Mother Angelica's Answers, Not Promises: Straightforward Solutions to Life's Puzzling Problems by Mother Angelica

Author:Mother Angelica
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898706062
Published: 2016-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

Understanding guilt is a very delicate business, because there is no handy rule book for figuring out what is good guilt and what is bad guilt. But you can be sure of this much—an enlightened conscience, one that nudges you toward right action, is good guilt. It becomes bad guilt when it leads to remorse, despair, and self-hatred.

Our goal is for you to stop living at the Memory level, if that is what you are doing, and learn to use your other faculties properly. You need to understand your sin and to use your Will to emerge stronger and holier from a sinful experience.

A very successful executive I know was divorced from her husband. Sue had been a Catholic convert for about fifteen years, and it is hard for most of us to comprehend the agony and turmoil she lived through as she saw her marriage falling apart. Imagine committing your life to God—with a true heart and an open mind—and then making a decision to end your marriage. Sue lived in a state of raw pain, because her love for God was great and she did not have the ability to discern whether the ending of her marriage was due to a lack of will on her part or to the fact that it was not a marriage at all.

For three years she lived in guilt and confusion as she and her husband attempted to reconcile their differences. She became so frightened about the possibility of breaking her vows that she couldn’t work. She took her pain out on her employees and started to drink heavily At night she would brood with her bottle. She became a recluse. Finally, the marriage ended.

It is hard to imagine what kind of sorrow this woman bore. In this case, her sorrow—her guilt—was good and proper, although it was obviously not good that she’d taken out her anger on her employees or that she’d become a heavy drinker. But she knew that she had offended God, and this was good—guilt for any sinful action is correct. Her guilt came not just from her Memory but also from her Intellect, which told her she was breaking her Marriage Sacrament. She was not imagining anything. But she was filled with the horror of disappointing the God Whom she loved so dearly. She was living in a no-man’s-land until she began to seek the guidance of the Church.

After the divorce went through, Sue visited her parish priest. “Father,” she said, “sometimes I wake up in the morning and wonder how I can live through the day. I make it, somehow, with God’s help. But my heart hurts so much I can literally feel the pain right here,” she said, striking her breast. “My husband and I were so wrong together, and yet sometimes I wonder what’s worse: how I feel right now, which is like a vile woman who gave up on her oath, or what we lived with for four years, which was a mockery of the Sacrament of Marriage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.