This is TCE theology and current events number 35. Four years of purgatory, the key to Father Sizek.

So do you ever feel like a past sin is unforgivable? Or maybe you know that God can indeed forgive all

sins in baptism or confession, but maybe you feel like a recent action in your life is irreversible?

Do you ever wonder if God is really with you having had such a hard life where maybe you feel like a recent action in your life is irreversible. Do you ever wonder if God is

really with you having had such a hard life where maybe you now blame yourself for a past vocational

decision you think was wrong? Many of us feel that way about one of those things. We forget that

divine providence is more like a GPS that can continually say recalculating than say a computer

system where if 1-0 was a 1 or 1-1 was a 0, the whole system is thrown off. We essentially

rely on ourselves. My favorite account of this misunderstanding and conversion to true trust in

God is the autobiography of St. Therese, but my favorite practical living out of this

is a memoir that many of you are familiar with. He leadeth me, the memoir or autobiography of Father

Walter Sizek. Now, Walter was a very Orthodox Jesuit from the 20th century who was a missionary

to the Communist Soviet Union. Now deceased, he was a Polish

American born in 1904. He was then ordained a Jesuit long before Vatican 2. This is back when many of the

Jesuits were still made of titanium, not lavender fluff. Father Sizek was extremely mortified and wrote

in another book of his with God in Russia

why he had become this way. He said, quote, and I had to be tough. I'd get up at 4.30 in the morning

to run five miles around the lake on the semi-grounds or go swimming in November when the lake was

little better than frozen. I still couldn't stand to think

that anyone could do something I couldn't do. So one year during Lent, I ate nothing but bread and water

for 40 days, another year I ate no meat at all for the whole year just to see if I could do it, end quote.

Now, as most of you know, a mortified life is one where a person excels in

...