Seeing With New Eyes

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge advocate for the sacrament of Confession. I've written about it here, where I included an examination of conscience link that I find very useful. I go to confession every 6-8 weeks.  Do you sin that much, you ask? Well, yes. The more I grow in my faith, the more easily I can hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, and the more I realize exactly how much I sin on a minute-to-minute basis, and need to reconcile, especially if I'm going to be united in Christ through the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

In his book Fundamentals of Christianity (A Cursillo Publication), Fr. Frank Salmani discusses how the Holy Spirit drives our Christian faith. "When we open our hearts to the Spirit," he writes, "we begin to see the world and reality not in our limited terms and ideas, but in the way that God sees them. (p. 50)" This isn't just seeing how God sees the good stuff about us, either.

 "When the Spirit of Truth searches our hearts and we are honest with ourselves, we will know that we need to be recreated and transformed to Christ. (p. 50)"  If we're going to live as disciples of Christ, we have to find the cracks--those little areas where evil continues to take root. The confessional is where I weed out the evil and expose the cracks. Christ in the Eucharist repairs the cracks, and my practice of holiness maintains the repair.

I found this handy list on Fr. Larry Richards' website.  This list is alphabetical--a weed's a weed, right?  There are two copies of the list on one sheet of paper, so cut it in half, keep a list for yourself and give the other list to someone you love. I'm not guilty of all of them, but I am guilty of quite a few.

I'm definitely taking this list with me to my next confession.