The ancient Fathers of the Church have commonly seen in the widow of today’s Gospel a symbol of our Holy Mother the Church. This Mother of ours brings souls to birth with divine life through sacred baptism and nourishes and sustains them through the Bread of Life and the other sacraments until one day they finally enter into eternal glory.
However, like the widow of Naim, our Holy Mother the Church also has much cause for weeping. She weeps over her child who has succombed to a death which is far worse than the physical death which all must undergo – Mother Church weeps over her children who are dead through sin.
Sin, is a word rarely heard today. Having been led to fear monkeypox or, even worse, causing offence by disagreeing with others, people flee from human contact or the pursuit of the truth, but walk at peace so long as they are “free” to be “me.”
Sin though isn’t a matter related only to those who have not heard the truth and come to a relationship with Christ – if only this were the case! The struggle against sin is something which continues to afflict souls already within the bosom of the Church and which, when grave, can only be healed by sacramental Confession when the soul is once more returned to a state of grace.
This state of grace is also something which can and ought to grow. The divine life offered to us by Christ is something which can be nurtured and which flourishes the closer we become to Christ, as we become more identified with Him in whom and for whom we were made.
Growing in grace, or becoming more holy, is the path to true happiness that God wants for each one of us, and in order for this to take place we must not only avoid mortal sins, the sin that kills the life of the soul, but also the little choices for evil which we make in venial sin. These sins too, Holy Mother Church weeps over and wants to help her children to overcome so that Christ may reign in them.
In this task, examination of conscience is a vital tool. Of course, it is good to examine ourselves at the end of each day to notice any sins we have committed in order to say sorry to God before we go to sleep and perhaps to make note of them in order to bring them to our next confession.
I want to suggest also that there is another element to be taken account of in our examination, and from which we may benefit greatly in our battle against sin. It simply requires asking ourselves the question: why?
For example, if I have been short tempered with someone, or with several people, and especially if I find that this is something which is coming up regularly for me, as well as saying sorry to God and those I have offended, I might ask myself: why did I respond like that? The true answer is very rarely as straightforward as “because so-and-so was annoying”. That may be so. But why did I choose to respond badly rather than with patience?
If we reflect more deeply, either on this example, or on any other faults we find ourselves regularly falling into, e.g. laziness, overeating, vanity etc, we will commonly find that at the root there is a deeper issue. True, my friend might have been annoying, but am I actually angry about something else in the relationship e.g. a jealousy or an unforgiven hurt?
Maybe I spend too much money on unnecessary luxuries: clothes, new gadgets, things to make me look better. Sure, these are wrong in themselves, but it is actually because I want to be better than others due to my pride, or even, because I find it hard to believe that I’m actually loved by God because of a sense of guilt or even self-loathing.
All of us are susceptible to have deeper tendencies within us which we may have learnt due to undergoing bad experiences: we may have been left feeling unable to forgive someone, or we may find it impossible to forgive ourselves. Or we may have learnt these traits throught bad formation, we may have been taught to always put ourselves first or always strive to come out on top.
The devil and his angels are also aware of these deeper wounds that we have and will use them to their advantage to put in front of us temptations that they know we are less able to conquer. Sometimes a demon might be especially assigned to play particularly on these specific sinful tendencies of ours in order to maintain the block they produce to our living the fullness of the life Christ wants to give us.
Becoming aware of these deeper issues means that we can then bring them specifically to prayer and to the Sacrament of Confession in order to seek the healing of Christ’s grace. We may also pray prayers for our own deliverance from the spirits which try to keep us tied up in these attitudes, or maybe ask a priest for a blessing asking for God’s healing of a particular wound.
In dealing with sin, we should not focus only on hacking horizontally with an axe but on digging deeper to remove the root. Our Lady of Sorrows to whom we turn especially during this month of September knows well the secret thoughts and intentions of our hearts and so we turn to Her, our Heavenly Mother, who weeps over sin but rejoices too to obtain for us the graces we need to be raised up from the death of sin to the true life of grace.