This Lent Discover God's Love In A Retreat - St. Augustine Catholic

words, redeemed people must act like
redeemed people.
So, we not only need to forgive
ourselves for our failures at loving, we
should resolve to do more, to develop a
new attitude, to change our behavior.
How can we forgive others? On the
cross, having been tortured, taunted and
humiliated, Jesus says: “Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do.”
What about us? How like his is our
forgiveness of others?
We could be consumed with anger and
hatred toward someone who has wronged
us. Understandable? Yes, certainly. But
Christian? Certainly not!
When we want those who wrong us to
“pay” for what they’ve done, we should
instead leave that person to God. Jesus set
the example. He forgave those who killed
him. He calls us to “Let go and let God.”
One of Jesus’ sayings has to do with
how often we should forgive. His disciples
ask him, “Tell us teacher, how often
should we forgive others: seven times?”
Now for the Jews, “seven” represented the
perfect number.
So, Jesus followers thought they were
really doing something special or being
heroic by forgiving seven times. Yet, Jesus
responds to his followers – then and now
– in this way: “I say to you, you must
forgive seventy times seven times!” And
Jesus didn’t mean 490 times. He meant we
must forgive an infinite number of times.
If we wish to be forgiven, we may be called
to forgive, every day of our lives.
And we should learn to “forgive” God.
At first, the idea of forgiving God may
seem strange, perhaps even somewhat
blasphemous.
But the idea isn’t new. There’s a whole
series of “complaint literature” in the Bible
where, for example, the psalmists complain
to God about his silence, his seeming nonaction
on their behalf in the midst of
adversity. Over and over again the
psalmists ask God, “How long, O Lord,
how long, must we wait?” and “Why, O
God, why do you let our enemies
overcome us?” The book of Job is a
powerful and moving response to the
question, “Why do good people suffer?”
The Book of Job tells us, “People are born
to trouble as surely as the sparks fly
upward.” Trouble isn’t a gate-crasher. It has
a passkey to every home in the land.
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote his
best-selling book, When Bad Things
Happen to Good People, at a time when he
had to redefine his concept of God
because his young son was afflicted with
the horribly painful and fatal disease,
progeria, the aging disease. He writes:
“The conventional explanation, that
God sends us a burden because he knows
that we are strong enough to handle it, has
We sin by
omission when
we could have
responded in
love and did not.
it all wrong. Life, not God, sends us the
problem. When we try to deal with it we
find out that we are not strong. We are
weak; we get tired; we get angry, overwhelmed.
We begin to wonder how we
will ever make it through all the years. But
when we reach the limits of our own
strength and courage, something unexpected
happens. We find reinforcement
coming from a source outside of ourselves.
And in the knowledge that we are not
alone, that God is on our side, we manage
to go on.”
But who is this God who is on our side?
Whether we’ve reflected on it or not, all of
us have some kind of image of God.
For some God is a “divine judge” who
rules every aspect of our lives.
For others, God is the “divine Santa
Claus” who gives us everything we pray for.
But, I believe, most of us would like
God to be a “divine Superman,” that is,
a God who saves us in the “nick of time,”
who sees that nothing terrible happens
to us.
However, the “image” of God that Jesus
gave us is God as a loving parent who, just
like a loving human parent, can’t always
shelter us from life with its pain and
suffering, but who is there with us and for
us and even suffers along with us.
At the end of his book, with a new
image of God, Kushner writes, “In the
final analysis, the question of why bad
things happen to good people translates
itself into some very different questions.”
For example: Are you capable of
forgiving and accepting a world that is not
perfect, a world in which there is
unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime,
earthquakes and accidents? Can you
forgive the world’s imperfections and love
it because it’s capable of containing great
beauty and goodness, and because it’s the
only world we have?
Are you capable of forgiving and loving
the people around you, even if they’ve hurt
you and let you down by not being
perfect? Can you forgive them, and love
them, anyway, because there aren’t any
perfect people around?
And so, are you capable of loving and
forgiving God, as Job did, despite the bad
things that may happen to you?
And if you can do these things, will you
be able to recognize that the ability to
forgive and the ability to love are the
powers God has given us to enable us to
live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in this
less than perfect world? Let us pray that
each of us can.
Father Cletus M.S. Watson, TOR, is pastor
of Crucifixion Parish in Jacksonville. He also
is the author of two booklets: “The Concept
of God, and the Afro-American” and “Love
and the Human Person: An ongoing
Perspective.”
ST. AUGUSTINE CATHOLIC • FEBRUARY/MARCH 2001 7