Lent is a time when Catholics traditionally do an examination of conscience. This spiritual exercise comes in many forms and formats, but basically it is taking a look at oneself and evaluating to what extent I am being the person I want to be, the person I am called to be. Many examinations of conscience focus on the ten commandments. The Ten Commandments can be broken down into the two great commandments of Jesus, to love God and to love your neighbor. The first three commandments have to do with loving God: “You shall have no other God before Me,” “You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain,” and “You shall keep holy the Sabbath.”

The rest of the commandments are ways in which we love our neighbors. They call us us to affirm life (“You shall not kill”), honor families (“You shall honor your mother and father), and honor the covenant of marriage (“You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife”). We hear a lot about the importance of family values today. Ideally the family is the place for one’s primary relationships and the place one receives love and support. The concept of ‘family’ includes a lot of diversity, for example single parent families, intergenerational families, or families that include a diversity of race or religion. To be a family is to be held together by commitment and love. As such we use the term ‘family’ as an analogy for communities that mirror that commitment and love as in ‘our parish family’. Our faith upholds the ideal that families are sacred. As some of you may have heard me say many times, the family is the first and foremost place a child learns about faith. The Church has a role in supporting families and marriages and upholding both as ideals. We also recognize that life is often not ideal, and our family relationships sometimes fall short of what we hoped and dreamed they would be. Thus the Church also has a role in helping people grieve when they experience loss or brokenness in their families through death, divorce, or the other hardships we encounter in life. Please know that those of us who work in parishes consider it part of our ministry to support you and your children during those difficult times, and hope you feel free to seek us out in that capacity.

Other commandments deal with possessions. They entreat us to respect the property of others (“You shall not steal”) and avoid coveting what is not ours (“You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods”). Most of us are probably not going to hold up a bank at any time in the near future, but these commandments do encourage us to look more closely at ways in which we might be less honest about possessions than we should be. Such an examination of conscience might include examining one’s investments to see if the companies in which one invests operate out of sound ethics, including such matters as how they treat their workers. It might mean examining how often we give in to the materialist expectations of our culture – how aware are we of what we need versus what we want? It is also not always goods or possessions that we covet, sometimes it can be someone else’s position or power or even his/her happiness. These commandments encourage us to examine our lives to see if we have made any false idols in our lives, i.e., that which we seek with the ardor with which we should seek God.

The final commandment left entreats us to be honest (“You shall not bear false witness”) and appreciate the dignity of the human person (an obviously recurring theme among our doctrines that is included in all of these commandments). Honesty has to do with our basic integrity and authenticity as human beings. It includes a prohibition against lying, but it also includes a prescription to have a congruity between the person you are on the inside and the person you present to the world, between your beliefs and your actions. The theological foundation for this commandment is the belief that our God “is truth and wills the truth (CCC 2464).” Part of our dignity as human beings is to be the image and likeness of our God who is truth. To be that image and likeness demands that we are always striving toward a deeper integrity and authenticity as a human being.