Kind of, but not really, new post. =p

So, as most of you know, there's this retreat called Longhorn Awakening that goes on every semester here at UT. It's pretty cool. I gave a talk on this most recent one about reconciliation. A good number of you have read/heard this already. Some of you haven't. The later part will probably give a lot of good insight as to why I love the Church and Catholicism so much. It's also written in the way I was giving the talk, and I was much too lazy/busy with other things to actually change it. I've been thinking about posting it on here for the past few weeks, so...here you go! I apologize for the length. It was probably around half an hour long on the retreat... sorry bailey. =p
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Alright guys and gals. I’d like to start off with a question. What’s your favorite thing about being Catholic?  *gets answers* Well, my favorite thing about being Catholic is that within the Church we have been given the best tools we need in order to get ourselves to heaven....The Sacraments!

This starts off with baptism which most of us probably experienced as babies. It’s so awesome though because it is in baptism that we are cleansed of the stain of original sin and that we become an official member of the Church and a part of the Body of Christ. I always really love witnessing baptisms. I mean, you have cute babies (though the older people getting baptized are just as exciting), the cleansing of a soul, happy family members, and a new brother or sister in Christ! What’s not to love and be excited about?

Another gift that we’ve been given through the Church is the Eucharist. Pretty much the most amazing thing in the history of ever. In the Eucharist we have the true presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the humble form of bread and wine. And we, unworthy as we are, get to receive Him into our bodies! We get to be tabernacles for the one who was crucified to save us from our own sin. Our bodies become literal temples for the Lord, and He enters under our roofs to heal our souls.

The Eucharist is often referred to as the “source and summit of our faith”, and the reason for that is because it’s Jesus. Literally. And if Jesus is the source and summit of our faith, why shouldn’t we strive to make the Eucharist the source and summit of our LIFE?

This makes going to mass, daily or as frequently as possible, essential to our spiritual development. And go to adoration whenever you have the opportunity. Or at least go visit Jesus in the tabernacle. An awesome American Archbishop from the 60’s, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of my Catholic heroes/favorite people ever, used to dedicate one hour every single day to spend in the presence of the blessed sacrament. And he stuck with that from his ordination throughout his life. He’s without a doubt one of the greatest role models for American Catholics in the past century and is an amazing example of how being in the presence of the Eucharist can mold you into a saint.

Now, baptism, the Eucharist, and all of the other sacraments are amazing and show you God’s grace in their own unique ways, but the one I’m going to focus on today is reconciliation. Otherwise, we’d be here for at least a few hours. But yeah, reconciliation. The topic of my talk haha.

For most of my life, I’d probably only go to confession when my family went to the big penance services before Christmas or Easter, but probably close to never on my own.
Reconciliation. Why do we need it?

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Well first and foremost, it’s because we are sinners. As human beings, we have concupiscence, which is fancy Catholic terminology meaning “a natural inclination to sin”. Though the stain of original sin is washed away at baptism, we can still leave the marks on our souls through the sins we commit through our choices. And temptations are everywhere you look in the world. On TV, the internet, 6th street, weekends in West Campus.... The devil is real and is fighting with God for our souls. It is our job to be aware of this and to do our part in striving for perfection and heaven daily. This is where confession comes in.

So why do we confess to a priest when you can just confess directly to God?  Well, in the gospel of John, chapter 20, we hear Jesus say to His apostles

“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”

Here, we see Jesus giving the apostles the authority to bind and loose sins. The apostles passed this on to the Church and Her bishops,  which then conferred it to the priests as well. It’s important to remember that it’s not the priest who is forgiving your sins, but it is God Himself forgiving your sins. The priest only acts as an instrument to be used by God in this sacrament.

Another reason that we don’t just confess “directly to God” is that our sins not only cause damage to ourselves and our relationship with God, but they also damage our relationship with the rest of the Body of Christ, our brothers and sisters. Just as our good works build up the rest of the Church, so do our sins break it down. In reconciliation, the priest acts not just on behalf of Christ, but also as a representative of the Church, and it is through this sacrament that we are restored to a healthy relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Some of you out there might be afraid or get anxious at the idea of confessing your sins to a priest, but it’s important to remember that the priest is there because he wants to help us get to heaven. That’s his job and it is a very integral part of his vocation. Just as it is the duty of each spouse in a marriage to get the other to heaven, it is the duty of the priest to get his bride, the Church (that’s us!), to heaven. That’s a pretty big and awesome responsibility, and if any of you young men out there are called to the priesthood, it’s essential that you remember that you have that responsibility to your people.
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What do we need for the forgiveness of sins? At the very least, we should have what the Church calls “attrition” which is, simply put, the fear of going to hell. Like I said earlier, the devil is real, and hell is most definitely real. The idea that the devil and hell don’t exist are some of the biggest lies that the devil will feed you in order to lead you to sin.


So, what is hell? Hell is the absence of the love of God. It is complete isolation and solitude. And it is very important to know that it is not God that sends us there, but rather we send ourselves there by turning away from and rejecting God’s love through our sins, actions that separate us from the love of God. God never wants us to be apart from Him and His love. He loves us so much that He gave us the gift of free will.

We have free will because love cannot be forced; it has to come from one’s own desire to give his or her love to another. God desires our love. God is jealous for our love, all of it, but in order for that love to be real, we have to choose to love freely. And our actions should reflect that love we have for God. Our actions are what prove our love for God.  As Fulton Sheen once said: “Ours is a free universe of character and soul making. Almighty.God has placed into our hands the power to make us saints or devils. It is up to us.”

So with attrition: When you realize that hell is real, that the devil is real and is vying for your soul, it’s a pretty simple level to get to. It should quite literally scare the hell out of you.

While a fear of hell is very important to have, (St. Ignatius meditated on it daily), the ideal level you want to be at is to have contrition, which means having sorrow for having offended God because you love Him so gosh darn much that any action of yours that might do harm to Him causes you to feel terrible. True contrition is not always easy to achieve, so it is very important that we continue to cultivate our relationship with Christ by going to confession and receiving Him in the Eucharist at mass frequently and spending time with Him in adoration in order to get ourselves to that higher level. By cultivating this relationship, we grow in love for God, and this love can help us conquer any fears we have about going to confession and will allow us to rise above just that level of attrition.

After remorse, one more thing we should do before going to confession is run through an examination of conscience. This is just a reflection on how you’ve lived your life since your last confession. I personally like praying to Mary and the the Holy Spirit beforehand for the guidance and strength to make a good, thorough, and contrite confession.

After examination, there’s the actual confession of sins to the priest and absolution of sins!

In the traditional act of contrition which we can say near the end of confession, some of the last lines are the promises “to amend my life/sin no more” and to “avoid the near occasion of sin/whatever leads me to sin”.

So, in confession, we promise to do our best to avoid sinning, but as I said earlier, we have concupiscence, a natural inclination to sin, as human beings, so chances are fairly high that we will sin again at some point in the future. However, we can’t fall into the trap of despair. It’s like in Batman Begins when everything looks like it’s falling apart and that the bad guys have won and all hope is lost. Batman’s talking to Alfred and says:


Bruce Wayne: I wanted to save Gotham. I've failed.
Alfred: Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.
Bruce: You still haven't given up on me?
Alfred: Never.

Terrible accent aside, you see, Bruce almost gave up on trying to save the city, but Alfred’s faith in him and reminding him of his purpose allowed him to keep fighting for his ideals. To keep fighting for a city that had been judged as so deep in sin that it was beyond saving.

And we see it in the bible with the apostles. Judas Iscariot, who after betraying Jesus with a kiss, found himself thinking that he beyond salvation and was met with a rather unpleasant fate. Interestingly, Peter had denied knowing Jesus three times in the same night during Christ’s passion.

What was main difference between them? They both betrayed the one they had loved and called master. Judas sunk into the trap of despair, thinking he could never be forgiven for his crime. Peter, on the other hand, returned to Christ’s side, trusted that he would be used as an instrument of the Lord, built up the Church with the other apostles, and eventually was crucified upside down because of his faith.

Despair is one of the only things God cannot forgive since you close yourself off to the possibility of being forgiven, and by despairing, you underestimate the depth and power of God’s love and mercy. Again, like with going to hell, it is not God cutting off His mercy from you, it’s you cutting yourself off from His mercy.

Let’s look at avoiding the near occasion of sin. How do we do that? Well, prayers are always awesome. We can pray the Our Father, which Jesus Himself gave to us. It ends with “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. There’s also the St. Michael prayer that Bailey and Evan introduced earlier, and it’s pretty freaking epic. In the prayer, we ask St. Michael to defend us in battle because getting to heaven is definitely a battle against the devil. We can also ask for Mary’s intercession. The Church often refers to her as the “New Eve” who, by cooperating in God’s plan of salvation, crushes the head of the serpent, aka satan. The rosary is an amazing weapon against the forces of evil, and if you can get a tag team of an archangel and the mother of God fighting for you, the devil will have a hard time getting through.

You can also do practical things like surrounding yourself with holy images and symbols, avoiding the near occasion of sin by not trying to push your limits, receiving the sacraments of Eucharist and confession, going to mass daily/often as possible, going to adoration/spending time with Jesus, reading the bible (get know Jesus in both word and flesh), getting an accountability buddy if it’s a habitual sin, and by PRAYING.


So what do we get out of reconciliation?
We get absolution, aka the remission of our sins. We are restored to a state of grace. So, it’s like in mass when we say, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” before receiving communion...

Though we might not ever become fully “worthy” while we’re still here on earth, when we walk out of that confessional, we’re as close we can probably ever get. We’re restored to a right relationship with God and with the other members of the Church.

So, I really love this sacrament of reconciliation if you couldn’t tell. Like a lot. But that love wasn’t always there and is something that had to grow over time. I’m going to share a bit of how that came about in my life.
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So, if we rewind a bit. To the beginning of my junior year of high school. I was pretty much your stereotypical nerdy asian kid. I didn’t have too many female friends, but before that year began, I made it one of my goals to get a girlfriend. Alas, that didn’t exactly work out, but I did make a lot of good female friends. And by the time senior year came around, I even ended up going to prom with the girl I liked. That was quite a victory for me at the time.

Fast forward four years to junior year of college. After many years of thinking that I was doomed to an eternity in the “friend zone”, I started growing closer to a girl that I was kind of sort of friends with,  and after a lot of awkwardness... we eventually started dating. Neither of us had ever had a significant other before, so we were new to this whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing.

Now, all of you out there, especially guys. If you’re going to be dating someone, you need to know how to protect them. That’s one of your responsibilities. To protect their heart. Protect their soul. Dating is for discerning whether God is calling us to marry that person, and if you’re going to get married someday, you are tasked with the responsibility of getting that person to heaven. Men, especially, we have to be aware of this and take charge of this responsibility. Just like Christ loved the Church and gave His life for Her, so must husbands sacrifice whatever it takes to get their wives to heaven.

So. I’d never had a girlfriend before, and I had no idea how to protect another person’s heart.

Why? Because I had no idea how to protect my own heart.

There’s a disease out there in the world right now that’s affecting a lot of people. What is it? It’s an addiction to pornography. And up until a year and a half ago, I was part of that.


It started when I was in 6th grade, and I stumbled upon some email that linked me to a site. I was so young, and had no idea just how much damage might come from that. And from that moment on... everything just kind of spiraled downhill.

After my first confession, it wasn’t till about 9th grade when I eventually went again. That makes about six years between my first and second reconciliations. And that feeling after my second confession was probably the best I’d ever felt for those six years. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of my chest, but I still didn’t really go to confession except maybe once every year or so. And unfortunately, I was still addicted to pornography. Although, I did try giving it up every Lent following, all of those efforts failed...

You know what’s really sad about pornography? It’s that it’s portrayed as “normal” and “ok” by the world and the media today. You see it in TV shows all of the time as a source of comedy, or you have organizations telling you that masturbation is ok and even “healthy”. All of this is leading souls astray.

You see, pornography takes a beautiful creation of God, one of your sisters or brothers, and portrays them basically as a piece of meat. It brainwashes and corrupts men.

It takes the men who are supposed to be protecting their sisters and basically turns them into ravenous wolves who only see a piece of meat waiting to be devoured. Pornography takes sex, which is supposed to be a beautiful, sacred reflection of God’s love for us in the Eucharist, and turns it into a utilitarian act of self-gratification.

Wait, what? Sex is a reflection of the Eucharist? What does that even mean.

Well you see, we are the bride of Christ, the Church, and Christ enters into us when we receive Him at communion. Sex is supposed to reflect that union. Just as husbands and wives become one flesh in marriage, so do we become one flesh with Christ. Pornography takes that beautiful image of the love of God and distorts and degrades it to an act of lust.

So, going back to the story. About 5 months into our relationship, I told her about my problems with pornography, and it absolutely destroyed her. I felt helpless and like I couldn’t do anything to make things better. Not that I didn’t try, but it seemed like the whole situation was so much bigger than anything I could take on by myself. Which is because it was. I also felt like the biggest piece of you know what because I had hurt the person I cared about the most.

After I told her though, after seeing how much it hurt her, I decided to stop looking at it right then and there and that I was going to stick through with it. I stopped because that feeling of hurting the person I thought I loved more than anyone in the world was the worst feeling ever.
So much of the trust she had in me was lost and deservedly so. A couple of terrible months ensued. Though as far as my addiction went, I did ok. I strove to grow in chastity because I didn’t want to hurt her like that again. The temptation was definitely still there, but I was like, “No. I love her.” I mean, I didn’t know how to properly love her at the time, but I fought through it.


Summer came around, and she went out of the country for a month or so. It was so hard not having her around, but I used that time to drown myself in prayer. I was in Austin for classes that summer, so when my class would get out at 11, I’d go straight to the UCC to the blessed sacrament chapel, prayed a rosary (that summer is when I finally got my mysteries straight), and then I’d go from the blessed sacrament chapel to daily mass. I knew that I couldn’t get through that on my own, so I was grasping wherever I could for any help I could get. During this time, the Blessed Mother was a source of great strength for me. I was asking her to help me learn how to properly pursue her immaculate heart so that I could properly pursue the broken heart of my girlfriend.

My main motivation for all of this was still my girlfriend though. I was leaning on God for strength which was great, but it was my love for her that was preventing me to give into temptation. However, God is a jealous God, and He wants to be the one we love the most in our lives. So of course, He gave me that opportunity.

My girlfriend came back from vacation towards the end of the summer. I thought things were going alright. Then, on July 15, the day after the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, she broke up with me. And I...I fell apart. It felt like my whole world had pretty much collapsed around me. Like everything I had worked on and prayed for throughout the summer had been done for nothing. It was almost like God had let me down. I was like, seriously?

I had lost the main reason for not looking at pornography. And I felt helpless. I felt a bit of that feeling of despair, the tool the devil uses to get us when we’re weak.

However, I was like “aw, hell no!” I did not just go through all of that just to fall back to where I had been or even worse. And it was HARD not having my girlfriend in my life, but I knew what I had to do. What I should have been doing all along. What I needed was a right relationship with God where He was the one I loved above everything and everyone else in my life, and where my love for Him is where my motivation for a chaste life came from.

That first month after the break up was the hardest. Some weeks I would go to confession on Saturday and have to come right back the following Monday or Tuesday. But every time I fell, I went straight back to reconciliation as soon as possible. Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves back up. I would go to daily mass daily, reconciliation as soon as I needed it or earlier, I would pray rosaries, spend time in the blessed sacrament chapel, pray to St. Michael (I memorized his prayer fairly early in my struggles), or whatever it was that I thought might help me in my struggles. It was a period of extreme spiritual growth for me though I still had a lot more growing to do throughout the year. And still will for the rest of my life, but it was then that I finally realized my calling to be a saint. I’d heard that throughout my life, especially my time in college, but it wasn’t until I had to strive so much for my sanctity that it finally hit me. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, “Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.”  


This call to sanctity is for all of us in the Church. We’re called to be saints. We’re called, even with our imperfections, to strive for holiness. To strive for perfection. To strive to be like Christ in the world, and to help others achieve this as well. The Church has given us the tools to achieve this in the sacraments. To quote a prayer from the mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus:

“For raised up high on the Cross,
he gave himself up for us with a wonderful love
and poured out blood and water from his pierced side,
the wellspring of the Church’s Sacraments,
so that, won over to the open heart of the Savior,
all might draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation.”

That the wound on Jesus’s side is referred to as the wellspring of of the Church’s sacraments is just beautiful imagery. And it is from this spring of salvation, the spring of blood and water that only came about from Christ’s passion and death, that we are transformed into the saints of today’s world. There are many challenges in our strivings. Many things to be afraid of, but with God’s love and our reciprocation of that love back to Him, we can overcome anything. We can be attentive to His will. We can die to self and be born in Him. He’s calling each and every one of us to be saints. The question is, will you answer it?