"FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES" ^_[1]

SOARING OR CLUNKY

1.  Much of human architecture is bland, relentlessly utilitarian and lacking even symbolic meaning. Not so for most bridges, however. Whether soaring or clunky, bridges universally evoke the powerful images of moving on, escape, challenge and exhilaration for those who traverse them.

2.  These experiences, powerful as they are, however, are not limited to architectural structures. Consider the Our Father prayer. Taught by Jesus Christ to his apostles and entrusted to the Church, the Lord's Prayer is easily the most recognized and beloved invocation of the divine known to the Western world.

SPIRITUAL BRIDGE

3.  The Our Father, too, is redolent of challenge and exhilaration. It is a spiritual bridge over which the pilgrim people of God make their exodus from the shadows of this world into the Kingdom of Light. The Our Father is an invitation to all who believe in Christ. We pray the Our Father to fortify ourselves for a spiritual journey through otherwise impassable territory--the difficulties, trials and even terrors of life which often cause us to lose our way altogether.  

4.  In the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the "Our Father" is the summit of Word and Prayer. It confirms the people of God's unique identity as the Body of Christ. It expresses the perfect unity twin lungs of the Mass--the liturgies of Word and Eucharist. For large numbers of the world's Catholics who are deprived of Mass, the prayerful offering of the Our Father after solemn meditation on the Sunday lectionary readings is all they have.

SUBLIME IMPULSE

5.  At the heart of the Lord's Prayer is the sublime impulse of human hope known as the "communion of desire". The Church prays in the celebration of the Mass that her children's hunger for truth and life will be satisfied. She prays that the communion of desire will be fulfilled for all persons, those who have not yet been received into the Church and others who personal circumstances are an obstacle to receiving the Lord's Body and Blood in the celebration of Mass.

6.  For our divine lesson today, I invite you to meditate upon the Our Father prayer, specifically the phrase: Forgive us our trespasses. This is most appropriate because the reality of sin and its deadly consequences demands that  "...the message of reconciliation (must be) proclaimed with clarity and tenacity, in season and out of season...."^[2]  Clearly, the Church places the greatest emphasis on mercy and forgiveness which are the fruits of the tree on which Christ was lifted up, "For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.  [Col 1:19-20] 

WEEDS AND WHEAT

7.  Today, strong evidence indicates that our nation suffers from a significant erosion of the value of personal accountability and the virtue of justice. Too many citizens demand goods, services and privileges from government, yet flinch at the prospect of making a meaningful personal contribution in return to the extended community. To a degree unprecedented in previous generations, men and women feel estranged from the communities in which they life. They reject the sociological and political principles which articulate the many advantages of community involvement.

8.  Ordinary people look for ways to compromise work and community service in favor of entitlements and unrestrained individualism. Issues of the greater good of neighborhoods, cities and nation are trivialized and sloughed off as irrelevant. The national media unwittingly chronicles our national hypocrisy--the oft-shocking and all-too-common discrepancy between professed values of solidarity and innumerable instances of numbing predation. Unquestionably we dwell in a land of wheat and weeds.  [cf. Mt 13:24-30] 

DON'T TOUCH THE STOVE

9.  The self-referential pronouns are I, me and my. These form the mantra of selfishness and egotism. I, me and my are the watchwords of post-modern enlightenment. The collective we, us and our are relics of patriarchal feudalism. Christian values disgust the secularist savants of hyper-individualism. They view them as environmental toxins. The egoistic person worships himself. His liturgy is the good life--doing what he wants when he wants, shunning meaningful dialogue with his extended community.

10.  Spouting the politically correct palaver of free choice,  the social insurrectionary seizes the throats of the weak, helpless and unborn. The social egotist does not fathom his own actions. His examen of conscience is rare or absent. Getting caught and sentenced doesn't lead to self-reflection; on the contrary, it provides no more moral content than does the dictum Don't touch the stove. The I, me and my mantra is a weed boasting a multitude of variations, the principal species being I am a victim, I need therapy, I deserve compensation.

LIKE A BELL OF A CATHEDRAL

11.  St. Paul, addressing the Church of Rome, viewed the crisis of individual normlessness and and lawlessness as the end result of man's rejection of God. The plea "who will deliver me" is an admission that all human beings are fallen creatures. Mankind's history, separated from God's plan of salvation, is a chronicle of failure. Further, "who will deliver me" is the cry of a one who understands for the first time that no lawless man can be saved by another. Why must man ask God to remedy his enslavement to the world and heal his inhumanity to his brothers? "I do not understand my own actions," admits St. Paul. "For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"  [Rom 7:15, 24] 

12.  Fortunately for man, the pronoun "our" encompasses the whole of mankind.  Humanity itself hungers for the fullness of divine truth, "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life".  [1Jn 1:1]  Human history begins to be truthful and human understanding is made possible only when man acknowledges his sinfulness—"since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". [Rom 3:23] Against the background of relentless individualism, the pronoun our rings out like the bell of a great cathedral. By pleading"forgive us our trespasses", the praying Church admits the true human condition and confesses her members' need for God. She pleads pardon for the personal sins of her children and implores God to wash their sins away.

SACRED BOUNDARIES

13.  A person trespasses against God and other human beings when the I, me and my in him becomes the reference point for sin, selfishness, and arrogance. When man trespasses, he enters a wasteland of futility and dread. Alone and unaided, he cannot survive. Christians know the "valley of the shadow of death"  [Ps 23:4]  as the realm where sin and its dread consequences debase both the righteous and transgressors alike. Man's every attempt to appease the principalities and powers of this present darkness  [cf. Eph 6:12]  degrades him profoundly and enthralls him to the powers of death.

14.  To trespass means to impose agressively and unlawfully on another’s property. Trespassing violates the boundaries of that which is universally held by men and women of good will as moral and ethical. To trespass is to offend the dignity proper to another person and to grasp for what one has not been given. It is to step surreptitiously onto forbidden territory. When we sin, we trespass on “property” of incomparable value--the sacred boundaries of God's holiness and the God-given dignity of the human person.

MISSING THE MARK

15.  The word sin suggests the ancient Greek military word harmartia, meaning literally to miss the mark. Missing the mark aptly describes the pandemic of sin oppressing this generation. Man views human degradation and destruction with a deadened impulse to sorrow or self-criticism. He presumes, by a perversion of the will, that he can save ourselves by his own cleverness. Tragically many of these aggressive persons are wounded and destroyed without any awareness or sense of suffering.^[3] 

16.  The Hebrew people, like other Semitic societies of ancient Palestine, viewed death as a dismal prospect. Man, in this scenario, is a brittle creature whose frail body prophesies the grim certainty of his death.  [cf. Psa 89:48]  "Be gracious to me, O Lord," prays the psalmist, "for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled."  [Psa 6:2]  It mattered little whether God healed his afflicted servant and granted him length of days  [cf. Deu 30:20; Psa 21:4], for nothing deterred the inexorable triumph of death over life. The man who died, died alone and spiritually unaided. Yet the departed did not vanish entirely into oblivion. Analogous to the community of the living, he goes down  [cf. Job 7:9]  to the society of Sheol, the realm of death, grave and gloom. From the deepest part of earth he "does not come up; he returns no more to his house, nor does his place know him any more".  [Job 7:9-10] 

SWARM OF TRESPASSERS

17.  The Hebrew perceived the human journey inevitably leading to Sheol's gloom and decay. Though understood by the Hebrews as part of nature, Sheol was considered unnatural and far from man's preferred destination. No escape was possible from the abode of the dead.  The Hebrew understanding of Sheol offers metaphorical insights into the problem of sin: What does it mean to disobey God's will? How are violations of the law to be fairly punished? Sin inflicts a wound to the human soul. Every act of selfishness aggravates this wound. By committing mortal sin,^[4]  however, man hurtles down into an abyss of self-centeredness and self-loathing.

18.  There he may experiences prolonged desolation and disorder. His well-being degrades as he is drawn further and further away from God's healing grace. Without the grace of reconciliation, this period of self-inflicted suffering may be exceeded only by eternal punishment in Hell. In terms of spiritual geography, hell is the utmost extreme of uncharted, desolate wastes, an eternal exile from God in which there is no return. The ultimate missing of the mark is total permanent separation from God. Human beings who revile God to the very moment of death will incur this irrevocable and harrowing final judgment.  The supreme irony of hell? A swarm of trespassers ensnared in their own lawlessness, devouring each other in frenzied self-hatred.

HIT THE MORAL MARK

19.  Though associated with human nature since Adam and Eve, sin is nevertheless unnatural.  Before Christ, no effective means existed by which man could escape the inevitability of sin. Sin is any thought, word or deed which degrades a person's relationship with God, wounds other human beings, and offends his own human dignity. Uncorrected and uncontrolled, sin leads to man's outright banishment from God. The recognition of sin (here we must include the sense of sin and its antecedents) necessarily must precede a genuine awareness of the wounds of sin and one's deep sorrow. To fully repent of evil necessitates this understanding: "There is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one, that exclusively concerns the person committing it."^[5] 

20.  God's grace leads the sinner to accept responsibility for his self-inflicted suffering, to offer a poignant expression of authentic sorrow, and to hit the moral mark. By asking for mercy, the faith community diminishes sin by the power of the cross, resolving "never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother".  [Rom 14:13]  The Church anchors herself upon "that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious".  [1Pet 2:4]  Forgive us is proof of the faith community's embrace of hope, the reparation of a wound to faith, and a plea for love's promise to be fulfilled in Christ. 

 SCANDAL OF THE CROSS

21.  The worshipping assembly pleads forgive us in prayer and offering. They understand the horror of a communion of sin^[6]  mortally opposed to the Lord's communion of grace. To pray forgive us enables the sinners to confront an altogether different sort of stumbling block--the social consequences of their sin. As the CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH observes, God's mercy and forgiveness is of such magnitude that it is the only petition of the Our Father which Jesus clarifies at great length in the Sermon on the Mount. ^[7]  

22.  From a place of darkness, the sinner must return to God. But he cannot escape from sin and cross over to holiness unless he situates himself on the cross of Christ that bridges the abyss; it is the scandal of the cross which stands as the universal sign of sacramental reconciliation between God and man:

THE MYSTERY of pietas, on God's part, is that mercy in which our Lord and Father--I repeat it again--is infinitely rich. As I said in my Encyclical on the subject of divine mercy, it is a love more powerful than sin, stronger than death.  

WHEN WE realize that God's love for us does not cease in the face of our sin or recoil before our offenses, but becomes even more attentive and generous; when we realize that this love went so far as to cause the Passion and Death of the Word made flesh who consented to redeem us at the price of his own blood, then we exclaim in gratitude: "Yes, the Lord is rich in mercy", and even: "The Lord is mercy". The mystery of pietas is the path opened by divine mercy to a reconciled life.^[8]