The answer to the wounds we carry is love.
This marks the first of what Fr. Steve says are the two most important homilies he has ever preached. The second was on December 17, 2017: "Healing and the power of words."
Fr. Steve tells us that many people come to confession time after time with the same sins and are discouraged by it. However, there is a path to freedom from persistent patterns of sin. The answer to sin is love. We sin only because we have not opened our hearts sufficiently to the healing love of God. We need to let God love us. How do we do that? What are the blockages in our hearts? A major obstacle to accepting the healing love of the Father is forgiveness. We need to forgive those who have hurt us in order to set ourselves free.
Few of us are living the fullness of life. When Jesus was baptized, the Father declared, “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” We need to hear these words as applied to ourselves, since we are one with Jesus through our baptism. That is how God sees us. God wants us to live the dignity of our baptism. Will we let him have his way with us?
Fr. Steve explains that we have all been wounded physically, spiritually and emotionally and we all work out ways to cope with the pain of those wounds by making inner vows and commitments.
The core wounds in our lives are rejection, abandonment, fear, shame, powerlessness, hopelessness and confusion. These are the lies with which we have come to identify ourselves, the lies we need to combat. We sin as a result of our wounds because we are trying to fill our hearts with something other than the love of God. We are all broken and he longs to heal us.
We can forgive when we allow the Lord to heal us and we are healed when we forgive.
The message that the Father has for us today is: You are loved.
