Never be discouraged

From the second reading on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord:

God saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,

not because of any righteous deeds we had done,

but because of his mercy. (Titus 3:5)

It is all about the mercy of God through Jesus Christ, and it is good for us to reflect on this during this Year of Mercy.

We do not connect with the Lord through our good deeds and virtues---these, too, are gifts of his grace and mercy. Our connection with the Lord depends wholly on our awareness of our own iniquity and weakness. Trappist Abbot André Louf said it so beautifully in one of his talks about living in community:

“. . . we should identify ourselves with the others in our common frailty in order to reach, from this point of departure, the salvation given us by Jesus. De profundis—‘out of the depths.’ For this is the Good News, this is the Church, and nothing else. Jesus came for these sinners, these sinners that in fact we are, and not for the righteous that we thought we were, that we hoped to become or appear to be, secure at the heart of the Christian community. There is no Good News without the proclamation of the forgiveness of sin.”   (In the School of Contemplation, 2015, Liturgical Press, p. 44. The emphasis is mine.)

And to this I simply add: We must never be discouraged about what we discover about ourselves. Never be discouraged by our weaknesses or failings or bitter mistakes---especially as we grow in the spiritual life, because our own growth sometimes causes to look with dismay and even disgust at the follies and iniquities of our earlier lives.

The other day I knelt in prayer before the Manger asking God to remove a particular weakness from me, but when I heard the reading at Mass today I realized that what is most important is not the removal of a weakness as much as the mercy that such a weakness impels me to ask for.

As Saint Benedict put it: “Never lose hope in God’s mercy.” (Rule of St. Benedict 4:74)