Beginning Again: Recovering Your Innocence and Joy Through Confession

"With God, every moment is the moment of beginning again."

After sin, can love be rekindled, innocence renewed, joy restored?

There is a great miracle in God, a great gift of God what is lost can be restored! Using the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the writings of Catherine Doherty, Beginning Again will show you the healing joy and spiritual restoration that awaits in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I love confession. When you hear the words of absolution fall on your ears, it is like salve on your wounds. The forgiveness of God envelops you like a mantle, for the confessional is the altar of mercy.

Only Love could devise such a wonder. At any hour, our souls can be washed clean and whiter than snow by the most holy sacrament of Penance. We can become little children again, newly baptized. We are like innocent babies again when we leave the confessional.

Think of what this sacrament of confession means. Our Lord gives it to us to bathe our souls and make them alive again, resurrecting from sin in a mercy that knows no end until we die. Catherine Doherty

What torture you feel after you ve uttered an unguarded word or behaved callously toward your beloved! The distance feels like a chasm. You hear the echo in your heart. You're distracted and restless. You feel sick. Your sorrow torments you. You bathe your heart in tears. Can the innocence be recovered? The love rekindled? The joy restored?

Jesus is the Bridegroom, and we are his bride. Jesus knows our torment. He knows that we fear we ve broken our relationship with him through sin. He knows our fear of being forgotten, rejected, abandoned. He knows our shame. But Jesus is the most generous of lovers. He established the sacrament of confession so that we do not need to lose one moment of our life with him wallowing in guilt and misery.

Catherine tells us, Christ s mercy was too immense to allow innocence to be destroyed without showing a way to restore it. So he gave us the sacraments of Penance and of the Eucharist which restore people to pristine innocence. It is yours for the asking, because he is in love with you. Only Love could create such a generous gift.

Catherine s book isn t meant to be an extensive curriculum on confession. Rather, she speaks from her heart as a laywoman longing for reconciliation with her Beloved. Let her tender, passionate recounting of moments from her own love life with God teach you how to return to your Beloved s heart through the sacrament of confession after you ve been distracted and forgotten him who loves you more than you love yourself.

The Lord Jesus Christ, physician of our souls and bodies, who forgave the sins of the paralytic and restored him to bodily health, has willed that his Church continue, in the power of the Holy Spirit, his work of healing and salvation, even among her own members. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1421)

Behold, I make all things new. (Revelation 21:5)

Catherine Doherty used her heritage as a Russian Christian as a matrix for responding to the needs of Christian life and work in the modern world. Her own personal pilgrimage led her to be poor with the poor Christ in the slums of Toronto and in Harlem; and later to the establishing of the world-wide Madonna House Apostolate. A dedicated wife and mother, Catherine was also a prolific writer of hundreds of articles, a best-selling author of dozens of books, a renowned national speaker, and a pioneer of social justice. Catherine Doherty's cause for canonization as a saint is now under consideration by the Catholic Church.