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Monday, First Week of Lent B (February 22/2021)
Your Daily Blessing: May God grant you the inner strength to seek reconciliation with anyone you need to reconcile with. Amen.
Narration: We have all come to understand that the Church has power to forgive or retain sins. We therefore believe in the power of the sacrament of reconciliation.
Though, objectively, or formerly, the Church as an institution has received the power to bind and to loose; but subjectively, that power is of little consequence if the individual members of the Church do not understand how he/she possesses and exercises that same power, even though the formats are different.
I had a recent experience with a brother of mine that made me see clearly how each one of us possesses and exercises this power of binding and loosing. During this encounter, I honestly wanted to seek true reconciliation with this brother of mine.
All through that encounter, I struggled to control myself so as not to yield to the pull of my lower nature that often incline us to exercise more readily the power to bind. If anything was achieved in that encounter, it was merely subjective: perhaps a restraint on both sides not to trigger a quarrel. In my judgement, it was a lost opportunity.
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But the fear of losing an opportunity to reach a full-hearted reconciliation should not discourage us from trying, particularly this Lenten season. We are different personalities, and the way we process our hurts and memories of them are different. We must enter into ourselves and try to reconcile the question of Jesus to his disciples and to us: “who do you say that I am?”
We cannot answer that question without an encounter with the Spirit of Jesus. That Spirit is what animates our own spirit to seek reconciliation and peace with all God’s children, even at the cost of humiliation. In the end, ‘setting prisoners free’ is an act only a person with highest authority can exercise. Yet each of us has been given this power.
PRAYER: Dear Lord, sometimes it is so difficult to reach out a hand of reconciliation to those who have hurt us. Please grant me the grace to seek more to ‘set prisoners free’ and that includes myself. Amen.
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