Sunday March 3, 2024
PURITY OF HEART
Memorable events during the month gone by are the Parish Lenten Retreat, Return with All Your Heart, and our First Reconciliation Retreat for students. Both retreats spoke to a return to our baptismal innocence, a return to paradise. Can we return to paradise, or do we simply survive on the periphery, in the valley East of Eden? Shall we go west or is paradise a state of being? Purity of Heart, a phrase used by the ancient authors, corresponds to a recovery of innocence, according to Thomas Merton. Purity of heart connotes a kind of original simplicity like that of Adam and Eve in the garden.
Like all of us, the students were nervous about confessing their sins. After all, that is why Adam and Eve covered themselves and hid from God after the Fall. When they did speak to God again, they certainly did not take responsibility for their actions but blamed it on one another and then the serpent. We all do much better by focusing on the mercy of God, not our sins, when we celebrate Reconciling Penance. Mercy is the quality of care for another, a willingness to make an effort to ease another’s pain, readiness to forgive, eagerness to help. Having been touched by Jesus’ mercy and chosen by him in baptism, we are sent out, sinners that we are, to witness to divine mercy through our almsgiving or service of charity.
In Christ,
Rev. Robert P. Capone