Recently I had the opportunity to go to my college’s alumni day. An annual event that many alumni look forward to, it is a pleasure to attend as often as possible. The day is filled with catching up with old friends, walking around campus, and hopefully getting an opportunity to see those one or two professors that were looked up to and remembered as “favorites.” 

My Alumni Day highlight is always the Mass offered by one of the priests of the college. Holding the attention of graduates from 1956 all the way to the class of 2016, Father Aelred, in a beautiful and reflective way, highlighted all of the mutual experiences that we, regardless of year, shared at our alma mater, our home. Bonfires, nights out with friends, banquets, and football games. Happy times, miserable times, angry times, and times of saying goodbye and then hello again. Every moment, the good and the bad, helped to form us into the persons we are today. The common experience, the essential action, that he observed that most shaped each of us: the experience of being forgiven.  “It is within a home that we become persons,” explained Fr. Aelred. “We become persons when we are healed and drawn out of the isolating experience of sin.”

Whether we went to a small Catholic college or a large state university, many of us can look back at those years of “growing up” and the moments of “forgivingness” that helped us to come out of ourselves. As I sat in the pew, I reflected that the home that shaped my person during my college years has continued into the home that I share with my wife and children. How much greater now is the invitation to my wife and I to create a home for our little ones to become the people who Jesus Christ loved them to be. 

This home that Mary Rose and I have made and continue to make with our children is the home of our vocation and mission in the world. We are building our domestic church. We are creating a domestic altar where the joys, pains, and sufferings are somehow offered to the Lord for our own healing and sanctification. Our home is a place where we say “I am sorry, “I love you, and “I forgive you.”

In our workbook for engaged or married couples we discuss a virtue that we discovered in married and family life: forgiveness. You could also say “the virtue of forgivingness.” Simply being always ready, no matter what our age, to  say “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you.” All the “hard times” remain unique opportunities for us to grow and become a person. Within our home, our new alma mater, hurt feelings and discouragement, sickness and exhaustion, become part of having the old self die so that the new self can be born.  If we persevere until the end, we will cherish these years of growth and mercy and we will see that it was all a part of God’s unique plan for us as we became the man or woman God created us to be.