God gives us the best second chances

A traffic accident spurred Fr KEVIN?REYNOLDS to reflect on life and the second chances God gives us. Here’s what the priest realised last Lent.

Our loving God gives us second chances to live, and live better, as Fr Kevin Reynolds reflected after being involved in a car accident.

On a lovely, sunny Thursday morning, significantly just two weeks before the start of Lent last year, I met with a serious motor car accident.

At the time, I was driving in the inner lane of a main road in the leafy suburb of Brooklyn in Pretoria. Once the car travelling a little faster alongside me had cleared a side street intersection, I collided with an SUV that hadn’t allowed me to also pass through the intersection but had turned directly across the path of my car.

This incident happened in a flash, so suddenly that I didn’t have a moment to take any avoiding action. I was aware only of a huge vehicle before me and of my car hitting it with the sound of crunching metal and my steering wheel air bag exploding while my seat belt held me firmly in my seat.

I was able immediately to release my seat belt, open the door and step out of my irreparably damaged car. When I approached the driver of the offending vehicle, a diplomat from one of the many embassies in Pretoria, I found him uninjured, sitting at his steering wheel, completely stunned by what he had done.

Thank God, my only injury was internal chest bruising from the force of the air bag and seat belt, but my strongly-built car was written off by my insurance company.

After the dust had settled—physically and emotionally—I came to realise how God had saved me from being killed or badly injured. In praising him for this I became aware of how God had given me a second chance on my life.

Memories of the accident never seemed to stop spinning in my mind. Reflecting on it, too, was never far from me.

I was especially conscious of this as I entered the season of Lent, a time for reflecting on how God never ceases to give us second chances. Of course, from a liturgical point of view Lent also prepares us to celebrate in its final week God’s greatest second chance to us through the saving life, passion, death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.

One attitude of the Western Catholic Church, which appears to be based on an illusion, is that we live in a perfect world. This is expressed particularly in the Church’s application of its moral teaching. Instead of understanding moral imperatives as ideals to be aimed at, the Church seems to expect that they be fulfilled literally.

Our failing attempts at living to the highest standards confirms that ideals are never fully attained. Indeed, the basic commandment of love is so challenging that we never fulfil it perfectly. This does not mean, though, that we are excused from aiming for the stars.

On the other hand, the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions encourage people to try and attain ideals, while acknowledging in a more realistic way that they will reach them only partially.

Perhaps the best example of the Western Catholic Church’s moral approach is evidenced by its handling of members who remarry after a failed marriage. The Church automatically excludes such people from receiving the sacraments.

The most profound reality of Christianity is that our heavenly Father loves us so richly that he sends his Son, Jesus Christ, to redeem us. This means that God himself gives us a second chance. He is prepared to cancel the debt of our sinfulness and to empower us to achieve the full purpose of our creation: to live with him in the present world and in his eternal kingdom of heaven.

Once we understand how Christ achieves our salvation, we can grasp why enjoying many second chances in our human lives is an integral dimension of Christian living.

A common misbelief is that our salvation was achieved by Christ only on the last day of his earthly life when he suffered tremendously and eventually died on Calvary hill.

However, God our Father raised him from the dead a couple of days later only because he recognised in him the one person who had finally got right the “human equation”. Christ was the One who chose to love perfectly in every situation and circumstance of his entire human life.

We often say, incorrectly, “to err is human”. In fact, to be human means that we enjoy a God-given capacity to choose to love. This is what we understand by our being created in the divine image. We are “like God” because we can choose to love.

The more we love, then, the more truly human we become. That is exactly what Christ did throughout his earthly life—to such a perfect degree that a couple of days after his death he was raised to the fullness of life in a glorified human body.

The Gospels record beautifully how Christ grew in his humanity, especially in his interaction with people.

We should note that most of Christ’s teaching centred on how people should live with one another. In this, he emphasised the need for mutual love, compassion, caring, forgiveness and giving one another many second chances. Certainly, by his own lived example, Christ illustrates that his heavenly Father’s design for people is to live in a truly human way.

We may well ask why the Western Catholic Church appears to miss this profound reality by too often seeming to lord it over people and not giving them second chances. I guess this shortcoming is part of Christ’s risk in entrusting the care of his Church to fallible people who are challenged to become more human themselves.

The time after my car accident gave me a keener perspective of my gratitude to God, not only for sparing my life but also for enabling me to appreciate more deeply the meaning of life itself.

May the season of Lent give us a richer appreciation of our life’s meaning in the light of what we celebrate in the holiest week of the year: God’s best second chance for us all.

Fr Kevin Reynolds is a priest of the archdiocese of Pretoria.