Lent III

Lent III 2016 – Cycle C Exodus 3:1-8, 13-15; Psalm 103; I Corinthians 10:1-6,10-12; Luke 13:1-9

How do we know when we sin?

For most of us, even as we contemplate a sinful action, it just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel right because our inner compass is telling us we are off course in not being the best that we can be. See, sin is not just a violation against the moral order but a violation against our very selves. This inner compass, this voice, this sense of moral right and wrong, we call our conscience. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of it as the covenant that God wrote upon our hearts [See Jeremiah 3: 31-34] so we all would instinctively know what we are called to live as God’s people.

How do you understand conscience?

Entertainment is where many people today obtain their morality. In the Broadway musical, Wicked, the wizard declares: “The truth is what we all agree on!” Is that statement true? Since we no longer seem to agree on much of anything anymore, in particularly, morals, truth, and values; is not a contemporary sense of conscience like looking into a fun house mirror – everything distorted?

Is conscience simply what we individually feel is morally right? If it feels right – than it must be right! Correct? Where then is the role of the human community’s experience and wisdom? Or has the individual so superseded the community and at our own peril?

The Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) defines conscience “as a human being’s most secret core and sanctuary. There the human person is alone with God, whose voice echoes in their depths”. Note, it is God’s voice that echoes deep within us and not our own desires. “By conscience,…that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and one’s neighbor” (16).

A non-reflective, undeveloped understanding of conscience is simply to do whatever the Church or moral authority teaches or demands. But is this really not to surrender our conscience to someone else’s reflection and avoid the demanding work of struggling, probing and pondering with the voice of God heard within us?

We are continually required to make judgements on our actions and ultimately to accept responsibility for our choices.

In its Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), the Vatican Council went on to say that, “It is through their conscience that human beings see and recognize the demands of the divine law. The human being is bound to follow this conscience faithfully in all their activity, so that they may come to God, who is their last end”. (3)   Though the Council teaches we are bound to follow our consciences faithfully, conscience is never just a matter of personal opinion or private preference. Though we are always obligated to follow our consciences.  Conscience never exists in a vacuum of individual sovereignty. We need to acknowledge that conscience does not “invent” truth. Rather, conscience must seek truth out, and conform itself to the truth once discovered – no matter how inconvenient.

The church speaks about formation,in regard to seminarians, that is, through prayer, spiritual direction and discipline to mold a person into a priestly consciousness. The same is true for religious and monastic life. This molding is accomplished by a person giving themselves over to the discipline of the “rule”. You are formed into a nun, monk, brother or sister. Thus the Vatican Council also speaks about Christians “forming” their conscience. Because a person can have a non-reflective, underdeveloped or immature conscience.

How does a Catholic Christian “form” and “inform” our consciences?

Again in its Declaration on Religious Liberty, the Fathers of the Council taught that “. . . in forming their consciences, the faithful must pay careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church. For the Catholic Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of truth. It is her duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth which is Christ and, at the same time, to declare and confirm by her authority the principles of the moral order which spring from human nature” (14).

Three things need to be taken into consideration in forming a Christian conscience:

• Refection on the Sacred Scripture, particularly the holy Gospels. What does God say though his Word and Jesus, God’s Word-made-Flesh?

• A grounding in the certain and consistent moral teachings of the Church and the principles of the moral order. That is, the experience and wisdom of the Christian community over the centuries.

• And finally, prayer, where we enter our most secret core and sanctuary with God.

Through this spiritual process we do not “invent” the truth, we “discover” the truth deep within us.

Like a seminarian or monastic, a conscience cannot be formed if we are unwilling to submit ourselves to the disciplines of study, reflection and prayer and to be honest with ourselves. We are not in search of alibis but the truth otherwise the result is not a conscience but just a will, and I expect a stubborn and obstinate will. To be formed, a person must be pliable like clay in the hands of the potter [See Jeremiah 18:1-6] or like the bending of a willow in the wind. True discipline is never meant to break a person but to strengthen them.

Consider the fig tree in today’s Gospel. I expect it has not borne fruit because it is too immature of a plant; it needs to be aged, cultivated and fertilized. Likewise, it is a tried and mature Christian who has grappled in the disciplines of conscience with the shades of grey in our world and the complex moral issues of our time that is the person who bears with conviction the fruit of moral virtue.