"And Peter went out and wept bitterly." (Luke 23:62)
That one sentence has always seemed to me to be the sum of human experience. We all have come up short at some time in our lives when measured against the yard stick of God's expectations. Yet I have often wondered by I've never heard a homily on Good Friday using this verse, or even more so at an Easter Mass.
Using this verse and placing the denial of Christ by Peter against the betrayal by Judas, the important fact that I see is that in the end Peter came to understand the true message of Christ--forgiveness, whereas Judas did not understand, taking his own life in despair of his actions.
It is the providence of the elderly to dwell on those short comings in our lives when a wrong word or act put us in the same position as Peter on the night of the Last Supper. The difficult part of the soul searching of old age is accepting the fact that God forgives us even if our conscience will not allow us to lay down those past offenses and let them abide. We keep re-opening them, taking them out for examination, finding more and more places where we could have done or said something different that would have turned something bad into something that today would not even be remembered.
'Tis far easier said than done when it comes to letting go of bad deeds.
