“Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25). The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, both those dead in body and those dead in spirit. St Augustine teaches us: “The soul is the life of the body, and God is the life of the soul.” Just as the body dies when it loses its soul, so does the spirit die when it loses its God. “It is an unchanging law of divine justice that the evil we choose should be punished by an evil we hate.”

This death is one that cannot be sensed, and yet, if we knew how to see into things, if only we could understand how much more to be feared is the death of the soul due to sin, we would then willingly suffer the death of our bodies instead, even though that death seems so cruel to us. For if it is a great evil for the body to lose its soul, how much worse it is for the soul to lose its God! If we are seized with horror to see the cold and senseless body struck down, without power or movement, how much more horrible it is to contemplate the rational soul when separated from God: it is a spiritual cadaver that lives now only to make its death eternal. It is to those who are dead in spirit, to the souls of sinners, that Jesus Christ speaks, calling them to repent: “The hour is coming, and now is.”

You will find a detailed examination of conscience tools available to you in the breezeway. CCC also provides detail for each commandment on pages 496-611. If you do nothing else this Lent, please go to Confession.

Please review the bulletin to find other tools useful for this Lent.