Forgiveness

The silent retreat I’m participating in is shaped by Ignatian influences. In this tradition, part of a retreat should be spent considering our sinfulness before God. Yesterday my Spiritual Director gave me a guide for doing this very thing.

I prayed as she taught:

“Holy God, I grieve for what I have done and left undone.

Holy God, I grieve that I have made myself disordered and my life unfocused.

Holy God, I grieve over sin’s horror on the earth and the vanity and emptiness of human affairs.

Holy God, draw me to your Holy Self.”

I was guided to ask God “to reveal to me the mystery of sin in myself more and more fully, and to give me the gift of repentance and of weeping for my sins.”

I was urged to pray three times: “I want to feel ashamed of what I have done and left undone, and to have a sense of revulsion from the disorderliness of my desiring and enacting…fill my heart with tears, and my eyes, if You will give me that.”

I was instructed to bring to my mind, in a comprehensive way, my sins, the weight of those sins, the God against whom I have sinned, and how God’s creation continued to nurture and care for me in spite of those sins.

Then, as a climax, I was asked to consider a day in the future when I will die. I was to imagine myself ailing in a hospital and to imagine who might have gathered around me. What would I like to have done between now and then? What attitudes or actions would make me fear on that death bed? What will seem valuable to me lying there? On my obituary, what would I want to blot out? What would I wish with all my heart it would include?

To deepen this experience, I decided to visit a nearby cemetery while practicing this somber exercise. During a run earlier in the week I had seen the Spring Hill Graveyard. Tucked in a wooded and upscale neighborhood, it was established in 1844. But its occupants lived and died even before this.

Read More »Of Sin and Salvation: Why I Went to the Cemetery During Five Days of Silence