Confession and Health of Soul

Extract

‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness.’ We see the meaning of the Sacrament of Penance most fully if we see it against the background of the world-struggle between good and evil. The essence of sin is pride, the isolation of the self; the harmony of creation is split into warring fragments; there is no redress until created spirit, responsible for the material world, can emerge from its isolation and return to its Source. ‘The whole of creation is in travail even until now.’ So the Redemption is given us; that man-in-nature may be made whole again by restored oneness with God—a restoration wrought by the Cross and Resurrection and made accessible day by day in the world through the power of the Church. It is for that restoration of the divine order in the world that we pray when we pray for the coming of the Kingdom; but the coming is postponed, the power of the Church to heal and make holy is curtailed, by the persisting presence and power of evil. Nor can we think simply of a struggle between the members (visible or invisible) of the Church, and the world; it is waged by the Church, but it is also waged within the Church. And as there is a communion of saints, so there is a solidarity of sin; and the Church’s power as a whole is curtailed and its victory impeded by the sins of its sinful members.