I silently wonder.)

I will have to get a cane and a walker for my weeks of recovery time.

My husband will have to cater to my needs (the "for worse" part of our vows, my poor darling). I will heal. I will hike again. I hope.

I've long dreamt of walking the width of Spain on the popular pilgrimage known as the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James.

I consider this 800-kilometre trek to be the ultimate experience of walking as a spiritual journey.

The walk is quite physical; the progress of faith is symbolic.

You take five weeks to walk west through Spain to the Atlantic Ocean, travelling through bad weather and blisters, relying on the kindness of strangers and the camaraderie of fellow hikers, and fellow searchers on the trail.

It is my kind of walk.

It was one of my retirement goals.

Then Covid-19 delayed all travel plans.

Then the hip.

Walking the walk has always been my metaphor of choice for growing closer to God, following the path to a sturdier faith, for keeping my feet on holy ground.

My doctor told me to keep walking in moderation but to avoid hills.

If only he could see the giant hill that is my driveway that I had been power walking up and down every day, thinking it was good for me.

He told me to limit high-impact exercise, probably like the series of jumping jacks recommended on my Jillian Michaels workout DVD.

The activities I thought were good for me have turned out to be bad for my impoverished cartilage.

My doctor told me to swim.

I am so not a swimmer.

I hardly recognize this less-active person I'm supposed to become, and that's before I glimpse the crone in the mirror.

I'm too hard on myself, I know.

But also: Perhaps I am too grandiose, another boomer who is somehow the first human ever to age and must document the details, right?

My hip is hardly unique in the annals of arthritis. We grow old, and we deal with it.

Still, I worry that the left hip will go next, and then each knee, followed by every joint that is put in and shaken all about for the hokey-pokey eventually needing surgery.

I worry I will spend too much of my remaining life waiting to walk again.

Maybe the secret to ageing gracefully is understanding that we have already made a lifetime of progress on our spiritual walk.

Walking the walk has always been my metaphor of choice for growing closer to God, for following the path to a sturdier faith, for keeping my feet on holy ground.

Who am I if I am unable to walk?

Maturity has become a lesson I don't particularly want to learn.

The breakdown of physical and mental ability is surely leading me somewhere, but do I want to follow that map?

I think of Jesus' words toward the end of the Gospel of John: "Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go" (Jn 21:18).

This is traditionally thought to be a reference to the way St. Peter would be martyred.

I used to think of my parents when I heard this Gospel read at Mass, how at the end of their lives, they needed intimate assistance from their children but complained about it mightily.

Now the verse seems more personally pertinent. Yikes, I think.

Age is definitely leading me where I do not want to go. Continue reading

• Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Overdue: A Dewey Decimal System of Grace. She and her husband Randy have four children and three grandchildren.

Others gloss it as "unconditional gift" or "undeserved favour."

Still others prefer to see it as God's favourable disposition toward his people.

However, the word grace in the New Testament (Greek charis) simply means "gift." The content of the gift is determined by its context. For example, the definition "God's riches at Christ's expense" makes perfect sense in the broader context of Ephesians 2:8.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.

But does that same definition fit 2 Corinthians 12:9?

[Jesus] said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

What about 1 Corinthians 15:10?

By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me."

The more fitting definition of "grace" in these two passages in Corinthians seems to be "power."

Grace is God's power manifested in Paul's weakness in the first, and in his ability to work harder than others in the second.

Do we give Grace?

What about 2 Corinthians 8:3-4? Do the glosses "unconditional gift," "undeserved favour," or "a favourable disposition" work here?

(The Macedonian believers) gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favour (same word for grace) of taking part in the relief of the saints."

Grace here is not the immaterial gift of salvation or spiritual power. Rather, grace is the material gift of money or resources.

That may surprise you.

Have you ever described the act of giving money as the giving of "grace"? Paul clearly does in 2 Corinthians 8-9, not just once, but six times (8:4, 6, 7, 19; 9:8, 15). The money bag he carried from these predominantly Gentile churches to the poor saints in Jerusalem is, strangely enough, "grace."

But what is even more surprising about 2 Corinthians 8-9 is how the material grace of humans is inextricably connected to the immaterial grace of God.

Grace as a person

To motivate the Corinthians to contribute, Paul begins 2 Corinthians 8 by speaking about the grace of God.

"We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given" (2 Corinthians 8:1). He then expands the definition of this grace in 2 Corinthians 8:9: "you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that although he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich."

Grace, in its chief manifestation, is the gift of a person (Titus 2:11-14), our incarnate, crucified, and ascended Savior.

To receive all the benefits that this gift of grace achieved, we must, as Calvin argues, receive his person: "as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us" (Institutes, 3.1.1).

In 2 Corinthians 8:9, we find that the gift of Christ's person is given to us in the gospel — he lowered himself, so that we, through his poverty, might become rich. And this gift comes from God. It is, after all, "the grace of God" (2 Corinthians 8:1).

I find it fascinating that when Paul wants to encourage human giving in the church, he placards the divine grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the fundamental expression of giving grace as he gives himself.

Paul does this intentionally to teach the church that Christ's self-giving love is the paradigm for all human expressions of material grace toward others.

Interestingly, the only two instances where the phrase "the grace of God" appears in 2 Corinthians 8-9 are when Paul speaks of God's giving (2 Corinthians 8:1) and human giving (2 Corinthians 9:14: "the surpassing grace of God on you [Corinthians]").

What's the connection? God's divine gift of grace fuels the human giving of grace to others.

God's Grace and ours

Consider 2 Corinthians 9:7-8. After stating that "God loves a cheerful giver" (quoting Proverbs 22:8), Paul takes a step back to explain the source of one's giving.

"God is able to make all grace [divine grace] abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work [human grace]."

Also, 2 Corinthians 9:11: "You will be enriched in every way [by God] to be generous in every way [toward others]." Divine grace propels human giving.

But why is this the case?

Why does our human giving depend on God's initial gift of grace? Because "all things are from him, through him, and to him. To him be the glory forever and ever" (Romans 11:36).

As Paul asks the boastful Corinthians, "What do you have that you did not receive? Why then do you boast as if you did not?" (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The only appropriate response is, "Everything is a gift from God's hand."

David also declared, "All things come from you" (1 Chronicles 29.14).

John the Baptist also affirms what David declared: "A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven" (John 3:27). James agrees: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights" (James 1:17).

But God always gives his grace to his people for a particular purpose.

We see this in 2 Corinthians 9:8 above (indicated by "so that") and 9:11 (indicated by "to be").

When people in the world give gifts, they determine the purpose of their gifts. But when God's people steward God's grace, the purpose of giving must align with God's purposes.

Thanks be to God

Why? Because our possessions are God's.

He's the Giver and the owner of grace.

We're simply stewards who mediate his grace.

In a sense, we're co-owners, but God never relinquishes his divine right over our possessions.

This becomes evident when we discover who receives thanks for the gift that the Corinthians give to the Jerusalem saints. Paul writes,

You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God.

For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God.

By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ, and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others, while they long for you and pray for you, because of the surpassing grace of God upon you. Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!

Why will humans direct their thanksgiving to God rather than to the human giver? Because, ultimately, humans do not receive from but through other humans. The final giver is God. He, therefore, deserves the final glory.

But does this mean that when I receive a gift from another human, I should never thank that person?

Of course not. John Calvin's Geneva Catechism #234 is helpful here. He writes,

Question: But are we not to feel grateful to men whenever they have conferred any kindness upon us?

Answer: Certainly we are; and were it only for the reason that God honours them by sending to us, through their hands, as rivulets [or streams], the blessings which flow from the inexhaustible fountain of his liberality. In this way, he [God] lays us under obligation to them and wishes us to acknowledge it. He, therefore, who does not show himself grateful to them by so doing, proves himself to be ungrateful to God.

We thank God by thanking others, remembering that his gifts come from him but through others.

And so our thanks should flow through others back to God — the Father of every good and perfect gift — as Paul does when he ends 2 Corinthians 9:15 by saying, "Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!"

More than human love

Recently, a close friend of mine bestowed on me a very generous gift. I was floored by his loving generosity toward me and my family, especially my mom. He loved my mom with an earnest love for widows.

But his love was no mere human love. It was divine. Not that my friend is God. But God loves through means.

Ηe channelled his abundant love on us through this friend, allowing us to witness the beauty of divine and human grace for those in need.

His act of generosity was simultaneously a gracious act of self-giving, and it immediately redirected my eyes and heart to the self-giving love of Christ.

It was therefore more than fitting to turn to my friend and say, "I thank God for ‘the surpassing grace of God upon you'" (2 Corinthians 9:14).

• David Briones is David Briones is associate professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of Paul's Financial Policy: A Socio-Theological Approach.
• First published in Desiring God. Republished with permission.

Unfortunately, this popular conception of grace is sometimes misconstrued, presenting grace as a commodity rather than a reality experienced in our lives.

From this view, "receiving grace" through the sacraments may be interpreted as getting more grace, as if sacraments were transactions imparting a quantifiable spiritual good.

These transactional descriptions of grace tend to portray sin and grace as competing entities on the spiritual side of our existence.

The souls of holy persons are filled by grace, these depictions suggest, while the souls of unrepentant sinners are so stained by sin that grace can find no home.

For those of us caught somewhere in the middle, venial sins diminish and sacraments increase our souls' stores of grace.

Avoiding mortal sin is of paramount importance because such acts sap the soul's supply of grace, thereby fracturing our relationship with God.

Grace as the electric company!

Father Thomas O'Meara describes this way of thinking as "grace as the electric company."

Sacraments give us grace (the lights come on), we sin and lose grace (the lights go out), and sacramental confession and absolution cleanse sin and restore grace (the lights come on again).

This framework was particularly influential before Vatican II and continues to persist in the minds of many Catholics.

Father James Keenan, writing about the anxieties of his own Catholic childhood, reveals the limits of this transactional model.

According to the electric company model of grace, if a person neglects to confess a significant sin, its stain remains and grace cannot refill the soul.

If he or she then forgets the unconfessed sin, believing it absolved, the stain of that sin remains on the soul indefinitely, thereby making impossible a direct ascent to heaven after death.

Luckily, it would seem, a postmortem layover in purgatory could eventually provide the necessary soul cleansing.

However, beyond the personal spiritual anxiety this transactional view can induce, it also problematically distorts the Catholic sacramental system. Continue reading

Sylva is an English-language official of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation.

He went on to explain the World day of Poor is also based on "our understanding that each of us is poor in some way ... " Read more

The year will also deliver hard work. Living in this world creates layers of busyness, planning, anxieties, small divisions that fracture our sense of wholeness. Yet when we pause long enough to go back to the sweet calm of the manger, we connect again with that newness. It echoes a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "…there lives the dearest freshness deep down things…"

What we encounter with Jesus in the Nativity, is our own birth, a pure soul coming into incarnation. What we feel is our own God-given state of grace.

I can't remember the name of the church father who described humanity as "part angel and part animal." That's a good metaphor. We immediately recognize in ourselves, the tools for survival, those animal me-first instincts that can block our spiritual path if we don't work with them and learn from them.

We can put a lot of prayer into the "sins" of the ego. That is not wrong, but our faith will lack balance if we don't also acknowledge the angel, that spark of God in us. Deep down, under the surface struggle, we all live in astounding grace.

Our struggles can be regarded as lessons in "life school." Sometimes the lessons are hard and we need to sit an exam more than once, but that core of grace will always move us forward. We go from narrow thinking in which we see ourselves as separate and alienated in a hostile world, to spacious thinking where we know the interconnectedness of everything - God manifest in all of creation.

This growth process is succinctly described by an anonymous 15th century monk: "Find thyself: tis half the path to God. Then lose thyself and the rest of the way is trod."

Losing oneself comes when we let go of dualistic thinking and see God in all things. There are no enemies, simply beautiful souls in various stages of growth in life school. The pilgrim who comes to this way of seeing, may appear to be full of loving kindness. That's because another's pain is his pain, another's celebration, his celebration, another's struggle her struggle. This is something beyond compassion. It is the true understanding of chessed, the Hebrew word for loving kindness.

We glimpse some of this quality in saints like Mother Teresa. We see it in its fullness in our Lord Jesus Christ who bore the pain of the world because he chose not to be separate from us.

That brings us back to Christmas and New Year. During the coming year, we will reflect on Jesus's death and resurrection, on his teachings, his miracles. But by far the greatest miracle is his birth. How could he choose to come into incarnation for us? That is truly astounding grace.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego told the National Catholic Reporter that the "theology of mercy is saying is that the essential attribute of God in relation to us - and for us to understand who is God - is that of mercy".

"And that God is innately merciful and can do no other than to be merciful, because that's at the core of who God is."

That understanding of God, Bishop McElroy said, "will be the prism through which so much of the discussion occurs" at the synod.

But the bishop said there will also be a tension at the synod between mercy and a kind of "cheap grace" that "leads to a sense of complacency and not trying to struggle with, wrestle with, the challenge of the Gospel in our lives".

"I think that is the central dilemma that this synod is going to have to deal with, in terms of diverse opinions," he said.

"How do you emphasise the mercy of God at every key point and at the same time not let it become a distorted sense of mercy that legitimates and supports complacency?"

Bishop McElroy noted a desire among many US Catholics for the Church to "banish judgmentalism" of people.

Something that may help bishops at the synod in their discussions, Bishop McElroy said, is the theological notion of graduality.

"What that says is that many times, people in their lives cannot embrace the fullness of the Gospel at a given moment," the bishop said.

"They need to take steps toward it."

The synod's special secretary, Archbishop Bruno Forte, last month said: "We want to be a Church" that "does not hurl anathemas, but stays at the side of the people . . . We want to innovate the modes of proclamation, not its content."

One of several key issues for the synod, he said, will be a discussion of allowing those who have divorced and remarried outside the Church to become "godfathers or godmothers, catechists, extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist".

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Catholic World News
• Image: Huffington Post

Cardinal Nichols was speaking at a special Mass at Westminster Cathedral in thanksgiving for the sacrament of Matrimony.

More than 500 married couple celebrating milestone anniversaries attended.

In his homily, Cardinal Nichols said Christ is actively present in every sacramental marriage; he is a partner in it and he is always faithful.

"So we have to grasp the challenging truth that even when the human relationships within a marriage denigrate and break down, something recognised in a civil divorce, there remains in that marriage the Word of Christ, given and never revoked," he said.

From this arises a demanding and painful question, the cardinal continued: What was the grace of marriage that remains for the spouse in such a situation?

"Perhaps it is the grace of sorrow and repentance, the grace of being able to see and embrace the hurt done through that breakdown and the responsibilities that flow from it?" he said.

"Perhaps that recognition is the first step on the pathway of mercy and of conversion."

Families are at the heart of the life of the Church, he said, and it was important to remember that neither marriage nor family was ever entirely private or self-contained.

"At every phase of marriage and family life, help is often needed from the wider family or from the Church community," he said.

The cardinal was speaking four months ahead of the Synod on the Family in Rome, in which he will be taking part.

This week, Pope Francis chaired a meeting of the Ordinary Council of the Synod of Bishops, working on the text of the working document (Instrumentum Laboris) for the synod.

Publication of the working document is expected within a few weeks.

The synod, to be held from October 4-25 in the Vatican is titled "The vocation and the mission of the family in the Church and in the contemporary world".

Sources

• The Tablet
• Independent Catholic News
• Vatican Information Service
• Image: Lifesitenews

My passport was my only remaining valid form of identification.

Rather than afflict it with new creases and sweat stains, I thought I'd obtain a state-approved photo ID, which would be good for six months.

It turned out that the agent had bigger plans for me. "Are you aware that your driver's license is suspended?" She asked.

I nodded. Standing before her in crotch-cradling lycra cycling shorts, a plastic helmet under my arm, I was very grimly aware of it.

My first act of settling in had been to buy a Trek road bike, the fastest vehicle I knew of whose licit operation required no official approval.

"To get it reinstated you'll have to pay a $500 abandoned vehicle fee."

How my beloved Geo Prizm came to be abandoned in the eyes of the law is a long story.

Let's just say it involved a light collision in the turning lane, a smashed-in driver's-side door, a high deductible, and a lot of poverty.

I was no longer quite so poor as I had been; paying the fine wasn't going to be fun, but it was possible.

The thought of scattering the black clouds from the record and getting my license back appealed to me.

With a gulp and a sigh, I lay my Visa on the counter and said, "Okay."

Without removing her eyes from her computer screen, the agent took it. Then she said, "Oh...wait.'

"What?"

"To get your license back, you'll have to go to traffic school."

Traffic school consisted of a one-day, eight-hour course held in the conference room of a Scottsdale motel. Mainly, the pupils watched videos - "Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler," starring Walt Disney's Goofy, being one.

As an alternative to paying a fine, it was far from a bad deal. I knew because I'd been through it twice before.

I agreed. The agent printed out some forms, which she instructed me to fill out and sign.

I did as she said, and she handed me back some other forms to keep.

Then she ran my card and had me sign the receipt.

I left the place with a temporary state-approved ID card and a sense of being one fairly small step from legitimacy.

But I had another record to clear up

During my year in Turkey, I had to work Saturdays and Sundays, and my work days lasted long into the evenings.

Traveling to the nearest church would have involved a seven-hour round trip and transportation costs in the neighborhood of $100.

With no confessor available, my sins, great and small, piled up.

On my first Saturday back in the Valley, I decided to get them absolved and receive Communion for the first time in 13 months.

The church had an open confessional, and the priest turned out to be one of the most benevolent-looking men I'd ever laid eyes on.

Actually, "benevolent" doesn't do him justice.

He was adorable. Well-padded around the middle, with dark brows arching over gently inquisitive eyes, he looked as though at any moment he might cry out, "Oh, bother" and thrust his paws into a jar of honey.

After breezing through what I considered the small stuff, I recounted the tongue-lashings I'd dealt out while in the grip of my awful temper.

Whenever I recalled these moments privately, or for the benefit of friends, I wilted with shame.

They seemed to me not only sinful but contemptible, evidence of a low and ill-formed character.

The priest gave no sign of holding such an opinion.

With no change in his cuddly affect, he offered a few general pieces of advice and absolved me.

"For your penance," he said. Continue reading

"It is the power of God's Word that brings about a true change of heart."

The "encounter between [our] sins and the blood of Christ is the only salvific encounter there is."

The Jesuit Pope's words would not have slipped past Charles Péguy, the great poet from Orléans who passed away a hundred years ago.

It was 5 September 1914 and the Battle of the Marne had only just began when a bullet went straight through his head.

He became one of the early victims of the First World War after volunteering for military service. He was enrolled as a reserve lieutenant.

Towards the end of his life, his unusual journey as an "irregular" Christian led him to experience the things Francis described in yesterday's homily on a number of occasions.

In fact he described this experience in his work Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy published after his death, in 1924.

An Italian translation of the text was recently published by Edizioni Studium.

The translation, by Cristiana Lardo, a researcher in Italian literature, reads: "The healings, the successes and the rescuing acts of grace are extraordinary; it brought victory and salvaged what was or seemed to have been lost."

"The most terrible miseries, miserliness, turpitudes and crimes, including sin, are often chinks in human armour which grace can penetrate through, overcoming human toughness."

Meanwhile, "everything slides over the inorganic armour of habit, the tip every sword is blunt."

Over a century ago, Péguy wrote: "the do-gooders, those who like to be called as such, have no chinks in their armour. They have no wounds."

"There is no way in for grace, sin is essentially the way in." Continue reading

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• Image: Charles Péguy

The pilgrimage, organised for the Year of Faith, attracted more than 100,000 people to St Peter's Square.

The Pope acknowledged that "life is often wearisome, and many times tragically so".

However, he continued, "what is most burdensome in life is not this: what weighs more than all of these things is a lack of love".

"Dear families, the Lord knows our struggles," the Holy Father said, repeating with emphasis: "He knows them!"

He encouraged the pilgrimage families to persevere amid difficulties and to have faith in God and in each other, rather than paying attention to "this makeshift culture, which can shatter our lives".

In his homily at Mass, the Pope mentioned three important characteristics of families:

First, "the family prays". Saying the Our Father together "is not something extraordinary; it's easy", he said. Praying the Rosary as a family "is very beautiful and a source of great strength".

Second, he said, "the family keeps the faith". He stressed that "Christian families are missionary families".

"How do we keep our faith as a family? Do we keep it for ourselves, in our families, as a personal treasure like a bank account, or are we able to share it by our witness, by our acceptance of others, by our openness?"

Third, "the family experiences joy". A family that lives by the light of Christian faith will naturally communicate that joy, he said. "That family is the salt of the earth and the light of the world, it is the leaven of society as a whole."

Pope Francis urged Catholic couples to go against the cultural trend of seeing everything, including relationships, as fleeting. Marriage is a life-long journey, he said, "a long journey, not little pieces".

Sources:

Catholic News Service

Vatican Information Service

Catholic News Agency

Image: Catholic News Agency

Since then, says Archbishop Justin Welby, there have been long periods with "no sense of any presence at all'', but he has never gone back on that night's "decision to follow Christ''.

He says it is not his doing: "It's grace. Grace is a reality: feelings are ephemeral."

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She and her husband arrived in Papua New Guinea on the Fourth of July 1969 to work with Wycliff Bible Translators, producing literacy materials and translating the New Testament. They had four children, all born in Papua New Guinea. Mrs. Fabian, 75, returned to the U.S. in 2005 after the Papua New Guinea government ruled it would no longer renew work permits to expatriates age 65 and older.

Until then, she remained in the country despite a tragedy that occurred 20 years ago.

Edmund Fabian, 57, was murdered in 1993 in the study of his house at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at Ukarumpa missions center, in the eastern highlands of the country. He was killed by a blow to the back of his head with an ax. His killer was a Nabak tribe member who had been helping with Bible translation into the Nabak language.

Papua New Guinea is in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, separated from northern Australia by the Torres Strait. The independent country is on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. The western half of New Guinea island is part of Indonesia.

The Fabians worked in the eastern highlands near the port city of Lae. According to the CIA's World Factbook, there are 836 indigenous languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, which is a tribal society. Most languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

"It's a linguist's paradise," Mrs. Fabian said.

Mr. Fabian was working on Book 1, Corinthians, chapter 13 when he was struck down. It's also known as the love chapter.

Mrs. Fabian's love of God guided her next step.

"I didn't only want to be a Bible translator," she said last month from her home in Pennsylvania. "I wanted to be someone who would obey the Bible. I could not find any loophole that said, ‘Well, in some cases, you don't have to forgive people.' There were no such verses."

But she added, "I had no idea that in doing that, God was going to take that and make it something grander." Continue reading

Sources

• Watertown Daily Times
• Image: Davis College History