Remember, O Lord, that your tenderness and mercy are everlasting, we read in the Entrance Antiphon of the Mass.
Lent is an opportune time to take great care in the way we receive the sacrament of Penance, that encounter with Christ, who makes himself present in the priest; an encounter that is always unique and always different. There he welcomes us as the Good Shepherd, he heals us, cleanses us, strengthens us. In this sacrament is fulfilled what the Lord had promised through the Prophets: I myself will feed my sheep, and I myself will bring them into the fold. I will seek the lost sheep, I will bring the strayed, I will bind up the wounded and heal the sick, and I will keep the fat and the strong
When we approach this sacrament we must think first of all of Christ. He must be the center of the sacramental act. And the glory and love of God must count more than our sins. It is a matter of looking much more to Jesus than to ourselves; more to his goodness than to our misery, for the interior life is a dialogue of love in which God is always the point of reference.
The prodigal son who returns - that is what we are when we decide to go to Confession - begins the path of return moved by the sad situation in which he finds himself, without ever losing awareness of his sin: I am not worthy to be called your son; but as he approaches his father's house he begins to recognize with affection all the things of his own home, the home he has always had. And he sees in the distance the unmistakable figure of his father coming towards him. This is what is important: the encounter. Every contrite Confession is "an approach to the holiness of God, a new encounter in one's own interior truth, disturbed and transformed by sin, a liberation in the depths of oneself, and, with it, a recovery of the lost joy, the joy of being saved, which the majority of the men of our time have ceased to savor "3 .