| Receiving Holy Communion and Making Your Confession |
For Sunday’s Living Jesus Chat, we will again read an article from a book by St. Francis de Sales called Of Devotion, and of the Principal Exercises of Piety. It explores the importance of preparation for the sacraments.___________________________________________To prepare for our chat, please read the article, which is reproduced below, and review the questions at the end.Click for Living Jesus Chatroom  Photo by Grant Whitty on UnsplashYou will know whether you are receiving the sacraments profitably, by the virtues which belong to them; for instance, if you draw from confession the love of your own abjection and humility: for these are the virtues which belong to it, and it is always by the measure of humility that we recognize our own progress. Do you not see that it is written that he that shall humble himself shall be exalted? (St. Matt. xxiii, 12.) To be exalted, is to make progress. If you become by means of the most holy communion very gentle, since that virtue is proper to this sacrament, which is all gentle, all sweet, all honey, you will derive that fruit which belongs to it and thus will be making progress. But if, on the contrary, you do not become at all more humble or gentler, you deserve that the bread should be taken from you, since you do not labor to make yourself worthy of it. I would have you simply to go to communion when you wish it, asking permission of the superioress; resigning yourself humbly to accept a denial, if you are denied it, and if it be granted you, to go to communion with love. Although there may be some mortification in asking permission, you must nevertheless not omit to do so; for the daughters who enter into religion, only enter into it to mortify themselves; and the cross which they carry ought to remind them of that. But if the inspiration suggests itself to a religious, not to communicate so often as the rest, by reason of the knowledge which she has of her own unworthiness, she can ask permission of the superioress, and await her judgment with great sweetness and humility.You ought not to be so tender about wishing to confess so many trifling imperfections, since we are even under no obligation to confess venial sins, unless we choose; but when we do confess them, we ought to have the resolute will to amend ourselves of them, otherwise it would be an abuse to confess them. Nor ought you to torment yourself when you cannot recollect your faults to confess them; for it is not to be believed that a soul which often examines itself would not observe, in such a way as to remember them, any faults of importance. As for all these little and trifling defects, you can speak of them to our Lord as often as you perceive them: a humiliation of spirit and a sigh suffices for that. You ask how you can make your act of contrition in a small space of time? I tell you that you require hardly any time to make it well, since nothing more is needed than to prostrate oneself before God in the spirit of humility and of repentance for having offended. Lastly, it is necessary that all the prayers and supplications which you make to God should be made not for yourself only, but also for others; and that you should always take care to say “we,” as our Lord taught us in the Lord’s prayer, where there is neither “my,” nor “mine,” nor “I.” This means that you should have the intention of praying God to give the virtue or the grace which you ask of Him for yourself to all those who have the same need of it; and that it should always be with the object of uniting ourselves yet more closely to Him: for we ought not to ask for or desire anything else, either for ourselves or for our neighbor, since that is the end for which the sacraments were instituted. We ought, then, to correspond with this intention of our Lord, receiving them for this same end. And we ought not to think that in communicating or in praying for others, we lose anything thereby, unless when we offer to God this communion or this prayer for the satisfaction of their sins, for then we would not make satisfaction for our own; but nevertheless, the merit of the communion or the prayer would remain our own: for we cannot merit grace for each other; none but our Lord could do that. We are able to obtain by prayers graces for others, but to merit them is what we cannot do. The prayer which we have made for them augments our merit, as well for the recompense of grace in this life, as of glory in the other.But if a person did not, in doing anything, fix his intention on doing it in satisfaction for his sins, the mere intention he might have of doing all he does for the pure love of God would suffice to make satisfaction for them; since it is a certain maxim, that whoever should make an excellent act of charity, or an act of perfect contrition, would fully make satisfaction for his sins. Reflections: Discuss this phrase in the first paragraph where the saint urges us to “love of your own abjection and humility.” How do we do this without feeling sorry for ourselves, or having another perverse sense of our littleness?If we know the humble will be exalted, how do we embrace humility without the duplicity of desiring to be exalted as a result?Why is it important to think about the benefits of the sacraments (especially the Eucharist) instead of merely an act of being “awestruck” by its profound reality?Discuss this line from the article: “You ought not to be so tender about wishing to confess so many trifling imperfections, since we are even under no obligation to confess venial sins, unless we choose; but when we do confess them, we ought to have the resolute will to amend ourselves of them, otherwise it would be an abuse to confess them.”Why is an examination of conscience so beneficial to the sacrament of confession? And is an act of contrition superfluous?Discuss this line: “for we cannot merit grace for each other; none but our Lord could do that. We are able to obtain by prayers graces for others, but to merit them is what we cannot do.” Think about prayers others have said for us. How can we return the favor, or “pass it forward”? Sign up for our Living Jesus Chat Room:Come to our Living Jesus Chat Room, 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM Eastern Time U.S. |