"FOLLOW YOUR CONSCIENCE!"

Reading: Acts 20:17—27

Though parents are the first teachers of their children and vital in forming the consciences of their children, we all influence one another. By what we say and do we can affect the formation or change of conscience of another person. Wouldn’t we hate to be responsible for helping to misform them!

St. Paul today considers himself innocent of malforming anybody’s conscience. “You know how I lived among you,” he told the Ephesians, “how I served the Lord in humility. Never did I shrink from telling you what was for your own good. But now I am on my way to Jerusalem, compelled by the Spirit and not knowing what will happen to me there. But I know that none of you will ever see my face again. Therefore I solemnly declare this day that I take the blame for no man’s conscience, for I have never shrunk from announcing to you God’s design in its entirety.”

Paul may not have had any doubts about mistakes he might have made in teaching and giving example, but we sure do about ourselves, don’t we? We must be very careful how we influence children, we just might be at least partly responsible for what some of them do. But when it comes to adults we must realize that all adults have the obligation to seek the truth on their own, and reform their consciences according to it.

Someone else may have influenced the formation of your conscience and mine when we were young, but as we got older the obligation became ours. We are to hold no one else responsible for the health of our conscience. As adults the responsibility is ours alone. And so, let us unrelentingly seek the truth, conform ourselves to it, and through our words and deeds try to spread it.