February 23, 2012
Fr. Spitzer's Three Steps to Accepting God’s Forgiveness
By Phillip Campbell
As Director of my parish’s RCIA program, it was my job to oversee the intellectual and spiritual formation of adults seeking to enter the Catholic Church. One year, I had a very interesting person come through the program, an elderly gentleman I’ll call “Douglas.” Douglas had been flirting with the idea of converting his entire life, but he told me that he had put it off because he had a lot of “unresolved issues” with Catholicism.
As I sat through our monthly meetings to help him work through his difficulties, I was shocked by the apparent pettiness of his problems. He didn’t like the way angels were depicted in paintings. He couldn’t understand why the priest’s vestments were green. The designs on the parish collection envelopes irritated him. He objected to priests using a headset microphone to preach because it made them look like “rock stars.” After going through several sessions with him, I was beginning to wonder if his whole objection to Catholicism was really based on such trifles.
Finally I said, “Douglas, in the three months I have been meeting with you I have not seen you bring forward one real, substantial objection to entering the Catholic Church. Is there any problem or question you have that is more serious than these trivial complaints?” There was an uncomfortable silence; then he came clean. It turned out that Douglas had committed a rather serious sin in his youth. His whole life he had struggled with crippling doubts about God’s capacity for forgiveness. The petty objections were just a smoke screen meant to obscure a grave insecurity about God’s mercy.
Accepting the reality of God’s forgiveness can be extremely difficult. Sometimes, due to the fear of coming to terms with our own sins, we allow ourselves to believe that our sins are unforgivable. We may even convince ourselves that this line of thinking is humble, but it is actually a rather prideful outlook. God the Father sent Jesus Christ to suffer an agonizing death on the cross in atonement for the sins of the world, yet now you think your sin is so special that the blood of Christ can’t wash it away? If Christ can offer forgiveness to those who drove the nails into His hands and feet, surely there is hope for you, too!
Until we learn to humbly and graciously accept the forgiveness of God, we remain hardened to God’s grace and make no spiritual progress. In order to remedy this problem, let us consider Fr. Spitzer’s three steps to accepting God’s forgiveness.
First, it is necessary to understand that God is truly Abba, our loving Father. To understand this profound truth, a meditation on the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 is helpful. As Fr. Spitzer notes in Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life, a first-century Jewish audience would have found the son’s actions far more outrageous and the father’s mercy far more incomprehensible than we could imagine, given our modern perspective:
The youngest son said to his father, “Give me my share of the property that falls to me.” This might be roughly translated as, “Father, you are as good as dead to me. The only worth you have is the inheritance money you can give me.” … The boy then proceeds to a foreign land, [which] would have been viewed by Jesus’ audience as a rejection of his election (belonging to the Jewish people). … He proceeds to spend his money on dissolute living (violating the Torah – the Jewish law). This constitutes a rejection not only of the law of God but God Himself.
The last straw comes when a famine forces the son to live with the pigs and eat their food, thus rendering himself ritually impure both inside and out. In short, the son does everything imaginable to shame his family and sin in every way. He has utterly forfeited any right to forgiveness, yet that is not how the father responds.
Jesus surprises His audience by giving a “disappointing” ending (by the culture’s standard of justice). Instead of the boy getting his “just desserts,” the father is looking for him and is moved to show him mercy. … When the father sees the son coming, he ignores the protocol of the day and runs out to meet his son on the son’s turf. When he reaches him, he throws his arms around him and kisses him. … [He says] “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet.” If we assume that first-century Jewish culture would have considered the ring to have some familial significance or be a family treasure, then the father’s gesture goes beyond lavishing luxury on his son to offering a family commitment to his son. … Through these images, Jesus reveals the unconditional love of the Father.
Elsewhere, our Lord reminds us that there is tremendous joy in heaven when a sinner repents (Luke 15:7) and that His whole mission in becoming incarnate and dying on the cross was to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10). Once we understand that this is how God desires to relate to us, we are properly disposed to accept his forgiveness and healing.
This brings us to the second point: affirming that God does indeed want to forgive and heal you. “This is the will of God, your sanctification” St. Paul tells us (1 Thess. 4:3). The mistake Douglas made, which Fr. Spitzer writes about as well, is to imagine that God is a task master with such high standards that we need to “clean ourselves up” before we can even ask for forgiveness. Fr. Spitzer recalls having this outlook when he was younger:
I would pray an alternative prayer: “Don’t worry, God. I’ll get it taken care of, and when everything is fine, then I’ll be able to ask you for forgiveness, and then You will want to forgive me.” I had forgotten an important aspect about the spiritual life, namely, I need God – especially to turn my life around (metanoia). By putting so many limitations on God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness, I had slipped into the worst of all possible spiritual attitudes. … I had conditioned God’s forgiveness on being “good enough,” yet I could not be “good enough” without God’s forgiveness.
The power of God’s love is transformative, or to use the old adage, “God loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to leave you that way.” This metanoia is not a one-time event; it begins when we accept God’s forgiveness and continues on throughout the duration of our earthly pilgrimage.
Third, accept His forgiveness unconditionally. For human beings, who can nurse grudges and be cruelly unforgiving, it is sometimes hard to understand God’s forgiveness. It is indeed a mystery, something that cost God the death of His only Son. Even God resorts to metaphor when explaining this profound truth to us. Psalm 103:12 tells us “as far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our iniquities from us.” The prophet Micah explains it beautifully, saying that our heavenly Father “will cast all our sins into the bottom of the sea.” When you call this infinite mercy to mind, it’s much easier to put on the heart of a child and approach God as Abba – a loving father. Fr. Spitzer’s own prayer is, “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. And I accept Your forgiveness and invite you into the depths of my soul so that You can call me to transformation.”
Douglas did eventually come to accept God’s grace and let go of his sins. He was received into the Church that Easter with joy and profound gratitude for the mercy of our Lord. Let us therefore cast away all deceptions and smokescreens that would prevent us from accepting the gracious mercy of God, recalling the repeated refrain of Psalm 136, “His mercy endures forever.”
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