Friday of Week 22 in Ordinary Time (Year II)
1 Corinthians 4:1-5 | Psalm 36:3-6,27-28,39-40 | Luke 5:33-39
True, my conscience does not reproach me at all, but that does not prove that I am acquitted: the Lord alone is my judge. (1 Corinthians 4:4)
During my catechism classes as a child, I’d been drilled on the importance of conscience, that little voice inside me that tells right from wrong. I’d been taught to always follow that conscience, no matter how difficult it proves to be.
However, I was never told how my conscience worked, so it was fortuitous that I stumbled across this article about conscience by Deacon Douglas McManaman. It made me realize that my conscience was actually my humanly-incomplete interpretation of Divine Law, and therefore it can be wrong.
So it should not come as a surprise when I confess to one and all that my conscience had been ill-informed for a very long time. In particular, I’d spent my time daydreaming at catechism, instead of taking in the knowledge of faith that Fr. Louis Foisson was patiently (thought sometimes a little grumpily) imparting to us, so the conscience of my younger self was a rather weak and uncertain voice.
That “justifiable” sin I mentioned yesterday about pilfering office supplies for personal use? I did that 20 years ago, and I never gave it a second thought at the time. Indeed, I might have gone on to bigger larcenies, had my natural timidity not held me back from exploring the darker depths of human activity.
I think my conscience is better-informed and quite a bit louder now, thanks to my oldest friend regularly questioning my Catholic knowledge, and my new habit of nightly scriptural reflections. It’s still far from perfect, of course, so St. Paul’s honest self-appraisal serves as a timely deflation of ego.
All I can do now is to “feed” it regularly with the Church’s teachings, be unafraid to let it lead me wherever I must go and do whatever I should do in Christ’s name, and to trust in the mercy of Almighty God when my mortal existence comes to an end.
Amen.