“Be
merciful O Lord for we have sinned.”
This is the message the psalmist has for us, but this message is
so very foreign to most of the messages we get in our secular world today. So
often, we don’t want to admit to God, or to ourselves, or to our brothers and
sisters that we have sinned. More often
than not, we want to blame someone else or something else, we might want to
even sue someone and try to gain financially even for our own sins. And then we have structural sins, which are
sins that we commit as a community or as a society. Again, we usually don’t want to take
responsibility for the sins we commit collectively.
The Eastern Orthodox Church has a
prayer called the Jesus Prayer. It is
often repeated again and again as a mantra. It has the same general message as our psalm refrain today: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Many scholars believe that this prayer developed out
of the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers out in the deserts of Egypt
in the fifth century. An important part
of the process of conversion and renewal for us today as modern Catholics is to
admit our sins and to seek a change of heart, which is why the Sacrament of
Reconciliation is such an important part of our Catholic faith.
Just this past weekend, we had three inmates
at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl come into our Church
through an RCIA program we have been conducting out there through our prison
ministry. It was wonderful to see the
humility and holiness in these men as they were received into the Church, how they were so happy to come into the
Church after a long journey of longing and searching, of wanting to truly change
their lives and give their hearts over to God.
May we always come to God with our
sins, with the ways we need to change in our lives. And the Lord will be truly merciful to us in
our honesty and humility.
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