In the last several weeks, many of us have gone to confession. Anticipating Easter, Lent is a natural time to take those steps to remove that which keeps us from God, most notably our own sins. If we did not avail ourselves of the opportunity for reconciliation in Lent, the Church also offers us the feast of Divine Mercy as another chance to focus on both the beauty of God’s Mercy and our own need for it.
If we desire to live in the peace and freedom of the sons and daughters of God — a peace and freedom won by Christ our Savior — we must use the means God provides. A truly good confession can be one of the greatest spiritual gifts we can receive and may be the very thing that gives us a firsthand experience of the reality of God’s mercy. But to have that powerful experience, we must first utilize another gift God has given: our conscience.
The quality of our confession will largely depend on our conscience — how well it has been formed and how well we’ve examined it. Even the best examination of conscience will be limited if that conscience was not formed well first. And a well-formed conscience will make an examination all the more fruitful. The two go hand in hand and their importance cannot be overstated.
The first priority then, becomes taking the necessary steps to form our consciences well. This is a life-long endeavor and involves real work — sometimes very difficult work — taking the time to not only learn Church teaching but also to assimilate it in our lives.
As Catholics we are blessed with thousands of years of wisdom and reflection on God’s revelation to draw on. We are not left to ourselves to figure it all out. Even so, it will not always be automatic or simple. It may mean wrestling with teachings for years.
It is critical to make that continual and concerted effort because of what we risk by neglecting it. Conscience is the gift which enables us to make truly good choices and avoid that which is harmful to our souls. A poorly formed conscience will be of little help and may in fact lead us to that dreaded state of pursuing evil as though it were good or avoiding good as though it were evil. Once this happens we become the very instrument of our own moral and spiritual demise.
From our earliest days our conscience wants to be formed — we desire to know good and evil. Therefore our conscience will end up being formed one way or another. Without good moral instruction though, it may be formed by all the wrong values.
Part of the ongoing struggle for religious freedom, is the fact that those who have done the hard work to form their consciences according to the Gospel and consistent and clear Church teaching, are threatened and coming under attack by those whose consciences have been formed or even corrupted by secular or atheistic values instead — ones which may not only disagree with Christian values, but seek to eliminate them from society.
The situation might be likened to professional athletes having their workout schedules determined by those who are not only out of shape, but even opposed to exercise in the first place.
The situation grows more serious as more people allow those secular values to form their consciences, sometimes even confusing them for Gospel values.
As Catholics, may we use the celebration of Divine Mercy to be a reminder and an impetus to take seriously the obligation to form our consciences with the clarity and certainty the Church provides, so that they may do for us what they were always intended to do: help us live as God made us to live. And by so doing perhaps even help others form their consciences by our example.