Meditation on Repetition of Venial Sin

This may be done with great fruit, especially by those who by the mercy of God are preserved from mortal sin, and are living in His habitual service, but yet from time to time fall into deliberate venial sin, by taking the same points as St. Ignatius lays down in the meditation on “Our own Sins.”

The commencement and preparatory prayer as usual.

Prelude 1.—We may picture to ourselves our soul like one in a decline, weak and incapable of making a step forward for our own salvation.

Prelude 2.—Let us beg light, courage, and confidence to overcome ourselves, and intense sorrow for our many venial sins.

Point 1.—Pass in review your life since your conversion, the places and the occupations in which it has been spent. What a mass of faults in thoughts of vainglory, uncharitableness, self-conceit; in words of falsehood, exaggeration, detraction, worldliness, &c.; of deeds as regards yourself, or others, or God; of omission of your spiritual duties, of the duties of your state of life, of the scandal and bad example you have given to others, &c. And with shame make your confession of them to God and His angels.

Point 2.—Let us next see the malice of them, even if they were not forbidden at all; for example, the meanness of falsehood, which if detected would make us blush; also the cowardice and meanness of backbiting and detraction, the contemptibleness of vanity and vainglory, the hypocrisy of striving to appear wiser and better than we are, the sacrificing of others to our own selfishness, the coolness and indifference to all spiritual things and the duties of religion. Oh, how gross and mean do all these appear, especially when we see them in a child of God. In a worldling one can see them without a shudder, but how black and repugnant they are in one who is in the state of grace, and consequently from whom we expect with reason so much more perfection.

Point 3.—And in God our Father it is so different. He is the very counterpart of all these. He is the truth, He is charity and love, He is forgetfulness of self and all sacrifice through love for us: Misericors et miserator et justus, ¹ the thrice Holy One.

Point 4.—Admitting that the ethical malice of sin is chiefly to be estimated by the distance between the offender and the person offended, and secondly by the claims of him who suffers the offence on him by whom it is given, we ask, Who can conceive the malice of a venial sin? For we are separated from God by an infinite gulf, and His claims upon us are likewise infinite—creation, conservation, justification, adoption into His own family, and sharing with us His own inheritance. What then must be our horror of venial sin? And this ought to be the greater, because it is so treacherous, and presents itself to us under such a disguised appearance.

Point 5.—We may well wonder how God has borne with us, how His angels have had patience with us, how the whole of creation has tolerated us, seeing that we have thus basely and ignominiously treated their Creator. What a humiliating thought it is that the animals which we feed and which are so submissive to us have never failed to do God's will, whereas we are so guilty.

In our colloquy let us pour out our souls in shame and sorrow for our many venial sins, faults, and negligences, and let us beg of God to confirm us in our resolution to lose all, even our life itself, rather than commit another deliberate venial sin.

End with the “Our Father.”

1. Psalm cxiv. 5.