Our postal address is 70 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3JA. You will find us on the east side of Kingsway, a few steps from Holborn Station (LT). Click here for a location map.

You can contact us on 020 7405 0376 or by fax on 020 7405 6928. Our email address is lif@rcdow.org.uk.

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FORGIVENESS

LOVE, and therefore God, is known most especially in forgiveness. To be forgiven means that I learn that God's love for me is not conditional, as though I were only loveable if I maintain certain conditions. We can find it hard to accept God's forgiveness because we can find it hard to accept that I am absolutely loveable to God.

The Scriptures teach that our true nature is perfect love (we are made in the image of God). This image is marred through Adam's rebellion against God (the Original Sin): this spirit of rebellion infects us all, and shows itself in our sins. God gives us Christ to restore the image in which we are made, and this is known through reconciliation with God and our neighbour. This is made real through Our Lord's gift of the Sacrament of Reconciliation (whoever's sins you forgive they are forgiven, whoever's sins you retain they are retained) .

The story of the Prodigal Son (todays Gospel) reminds us that true contrition for our sins brings us back to God, who always welcomes us back home.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation is for you. Go to confession before Easter. Do not be afraid, for through this Sacrament you will not only know forgiveness, but come to see how loveable you are.

There is much to be joyful about.

Fr David Barnes, PP

Third Sunday of Lent  7th March 2010

BEAR FRUIT 

God wants us to live fruitful lives; that is, exercising all my God-given talents and gifts to the full. God wants us to be fully alive! But am I? 

We often experience being half-alive: our talents often half used, and finding we lack energy and life. This sense of being "blocked" is unblocked through repentance, which is to have a change of heart. 

• Come back to God with all your heart, and let God reign in every area of your life. 
• Have true sorrow for our sins, the symptoms of our selfishness, and want to sin no more. Our sins are destructive of our true self. This is best done through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, so go to confession.
• Ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit knowing how much we need the Holy Spirit is a very great blessing. 

This is the way forward to become fully human, fully alive, and to bear fruit. This is the royal road to heaven. 

PATIENCE is a hallmark of God's love for us. Like the gardener with the fig tree in today's Gospel, who wants to give the tree another chance to bear fruit, so is God with us. But there is also the warning in the second reading: to persist in wickedness leads to our destruction. We must then avoid the sin of presumption, that whatever I do God will just forgive me. 

FREEDOM is another hallmark of God's love for us - we are free to respond to God or not. What is the degree of my response to God? The Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) wrote: "To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." That is our Lenten journey. 

Fr David Barnes, PP