Have you ever been slowed down or paralyzed by a recognition of your own moral failure?

That agony of knowing that you messed up, that you're to blame, and that you don't know how to get out of the quagmire.

You know that you should do better, make amends, try to do some sort of improvement project

for yourself as well as for those that you hurt. But when one has been struck by sin and stuck

in sin, change seems extremely difficult, nearly impossible.

The Catholic Sacrament of Penance provides a way to get the conversion process moving,

to get out of the quagmire.

The Sacrament of Penance is a religious ceremony whereby God,

working through his Catholic priest, perfects a prior grace of conversion

in a penitent sinner and accords forgiveness to that sinner. This reconciles the serious

sinners to God and the Church. Penance is not a painless effort, it involves struggle,

but it is a framework, a process, that otherwise turns the quicksand and morass of self-doubt and brokenness

into a more constructive process of healing and perfection.

The moral life, most fundamentally, is based upon personal relationships, those with God, the angels, and all of our human neighbors.

When I say the word relationships, that may conjure up all sorts of mental associations.

We may have a jaded outlook toward personal

relationships because we've seen enough damaged ones and experienced too much hurt in our lives.

But our connections with God and all our human neighbors should be marked not by this jaded

approach, but by friendship,

and by easy, familial conversation.

That is how God originally created us and how he intends things.

Sin is a severing of that friendship and conversation with God and our neighbors.

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