"If you hear the voice of God today, do not harden your hearts," the liturgy repeats to us every day of this liturgical season. And each day, in very diverse ways, God speaks to the heart of each of us.
«Our prayer during Lent is directed towards awakening the conscience, to sensitize it to the voice of God. Do not harden your heart, says the Psalmist. Indeed, the death of conscience, its indifference regarding good and evil, its deviations are a great threat to man. Indirectly, they are also a threat to society because, in the final analysis, the level of morality in society depends on human conscience»2. Conscience is the light of the soul, from the deepest part of man's being, and, if it is extinguished, man remains in darkness and can commit all possible atrocities against himself and against others.
The lamp of your body is your eyes3, says the Lord. The lamp of the soul is the conscience, and if it is well formed, it illuminates the way, the path that ends in God, and man can advance along it. Though he stumble and fall, he can rise and go forward. He who has let his inner sensitivity "fall asleep" or "die" to the things of God is left without signals and disoriented. It is the greatest misfortune that can happen to a soul in this life. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil - announces the prophet Isaiah -, who turn light into darkness and darkness into light, and swap bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!4.
Jesus compares the function of the conscience to that of the eye in our life. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but if your eye is sick, your body is also full of darkness. See, therefore, that the light which is in you is not darkness5. When the eye is healthy, things are seen as they are, without deformation. A sick eye does not see or deforms reality, deceives the subject themselves, and the person can come to think that events and people are as they see them with their sick eyes.
When someone suffers an error in the affairs of daily life, due to having made a false estimation of the data, it causes prejudice and inconvenience, which at times can be of little importance. When eternal life is compromised in the error, the transcendence has no limits.
The conscience can be deformed by not having put the means to attain the due knowledge about the faith, or else by a bad will dominated by pride, sensuality, laziness... When the Lord complains that the Jews do not receive his message, he affirms the voluntariness of their decision - they do not want to believe6 - and does not place the cause on an involuntary difficulty: this is rather a consequence of their free refusal: Why do you not understand my language? Because you cannot bear my doctrine7. The passions and the lack of sincerity with oneself can come to force the understanding, to think in another way more in accordance with a tone of life or with some defects and bad habits that they do not want to abandon. There is then no good will, the heart hardens and the conscience falls asleep, because it no longer points the true direction, the one that leads to God; it is like a broken compass that disorients the person themselves, and frequently many others. «The man who has a hardened heart and a deformed conscience, though he may have fullness of strength and physical capacities, is spiritually ill and it is necessary to do something to restore the health of the soul»8.
Lent is a very opportune time to ask the Lord to help us form our conscience well, and for us to examine if we are radically sincere with ourselves, with God, and with those people who in his name have the mission of advising us.
HCD