Today was the second gathering of our Fall Reflection Series on forgiveness at UST School of Law. I’m delighted by the number of people participating with us this year, a combination of students, faculty, staff and alum of the law school and university, as well as some outside friends.
We began the session by giving participants time to share in small groups some of their experience from their prayer over the last week with the material I distributed last week.
Following the sharing and some time to address questions and answers, Chato Hazelbaker offered the reflection for this week. Chato’s aim was to orient us to our prayer materials on biblical models of forgiveness. He began by talking about the relationship between forgiveness and love and distinguishing forgiveness from trust. He then talked about the reality that we are called to forgive because Christ first forgave us. Making references to the various stories participants will pray with during the week, he spoke about how forgiveness is not related to either past actions or future actions of the person being forgiven and about how forgiveness affects our own relationship to Christ.
You can access a recording of Chato’s reflection here or stream it from the icon below. It includes a guided meditation on a shortened version of an examen. (The podcast runs for 25:27.) You can find a copy of this week’s prayer material here.
Creo en Dios! 