Ave Maria Meditations
Confession and the holy fear of God
When we go to the Sacrament of Penance it will help us very much if we foster the holy fear of God in our souls. To receive the sacrament, attrition (a supernatural but imperfect sorrow, arising from fear of punishment, or revulsion from the ugliness of the sin … ) is sufficient. But we will receive much more grace if we impel our soul to a sense of filial fear for having offended an Almighty God who is also Our Father. It will be much easier to pass from this filial attitude to one of genuine contrition, a repentance springing from love, to an attitude of sorrow based on love. Then confession becomes an immense source of grace, a place where love grows constantly stronger.
Interior life grows in sensitivity and depth if we keep continually before us those truths that reveal to us the foundations of this gift of the Holy Spirit: God’s holiness and our wretchedness, our daily failures, the absolute dependence of the creature on his Creator, the enormity of a single venial sin in the sight of the divine holiness, the ingratitude implied by our lack of generosity in living up to the demands of our vocation . We shall understand better the mystery of sin if above all we develop the habit of considering frequently the Passion of Our Lord. We shall learn to love, and thereby dread committing a single venial sin. When we contemplate the suffering that Christ endured for our sins, the countless sins of all the world, our hope will be strengthened and our contrition intensified, and we shall have a firmer resolve to avoid every deliberate fault.
The holy fear of God joined to love gives a special strength to the Christian’s life. With it, nothing can make him tremble, for nothing can then separate him from the love of God.The soul is consolidated in the virtue of hope and set free from a false and careless security by maintaining a watchful love against the treacherous lures of temptation.
Let us ask our Mother Mary, the Refuge of Sinners, to make us understand just how much we lose every time we step aside from the path that leads to her son Jesus, even if our faults are only slight ones.
Fr. Francis Fernandez
