God is always there, searching us out, and he is always saying, “Where are you?”, not because he does not know where we are, but because we do not know where we are, nor where we are going when sin and shame make us run from the only One who can heal us.

Could have tried harder

Every year at school was an annus horribilis for me because I did not exactly excel in the academic field, so I put all my energies into excelling on the playing field. If every year was an annus horribilis then there were three particular days that were a dies horribilis, days which I dreaded more than any others. These were the days when my school report arrived. Fortunately my father usually missed the morning post, so I had the whole day to think of ways and means of avoiding him that evening.

If I could not go out I would try hiding upstairs where he would not find me. But one way or the other the time would inevitably come when I would hear his voice resounding up the stairs. “David, where are you, where are you?” It reminded me of the voice of God calling out to Adam who had fled, like me, because he was ashamed of what he did, or in my case what I did not do. I know I should have had the courage to face up to my failures, and to my father too, as soon as possible and get it all over with, but I never did.

Unfortunately I fell into the bad habit of running away from my failures. That is why my weekly confession became a fortnightly confession, and then monthly, and then it took me all the courage I could muster to make it at Easter or thereabouts. All this was in the early fifties when boys like me were so innocent that they did not really think of their parents or teachers, let alone their priests, as sinners. I remember being shocked when I heard that every priest had to go to confession. Then I read St John’s famous letter when he said that we are all sinners, and if we say we are not then we are deceiving ourselves and calling God a liar. It was quite an eyeopener for me.

I was in the sixth form before I found out that the saints were sinners too; at least that is how they started out, and some of them had been ten times the sinner I was, something I found hard to believe until a retreat master gave us a few examples that started me thinking. I thought about it so much that I put a question in the box provided for question time at the end of the retreat.

That retreat was given by Father Bassett SJ and it was one of the best I have ever attended. He told us that only Mary was immaculately conceived and that meant the rest of us were not. We were all born sinners and born into a sinful world. The difference between the saints and us is not that they did not sin and we do. The difference is that they had the humility to accept their sinfullness and their sins whenever they committed them. They did not run away and hide with shame as we do. They had the courage to admit what they had done immediately and sought forgiveness from the One they had offended.

Fr Bassett gave St Peter as an example. The moment Peter betrayed Jesus he was sorry and sought forgiveness without delay. We were given many more examples from the life of St Peter and other saints to show that the real difference between them and us was not sin but the swiftness with which they faced up to the sins they committed and the forgiveness they needed. I was relieved that I was not the only one to run away from my shame and put off the forgiveness I needed — even the saints did it. But they finally became what God wants us to become by the ever-increasing urgency with which they turned back to him after they had fallen. Fr Bassett’s talk on the presence of God was a great help because it made me realise that God knows exactly what we have done and pursues us until we admit it, as he did with Adam in the garden.

God is always there, searching us out, and he is always saying, “Where are you?”, not because he does not know where we are, but because we do not know where we are, nor where we are going when sin and shame make us run from the only One who can heal us.

The first measure of genuine progress in the spiritual life is not the absence of sin, but the time it takes from the sin we inevitably fall into to the moment when we have the humility to ask for the forgiveness we need and the grace to begin again. I am still trying to shorten that time, so that when my final report is read out from the rooftops at least it will say, “He tried”, even if it goes on to say, “He could have tried harder.”

This essay is chapter one of A New Beginning: A Sideways Look at the Spiritual Life (Essentialist Press, 2024) and is published here by gracious permission of the publisher.

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