Devotional Thought of the Day

17 If you had not helped me, LORD, I would soon have gone to the land of silence. 
18 When I felt my feet slipping, you came with your love and kept me steady. 19 And when I was burdened with worries, you comforted me and made me feel secure.  Psalm 94:17-19 CEV

The perfect example of God’s love transcending our “right” vs. “left” separations is the sacrament of reconciliation (“confession”). When a “conservative” enters that holy place he suddenly becomes a “bleeding heart liberal”, for he knows that our only hope is not truth and justice but mercy and compassion. And the “liberal” suddenly wants the authority of the Church to be infallible, dogmatic and absolute when the priest pronounces that his sins are forgiven.

I had to think through Peter Kreeft’s words this morning.

In the midst of this broken, divided world, we struggle. We look for answers, and as we do some fall to the right and some to the left. Which divides us more, causes division, and it breaks us down.

We see this today,  in the midst of the pain and anxiety that is taking over our world.

In the midst of this, Kreeft finds the place where we have to deal with our own error and our own sin to be the place of the miraculous – the conservative crying for mercy, and the liberal crying for something to depend upon that is inflexible and cannot change.

For there, they both find the mercy of God.

And they both need it.

Desperately.

And as they find the God who draws them to Himself, as He declared the mercy one doesn’t want, and the other doesn’t think they need,

There they can find unity, as the pastor or priest assures them of God’s love, as the words are  heard, and you realize that God has helped us, saving us from silence, hold us when we stumbled,

We have all sinned, we have all been narcissistic. and Jesus died for all of us.

There is where we find unity, as we are all forgiven and cleansed.

Peter Kreeft, The God Who Loves You (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 223.