THE BEACON ON THE BOULEVARD

        I love Confession, because I love God, because GOD loves me.  There is a Chronical of Confessions across time, across the world, each day, where heaven has opened up and God was freed to love that person in ways they have been deeply missing, not knowing they could be loved that deeply, or that deeply again.  Going to Confession is an act of love for God: His beloved child who He sees, seeking Jesus’ face as a sinner let Him be the kind and merciful Savior He is, who just wants to love them.  I will always remember a childlike Confession I heard from a child at my first parish.  It was a sweet, little girl around 9 years old.  She sat down.  I smiled, greeted her and asked “What would you like to confess to God today?”  She paused for a moment thinking, looking up, then looked at me and said “That I love Him?”  I said “YEP.”  We love Jesus by trusting Him and sure of His mercy, open ourselves up to Him completely vulnerable with nothing to hide.  I love going to Confession too.  Whenever I am blessed to have another priest hear my Confessions, often they thank me for such an honest, vulnerable confession.  What else would it be?  I love Jesus.  The manner in which we speak, trust and share ourselves with Jesus day in and day out is same manner in which we come before Him in the Confessional (or don’t).  If it is not trust and love, it is fear in one form or another.  “Love has no room for fear, because fear has to do with punishment, but His perfect love drives out all our fear.” (1 John 4:18)

        What I really want to say is what struck me last Sunday: “Reconciliation is the Door to Heaven.”  If Mass is Heaven, the closest we can come to experience it on this earth, Reconciliation is the door.  Think about Jesus’ words of Consecration at Mass, “This is my Body which will be given up for you” and “This is my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant will be poured out for you…for the forgiveness of sins.”  To truly take it, eat of it, drink from it and receive Him, we have to fully by faith accept His atonement for our sins and freely desire to be reconciled.  Everything we ask of God at Mass is to reconcile us in His mercy given through His Son, so we CAN receive all He wants to freely give.  May we not only love Jesus by going to Confession, but go as children with arms wide open, wanting to be held, lifted up, loved, relieved, healed and brought to a place of grace, so as to confess more fully by life that we love God.  We cannot buy a “stairway to heaven”, nor enter through the narrow gate going around it, but enter through the wide-open door of His mercy