From sin’s gutter to mercy’s light
Father Sam Martin
Vicar for Clergy
Every year in the late fall, thousands of teenagers gather together for the National Catholic Youth Conference (NCYC). This year, it contained a component that once would have been impossible: Pope Leo XIV participated in a live interview with five teenagers through a video link set up by EWTN. Each teenager had the opportunity to ask the Holy Father a question, and his responses were both spiritually rich and full of fatherly wisdom. If you missed it, I encourage you to scan the QR code located at the end of this reflection and check it out. It’s a beautiful snapshot of the Church in her wisdom, her youth and the sort of communion that God desires between people of all ages and backgrounds.
While each question was thought provoking, the first one beautifully set the tone. Here’s how it began: “Good morning, Holy Father. My name is Mia Smothers from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Md. In my experience, it’s been difficult to voice my mistakes. Is it hard for you to accept God’s mercy when you make mistakes or feel like you’ve let people down?”
Pope Leo handled that question and the others with care and competence as he helped the young people to know the Lord on a deeper level. We’ve suffered the burden of shame and guilt since sin first entered the world. Our first parents ran and hid themselves, so burdened were their hearts with the sadness that comes with sin. But occasionally someone discovers that there’s another side of our fallen condition.
“We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde wrote these words, which makes sense because he bottomed out in life and spent time in prison. But in that prison cell, he began to turn toward the stars. And in one of the great shocks of his life, Oscar found the mercy of God. That mercy led him to the warm and forgiving embrace of a Father who had always loved him.
Before all this, Oscar Wilde was known as one of the wittiest men who ever lived. He once famously and cynically claimed, “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” Despite his cleverness, Oscar struggled mightily to find true love. Of all the places to find it, he discovered love through his suffering, evidenced by these words that he wrote in prison: “How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?” What follows is a tale of hope, specifically a “hope that does not disappoint.”
Sometimes we sail along in life and things seem to be going well. But we are fragile creatures, and even the happiest person in the world will inevitably run into the brick wall we call suffering and disillusionment. When that happens, many of us turn to compensatory behaviors to ease our pain. Whether it’s plugging in to technology or indulging in intemperate eating or drinking, we have a predictable tendency of trying to heal the pain by numbing it. Suffice it to say that there are mountains of evidence to convince us of the futility of this exercise. But even when we look for love in all the wrong places, we are not necessarily as far from God as we might think. If only we would look up. But so often, because of the burden of shame and guilt, we seem compelled to look down.
Jesus told a lot of stories about people who experienced conversion and who turned back to Him. One of the most dramatic happened as Jesus was dying on the cross. The “good” thief acknowledged that he was guilty and was suffering a just punishment for his crime, but he never doubted that Jesus was innocent. Throughout all the themes in Scripture, one of the most ubiquitous is that God is unable to refuse giving His love and mercy to someone with a humble, contrite heart. The good thief asked Jesus, a dying man, for eternal life. Jesus replied, “This day you will be with me in paradise.” Stories like this still happen today, and one of my favorites comes from the author, Jennifer Fulwiler.
When Fulwiler was in college, she and many of her friends were atheists. One Friday night, just as they were getting ready to go out and spend a night on the town, a salesman called Jennifer’s dorm room. In a playful mood, she put the call on speaker phone and decided to have some fun with the unsuspecting caller. When she told the salesman that she could not buy his product due to religious affiliation, the salesman got excited and asked what religion she professed. Bemusedly, Jennifer claimed she was a Christian. That absolutely excited the salesman, who exuberantly responded by saying he also was a follower of Jesus Christ. The other people listening in to the conversation were hooked and began to enjoy the man’s tale of faith and all the joy that comes from giving your life to Jesus.
But then the conversation took a turn. The man confessed he had struggled with alcoholism earlier in his marriage. One day, he returned home to find that his wife had taken their children and left a note suggesting she would never return. He started to cry as he remembered God’s mercy and how Jesus had given him the grace to turn away from alcohol. He shared that he’d been sober for over 10 years and that he and his wife and kids were closer and happier than they’d ever been. He ended by thanking Jennifer for the opportunity to share his faith, as well as the deep peace that it brought to those who lived it. When Jennifer hung up, she was shaken and didn’t understand the peace he described. Still, she decided at that very moment that she would spend her life searching for it.
Conversion heals, lifting our hearts and faces to a God who redeems our shame and forgives our sins. When Jennifer later became Catholic, it was partly because, through that random phone call with a true Christian, she vicariously realized that God loves broken people. And though it can be excruciatingly painful to admit, we are all broken people. Many of us run, hide and spend years trying to bury the shame and guilt that haunt us because of something we did or didn’t do. But even in this age of countless pharmaceutical ‘cures,’ there still seems to be no pill for a broken heart. As Oscar Wilde said, “How else but through a broken heart could Lord Christ enter in?”
The Catholic Church has two healing sacraments: anointing of the sick and confession. When Jesus forgives our sins, there’s an incredible lessening of the burden of shame, guilt and self-loathing that so many human beings carry. Oscar Wilde discovered this as he languished in jail. It touched him so deeply that he asked to be baptized Catholic. Oscar’s timing, like the good thief’s, came just in the nick of time—he died the next day.