Remembering...

And this, too, is surely part of the work of penitence:

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)

Just as humility is the work of becoming aware of who we are, so penitence surely is becoming aware of our condition as sinners - part, inextricably, of a fallen Creation - yet capable of doing and experiencing good and wonder as well as evil and despair. The openness to the awareness of both conditions, in our lives as well as in the existence in which we find ourselves, that "hard spiritual work," is penitence - or at least it is when it is lived consciously in the presence of God, in his and for him: that self-emptying that is Christ's death alive in us. (Philippians 2.2-12; Colossians 3.3-4; The Principles of the Third Order (Day 30))