Reconciliation and Religious Life

I was going through some of my old resources from when I was in retreat ministry and I came across a playlist of songs from when I worked as part of the Los Angeles/San Gabriel Valley Search community. It's a retreat community, and these weekend retreats are held four times a year. I was involved with them for five years, and our principal goal was evangelizing young adults and helping many come back home to the Church. One of the songs that I listened to last night was "Right Now" by Van Halen. It was used for a talk on Reconciliation, and it got me thinking- just how important is Reconciliation in religious life?

If you're looking for the answer, it's VERY IMPORTANT!

Many religious men and women live in communities, and for us as Salesians, what characterizes our style of living in community is what we like to call a Family Spirit. That means that we strive to live as brothers, not just as a bunch of guys who happen to share the same living space. When close to 30 guys come together to live in one house, sparks are bound to fly. There are so many different personalities in the house, that friction is bound to happen. One person doesn't like that so and so missed work period, another gets irritated with how one of the guys chews loudly, another just gets on someone else's nerves. It's natural for things like this to happen. The question then is what do we as religious do when these things arise in our day to day lives? We don't belch rainbows and ride unicorns to school- our being religious doesn't excuse us from being human.

This is where reconciliation comes in. Reconciliation is important for religious on two levels- reconciliation with our brothers and sacramental reconciliation. It is extremely hypocritical to go to reconciliation and lament how sorry one is for mistreating one of their brothers in community only to go out and deliberately avoid him or get on his nerves on purpose. Reconciliation with our brothers (or sisters) in community works hand in hand with sacramental reconciliation. We forgive and ask for forgiveness from our brothers, and we ask forgiveness from God through the amazing gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Don Bosco was no fool- Reconciliation was one of the two major sacraments that he told his earliest Salesians to rely on. The other was the Eucharist, which in itself is a sacrament of Reconciliation- through the reception of Christ in the Bread and Wine we make public our binding of ourselves to Him in this special Presence.

So, back to reconciliation- it's something that we as religious are not perfect at, but it is something that we work on our whole lives. We fall, but the beauty of religious life is that we have brothers to lend us a hand to help us back up, or when it's particularly difficult, they carry us. What a beautiful life we lead.

Here's the song, in case you wanted to give it a listen.

Enjoy!