Amongst the many upheavals in our Catholic life in the past fifty years, one is about how to be a disciple of Jesus. It was a major shift in how morality is viewed.  It’s basically about two ways of seeing God – Before and After. Let’s take the before aspect, what we changed from?For a long time, the dominant image of God was of a demanding Judge, who rewards and punishes. This is the God who is angered by sin. Here, while God loves us, someone must pay. The suffering and death of his Son was God’s solution to setting things right. 

What happens when that God invites us to respond to what God has done? Our instinct is to match that God’s expectations. We don’t want to fall out with God. The Christian life, then, is about watching for potholes, keeping on side with God, not breaking the law. Basically, avoid sin. ‘You can’t be too careful!’ Its motto? ‘If I am good, God will love me.’

This fosters four things: a) it’s about not getting sick [sin] rather than living a healthy life [growing as a Christian]; b) it is driven more by fear and guilt than by love; c) its focus is on my actions [how many times] and neglects my attitudes [what prompts my actions]; d) it emphasizes the idea that living a good life was mainly about ‘me’ and God.  

Let’s take the after or future aspect, what we have been called to change to? 
For hundreds of years many people lived fruitful, holy lives despite the dominant image of God as an angry judge. The Spirit of God works despite us, our images, and our systems.
Many people, in their personal lives and devotional practices [especially to Mary], were drawn into, and nourished by, another way of seeing God. This is the God who is all loving. With this God, love and compassion just bubble over almost as if God cannot help it.
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Matthew 19:14: but Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven."
Quotes from St. Therese of Lisieux
"I leave to great souls and lofty minds the beautiful books I cannot understand, much less put into practice and I rejoice that I am little because children alone and those who resemble them will be admitted to the heavenly banquet. I am glad that there are many mansions in the Kingdom of God, because if there were only those whose description and whose road seem to me incomprehensible, I could never enter there."
"How happy I am to realize that I am little and weak, how happy I am to see myself so imperfect"

​"It is needful to remain little before God and to remain little is to recognize one's nothingness, expect all things from the good God just as a little child expects all things from its father; it is not to be troubled by anything, not to try to make a fortune. Even among poor people, a child is given all it needs, as long as it is very little, but as soon as it has grown up, the father does not want to support it any longer and says: "Work, now you are able to take care of yourself". Because I never want to hear these words I do not want to grow up, feeling that I can never earn my living, that is, eternal life in heaven. So I have stayed little, and have no other occupation than of gathering flowers of love and sacrifice and of offering them to the good God to please Him.

​"You are not sufficiently trusting, you fear God too much. I assure you that this grieves Him. Do not be afraid of going to purgatory because of its pain, but rather long not to go there because this pleases God who imposes this expiation so regretfully. From the moment that you try to please Him in all things, if you have the unshakable confidence that He will purify you at every instant in His love and will leave in you no trace of sin, be very sure that you will not go to purgatory."
 
"O, how you hurt me, how greatly you injure the good God when you believe you are going to purgatory. For one who loves , there can be no purgatory.

​"For a long time I had been asking myself why souls did not all receive the same amount of grace. Jesus deigned to instruct me about this mystery. Before my eyes He placed the book of nature and I understood that all the flowers created by Him are beautiful... that, if all the little flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime garb. The same is true of the world of souls, the Lord's living garden. "God's love is revealed just as much in the most simple soul who does not resist His graces as in the most sublime.                                               

​There is only one way to force the good God not to judge at all, and that is to present one's self to Him with empty hands.
When I think of this word: 'I will soon come and I carry My reward with Me to give to each one according to his works ', I say to myself, He will be very embarrassed for me because I have no works. Well, He will have to give me according to His own works." "It is necessary to consent to remain poor and weak; this is hard ". "I have always longed to be unknown, I am resigned to being forgotten". "It is necessary to count on nothing".

​"I know well that it is not my great desires that please God in my little soul, what He likes to see is the way I love my littleness and my poverty; it is my blind hope in His mercy, this is my only treasure.... The weaker one is, without desires or virtues the more ready one is for the operations of this consuming and transforming love....God rejoices more in what He can do in a soul humbly resigned to its poverty than in the creation of millions of suns and the vast stretch of the heavens."

"I tell you that it is enough to recognize one's nothingness and to abandon one's self like a child in the arms of God." "Merit is not to be found in doing much or in giving much, but rather in receiving and in loving much. It is said that it is far sweeter to give than to receive, and this is true. But when Jesus wants for Himself the sweetness of giving, it would not be gracious to refuse. Let Him take and give whatever He wants."

Every parent, the Pope pointed out, knows how challenging it is to help their children to grow in freedom and responsibility.
But, because of sin, freedom becomes a pretension of autonomy and pride leads to opposition and to the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
Francis added how God understands this experience firsthand, as we see in the Scriptures, where he laments how His children sin and are disobedient.
Although wounded, God lets love speak, and He appeals to the conscience of these degenerate children so that they will repent and allow themselves to be loved again. This is what God does! He comes to us so that we will let ourselves be loved by Him, by our God.”
In his mercy, he asks them to turn back to him with all their hearts and to receive a righteousness that is itself his gift.
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God never disowns us, we are His people, the most evil of men, the most evil of women, the most evil of peoples are His children. And God is like this: He never, never, disowns us! He always says: “Son, daughter, come.” And this is our Father’s love; this is God’s mercy.”
And this is the way of divine mercy: God does not treat us according to our faults.
Pope Francis concluded, praying that all people this Holy Year be open to God’s merciful invitation to come back to him and to experience His miraculous love and forgiveness.

Pope Francis: Be courageous, go to confession
Trusting in God's infinite mercy, people should not be afraid or embarrassed to go to confession, Pope Francis said.
"There are people who are afraid to go to confession, forgetting that they will not encounter a severe judge there, but the immensely merciful Father,"
 
"When we go to confession, we feel a bit ashamed. That happens to all of us, but we must remember that this shame is a grace that prepares us for the embrace
of the Father, who always forgives and always forgives everything."
 
To go to Confession, he said, is to encounter the love of Jesus with sincerity of heart and with the transparency of children, not refusing, but even welcoming the “grace of shame” that makes us perceive God’s forgiveness.

For many believing adults, confessing to a priest is an unbearable effort – that often leads one to avoid the Sacrament – or such a painful process that it transforms the moment of truth into an exercise of fiction. Pope Francis, commenting on the Letter to the Romans, says that Saint Paul does exactly the opposite: he admits publically to the community that “good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh.” He acknowledges that he is a “slave” who does not do the good that he wants to do, but the evil that he does not want to do. This happens in the life of faith, the Pope said, that “when I want to do good, evil is close to me”.

Some say: ‘Ah, I confess to God.’ But it’s easy, it’s like confessing by email, no? God is far away, I say things and there’s no face-to-face, no eye-to-eye contact. Paul confesses his weakness to the brethren face-to-face. Others [say], ‘No, I go to confession,’ but they confess so many ethereal things, so many up-in-the-air things, that they don’t have anything concrete. And that’s the same as not doing it. Confessing our sins is not going to a psychiatrist, or to a torture chamber: it’s saying to the Lord, ‘Lord, I am a sinner,’ but saying it through the brother, because this says it concretely. ‘I am sinner because of this, that and the other thing.’”
​Concreteness and honesty, Pope Francis added, and a sincere ability to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. There are no shadowy lanes that can serve as an alternative to the open road that leads to God’s forgiveness, to the awareness, in the depths of the heart, of His forgiveness and His love.

And here the Pope explained we must imitate little children:
 “Little children have that wisdom: when a child comes to confess, he never says something general. ‘But father, I did this and I did that to my aunt, another time I said this word’ and they say the word. But they are concrete, eh? They have that simplicity of the truth. And we always have the tendency to hide the reality of our failings. But there is something beautiful: when we confess our sins as they are in the presence of God, we always feel that grace of shame. Being ashamed in the sight of God is a grace. It is a grace: ‘I am ashamed of myself.’ We think of Peter when, after the miracle of Jesus on the lake, [he said] ‘Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinner.’ He is ashamed of his sins in the presence of the sanctity of Jesus.”

Notes taken from extracts of:

• Pope’s Homilies For The Solemnity Of Mary… “Show Us The Face Of Jesus Your Son”   January 13 , 2016
  
•  Pope Francis: Angelus appeal for peace   Jan 1, 2016 -