How can you love if you have not experienced it? How can you forgive if you have not received it? How can you have hope if you have not known that it exists?
We all have the graces to learn to love, to know how to forgive, to have the spark of hope. Some have already retrieved these “graces in waiting”, others are perhaps in the process of doing so. Adrienne Von Speyer describes an intimate experience of love, forgiveness and hope in her book “Three Women and the Lord”:
“And there can be no question of the light of grace somehow beautifying sins and making them more pardonable. The sins that are forgiven are these sins, real, naked and totally unforgivable. At this moment the woman knows more surely than ever that, if she were to look only at her sins, she would despair. There would not be the least room left in her for hope. But at the very point where all she can see is her sin, where she can no longer explain her actions or make excuses for them, where she no longer tries to understand them and has given up trying to pin her hopes on any remaining good quality she might have-at this very point she finds the Lord, forgiving her everything. In her there is sin; there is no basis for hope. All hope lies in the meeting with the other, the Lord. Her all embracing sin meets His all embracing forgiveness. (p76-77)
Within sin we can still find hope. Moving beyond it there is always great hope. We have hope, not in the sin itself but in the mercy that had contact with the sin; the mercy that touched it, the mercy that felt the sin and embraced it, the mercy that took on the sin and held it close to His Heart. This mercy is the love that hung on the cross, the final sacrifice on the cross in which all sin has been redeemed.
