By Father Bede Jarrett
When a person sins, that
friendship is at once broken, for sin means that the soul has deliberately
turned its back upon God and is facing the other way, and thus it has been
able, by some fatal power, to prevent God's everlasting love from having any
effect upon it. God cannot hate; but we can stop his love from touching us . .
.
Grace operates to restore all
these lost wonders. Sin itself is forgiven; all the ingratitude and disloyalty
are put on one side; not simply in the sense that God forgets them, or chooses
not to consider them, but in the sense that they are completely wiped away. It
is the parable of the Good Shepherd where the sheep is brought back again into
the fold, and mixes freely with the others who have never left the presence of
their Master. It is the parable of the prodigal son taken back into his
father's embrace.
That is what the forgiveness of
sin implies. God is once more back again in the soul. He had always been there
as the Creator without whose supporting hand the soul would be back in its
nothingness; but he is now there again as Father and Master and Friend. Not
only the saints who have been endowed with a genius for divine things, but
every simple soul that has had its sins forgiven comes at once into that
embrace. We are far too apt to look upon forgiveness as a merely negative
thing, a removal, a cleansing, and not enough as [a homecoming], a return to
something great and good and beautiful, the triumphant entrance into our souls
of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.”
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