This reflection was originally published on February 8th, 2020.

In 1 Corinthians 3:16, Saint Paul tells us, “You are holy, for you are God’s temple and God dwells in you.” The Catechism talks about the “common priesthood of all the faithful,” (CCC 1547). In other words, we are all priests in our own little temples.

If you had a GoPro camera mounted on a drone and flew it over the Garden of Eden, you would see that Eden was laid out like a temple and at the centre, the Holiest of Holies, there is a tree with seven branches (the forerunner of the Jewish menorah). Now, a temple needs a priest, and in Genesis 2:15, it gives the job description of the first priest. “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to serve [to sacrifice] and to guard.”

In our temples, what do we sacrifice and what are we to guard? The model for our sacrifice is the Eucharist, where we offer simple bread and wine and receive back the body and blood of Christ. What we lay on the altar is returned to us in a vastly superior form. What we are to guard is our sacred centre, that place where God comes to commune with us heart-to-heart. We must guard our hearts so that they do not become hardened.

What is the name on our altar and what do we sacrifice on it? The Lord’s Prayer gives us a clue. We are to sacrifice our resentments on the altar named forgiveness. Even some secular philosophers point out that resentment is the poisonous venom that fuels the engines of the toxic pathologies and ideologies that threaten our individual and societal well being. Saint Augustine has said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Lethal resentment, when sacrificed to God on the altar of forgiveness, is returned to us a high-octane love, or caritas, which is the theme of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, where he explains how ‘charity in truth’ (the English translation of the title) is the principal force behind the true development of every person and of all humanity.