This Sunday we see St. John the Baptist answering those who desire to know who he is. St. John tells the truth, he is not the Christ, nor Elias or a prophet. He says of himself that he is a voice crying in the wilderness. A voice that cries out but very few hear and listen. This same function is performed for each one of us by our conscience. Our conscience is the voice of truth, the voice of God, within our souls that cries out to us to make straight the way of the Lord. We are informed which way we should go, how we should act, and what we should say. If we fail to heed its cry, we then hear its condemnation for our evil rebellion.
Just as St. John did not hesitate or fail to condemn the evil that he saw, even when it was in the ruler (Herod), so does our conscience reliably condemn the evil that it sees within us.
We are made in the image and likeness of God and it is in our conscience that we most resemble God who is truth itself. We cannot hide our evil from our own conscience just as we can hide nothing from God. Even if no one else in the world knows of our evil deeds, God knows and our conscience knows. In this capacity our conscience performs the work of God. It eats away at us warning us that we have done wrong and that we must straighten things out.
Men often become physically ill because of a guilty conscience. They have no need for anyone else to condemn them or torment them; their conscience condemns them more loudly than any human voice can, and it is relentless allowing the soul no rest or peace.
In our preparation to receive Christ this Christmas season, we must repeat history within our own souls. Just as the people went out into the wilderness to hear St. John preach penance and baptism; so must we enter into our souls to hear our conscience point out to us the evil within us and admonish us to penance. Only in this way will we find ourselves prepared when Christ comes to us.
We must not only hear the voice of our conscience but we must act upon it. If we choose to ignore the truth from our conscience we will end up as Herod. The evil that we love more than the truth will bring us to the drastic state of killing our conscience just as Herod killed St. John.
Once the conscience is silenced by our violent and evil wills, we are damned even while we still walk this earth. There can be no state more evil than that of someone with a dead conscience that no longer speaks or that he can no longer hear. Such a soul has no means of discerning right from wrong. The only voice that they now hear is their passions which freely lead them on from one vice to another each worse than the one before. And this continues until they enter into the gates of Hell.
It is said that: "conscience makes cowards of us all". And we can see how true this is. If we are attuned to the voice of our conscience, we see clearly not only our sins and transgressions but also our profound weakness and misery. It is in this state of profound awareness of our complete weakness and our awful sinfulness brought upon us through our conscience that leads us to the profoundest of humility. This awareness of truth of their own souls and profound humility is what brought many of the saints like St. Francis to style themselves the worst of sinners. This is not a "pious exaggeration" because they say this not in comparison of their souls to others around them, but in comparison of their souls to the perfect model - Christ - who their conscience constantly holds up to them as the ideal.
The tragic mistake of most of mankind is that they do not listen to their conscience in the comparison of their lives to Christ, but rather they listen to their passions which compare their lives to the lives of those around them. And their passions clearly tell them that they are not so bad. There are others that are much worse than they are and so they can comfortably lull themselves to sleep in their sins. They are unable to see another's conscience so their judgment of the person's life is at best a guess. The guilt which they see may not be there in the eyes of God, so perhaps they are not even as good as they would like to believe and their comparison is a lie. And in following their lie they live under the illusion that they are better than the rest of men, when in reality they are worse than the rest of men.
Let us bring forth the voice of our conscience and attune ourselves to hear it no matter how painful it may be to us. And in this state let us become profoundly humble and straighten out the rough and crooked ways of our souls so that we may truly receive the grace of Our Lord and Saviour on Christmas day.