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With willingness to go on always, in a going on that takes courage… where is courage found, and taken?
Addiction and compulsion recovery is a narrow way of carrying what cannot be fully understood, the narrow somewhere between acceptance of frailty and determination to be holy. The fine line of this becoming, is today, the focus of our heart’s eyes on God, and the act of loving our neighbor.
Healing is a divine work that is continuous. With every fall and every confession, the story of our learning and transformation unfolds. One thing is sure, no two falls are alike, which contradicts the Devil’s most devious tactic - the lie that every sin is the same stupid sin.
As time and grace reveal, as long as we rise and go on with faith in Christ, we are choosing a recovery that can never double back nor merely repeat what has passed. In the Gospels, Jesus in fact never healed the same way twice.
Christ is the author of our redemption. He alone knows the beginning, middle and end of our full conversion. For the long suffering, it is a longer process. But, we see more: an unsurpassed view of God’s immense mercy, the grandeur of God’s deliverance, the deep purity of God’s Kingdom.
Quoting from the Litany of who I am in Christ, here is our faith: I am confident that the good work that God has begun in me will be perfected. Have we forgotten how far we have come? Satan’s big lie after a fall number two: “you haven’t come any distance at all; you are where you always were” . Lies lies lies.
At Easter, Mary Magdalene the patron saint of penitents relays the message from the Risen Jesus, to the disciples, to you and to me, to the Church: Do not be afraid. Go to Galilee, and there you will see Me.
Scripture commentaries have given us the meaning of Galilee, as the place of beginning, where we first knew we needed saving, the hour of finding the Doctor Christ. Galilee is also the place where the light of the Resurrection illuminates our entire life afresh, where we can see our weakness, our struggle, our progress and our hope, in a new way. Galilee is finally also our humble place in the world, where we live, where we work, who we know, who waits for our love.
It is in the ordinary reality of our lives, by the infusion of Resurrection grace, where we see and hear the Risen Christ around us. Resurrection is rebirth, which we know is continuous, and which reminds us that our journey ascends elliptically. We need to touch briefly where we’ve come from, to be grateful for every grace and blessing tendered to us, allow where there remains to go.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses relays the Father’s message to Pharaoh “Let my people go, so that they may serve Me. Is our life being converted from pornography to purity, from vice to virtue, from dying in sin to living to serve? The answers to this question shape our prayer and our hope. The grace of God: the instrument and the victory.
Heavenly Father, by our Savior’s Resurrection light, help us see our re-creation as You see it. Help us graduate from a life of recovery to a life of service. Grant us what may have never yet been possessed or what has been dearly lost - restoration of innocence and natural desire in the most holy purpose of sexual faculty. We ask in the name of the Risen One. Amen.