Lies

It is simply a lie to think that God doesn't love us.  It is a lie to think He won't forgive us.  It is also a lie to think that God is out to punish us.  Christ didn't come to condemn us but rather to save us. 

Why then do we carry around so much shame and guilt?

The devil is the father of lies.  It is his goal to separate us from God (thus making our existence miserable).  The lie is the distinguishing feature of evil, because of its self-devouring commitment to what is not: it is an inner vacuity. Shakespeare’s villain Parolles identifies himself as a “corrupter of words,” and the sardonic Porter in Macbeth remarks wryly upon the liar who equivocates his way down the primrose path to perdition. Orwell’s dystopian regime in 1984 rests upon a ground floor of terror and violence, but its bedrock foundation is the lie: witness the hero Winston Smith’s work at the “Ministry of Truth,” sending precious archival materials down the “memory hole,” where they will be lost forever. It is why Dante situates fraud below violence in the Inferno’s decrepit descent into non-being and idiocy; so we find the giant Nimrod, builder of the heaven-aspiring Tower of Babel, sputtering gibberish, and the consummate liar Satan uttering not a single word, but telling the same old lie again and again with every flap of his bat-like wings, “I rise by my own power.”

The result is, literally, confusion—pouring together, a disorderly mélange, a chaos. I believe, in our day, that we see this linguistic and moral confusion in almost everything that is uttered about the subjects that have us most perplexed: man and woman; marriage and children.

God on the other hand is clarity.  He wants our lives to be at peace.  We achieve peace through living a moral life based on Christ.  We should always ask God in our prayer for the grace and strength to stop sinning, remove our shame and guilt through the Sacrament of Confession and live in peace. 

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