Déjà vu! As the season of TV reruns begins, we are being treated to a rerun of a gospel passage we first heard on Divine Mercy Sunday, a passage worth hearing again for its message of forgiveness cannot be told often enough.
Jesus said at the Last Supper, “Peace be with you.” Alas, some people are not feeling the gift of the Lord’s peace. Instead, they are hurting or upset for any number of reasons. Whenever I hear that, I ache, wondering what the origins of that person’s hurt might be. Hurting someone is the last thing I would ever deliberately do yet I know that has happened, such as when someone is offended by what I have said in homilies dealing with social justice issues.
A painful reality for anyone in leadership is what we say is not always what is heard or understood. Many of us have probably said and done things that hurt others at home, at work, here in the parish or at school. We cannot undo all the damage on our own, but we can pray for what could be called a healing of memories.
Fr. Bob Spitzer, former president of Gonzaga, once told me about praying to the Holy Spirit when he asks for healing of hurts and memories, not just for himself, but for those whom he hurt. To illustrate, he shared how he once made an offhand remark to someone and later deeply regretted it. Unable to call the man, he went to the chapel and asked the Holy Spirit to heal any harm he had done.
A few days later, Fr. Spitzer ran into him. “You know, Father,” the man said, “I have been thinking about what you told me. At first I was kinda angry, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized what you were getting at. You helped me a lot.” Fr. Spitzer didn’t give himself any credit. As he said, “It was all the Holy Spirit.”
Looking back over this most unusual year, I apologize if I have offended or hurt you during that time, as we say in the Confiteor, “in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” I want you to experience the gift of peace that Jesus freely offers, that gift that comes to us through the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus to be an instrument of reconciliation.
Some people use instances of hurt, especially those caused by a priest, as an excuse to leave the Church but as St. Francis de Sales cautions, to do so is to commit spiritual suicide. When we are hurting, we need God’s gift of grace and peace more than ever. To abandon what we believed in is to give into Satan’s devious temptations to lure us away from Christ.
Forgiveness of those who have harmed us is the hallmark of being a Christian and a crucial step toward peace. The first message of the risen Lord was, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.” When you think of all that happened to Jesus: Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, abandonment by all the disciples, his greeting was quite a profound thing for Jesus to say, yet we know from our own experience that forgiveness and peace go hand in hand.
The gospel message of forgiveness isn’t reserved for just the disciples. We are reminded of this mandate to forgive each time we pray in the manner Jesus taught us. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Do as he commands and you will experience the Lord’s peace.
Do you want peace in your life? Jimi Hendrix offered this insight, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” This underlies messages in certain past homilies that some critics considered too political for their comfort zone. Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their views dismantled. That was how some reacted to John the Baptist, Jesus, and countless other prophetic voices in our Church through the ages. All of them spoke out in their quest to bring about peace in our divisive world.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I say from the pulpit. However, I do hope that we can together take time to reflect on the bigger picture and apply the message of the gospel to our lives. Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, observes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
And what might that bigger picture be? Think back to what Jesus said was the greatest commandment: to love the Lord our God and our neighbor. Love is the force that overcomes the world’s ills. What will our response be to the challenges facing us in a world beset by much division?
Peace of mind is a motivating force for many of us and if that is our goal, forgiveness becomes the vehicle to get us there by letting go of our fears, the source of our reactions to any thing that challenges us. Love, one of the gifts of the Spirit along with joy, patience, peace, kindness, generosity, self-control and gentleness, is what enables us to let go of our fears and forgive and strive to build a better world.