NOTE: This is one of a continuing series of blogs on the current situation in our West Chester, Ohio parish.
IF YOU are no longer coming to Mass at our parish, what was your gripe?
I don’t mean the calumnies you later picked up from the Wingate web-site. I don’t mean the nasty stories that Father Ramolla or his agitation teams poured into your ears and your inboxes during November.
I mean the real gripe — the one pet resentment that smoldered in your heart before all this happened, the initial rash judgment that disposed you believe the absolute worst about anyone at our church, the chink in the armor of your charity that left you defenseless against the attacks of the hate-whisperers.
This, your sin — not the sins of others, real or imagined, numbered and parsed, catalogued on the Internet — is the only one you should worry about.
Take some additional quiet time tonight to examine your conscience. Search out that one resentment. Admit it’s there. Then uproot it.
Some months ago, I preached a sermon to you on the need to forget offenses in order to forgive them. The world, whenever it is to its advantage, will dredge up offenses and throw them in the sinner’s face — “Never forget.” But the true follower of Our Lord, seeks to forget the offense in order to forgive it. Many of you told me how moved you were by the sermon.
Now is the time to apply it, when so many are not only dredging up resentments from the past, but also re-opening old wounds in hopes they will fester.
Spreading this contention, of course, is portrayed as the noblest of causes. Its leader is sad, so sad, that it all came to this…
But nothing good will come of it if you fall for such wickedness. You will lose not only your peace of heart, but also your way to God in a wilderness of resentments sown by others.
Admit what your pet resentment was. Then forget it, forgive it — and forsake the wilderness.