God’s Love is the Cure for Habitual Sin [Punish me with a Kiss (Part 2)]

There is a moment familiar to any parent. A child has done something wrong—spilled something they were told not to touch, broken something precious, snuck a cookie before dinner. And now the child stands at a crossroads. Some children scatter like startled birds, hiding behind the couch, under the bed, anywhere the parent’s eyes cannot find them. Others, even as their lower lip trembles, walk straight toward the parent they have disappointed, climb into their lap, and bury their face in that familiar shoulder.

What is the difference between these two children? It is not that one has sinned less. It is that one has understood something about love that the other has not yet learned. 

Yesterday we sat with St. Thérèse’s parable of two such children. If you missed yesterday's meditation, you can read it HERE (including the full text of the parable).

The first child in the parable, aware of his wrongdoing, flees and hides. The second runs to his father and asks to be punished with a kiss. And perhaps, sitting with that image, a quiet objection began to form somewhere in the back of the mind:

Isn’t this too easy? Doesn’t this cheapen grace? Doesn’t this turn the terrible seriousness of sin into a sentimental embrace? 

It is a worthy objection, and one we must answer carefully. Because the answer, I believe, is not only that such confidence does not cheapen grace, but that this habitual flight into the Father’s arms is actually the secret to overcoming the very sins we find ourselves repeating. The path into His heart is the path out of our patterns.
 

 

The Two Fears 

Theologians have long distinguished between two kinds of sorrow for sin. The first is called attrition—an imperfect contrition born from fear of punishment, from the dread of hell, from the sensible consequences of our wrongdoing. It is real, it is valuable, and God in His mercy accepts it. Attrition, though imperfect, is a true gift of God and a movement of the Holy Spirit. 

But there is a second, deeper sorrow called perfect contrition. This is sorrow that arises not from fear of what our sin will cost us, but from grief over what our sin has cost Him. It is the sorrow of love. It is the sorrow that weeps not primarily because it has broken a law, but because it has wounded a Heart. 

Here is what few of us consider: these two sorrows do not simply differ in degree. They differ in their very nature, and therefore they produce different results in the soul. 

Attrition can keep us out of serious sin, at least for a time. The fear of consequences is a real deterrent. But fear is a poor gardener for the soul. It can pull up weeds, but it cannot make roses grow. The soul that avoids sin only because of fear remains, in a sense, still turned in upon itself. It is still calculating. It is still, at its core, asking: What will this cost me? 

Perfect contrition asks a different question entirely: What has this cost Him? 

 

Why Hiding Keeps Us Sinning 

Consider the child who hides. What is actually happening in his soul as he crouches behind the couch? He is, in that moment, constructing a false image of his father. His father becomes, in his imagination, a figure of wrath, of distance, of danger. The longer he hides, the more real this false father becomes. 

And here is the tragedy: when he finally emerges, even if his father greets him with mercy, the child has already rehearsed a version of the relationship in which he is fundamentally alone with his failure. The next time he sins, he will hide again, perhaps longer. The pattern deepens. The distance grows. And the more distant the father seems, the less the child’s heart is moved by love, and the more his avoidance of sin, if he manages it at all, becomes a white-knuckled exercise in self-protection. 

This is why so many of us find ourselves trapped in cycles of the same sins. We fall, we hide, we work up the courage to return, we resolve to do better, we rely on our own strength, we fall again. The cycle is exhausting, and it is exhausting precisely because it keeps us at a distance from the one source of transformation. 

St. Paul understood this with painful clarity: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15, NRSV). And what is his resolution to this wretchedness? Not greater effort. Not more self-examination. But a cry that reaches beyond himself: “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25).
 

 

The Child Who Runs Toward 

Now consider the second child. She has done the same wrong. She feels the same guilt. But something in her has understood, perhaps without being able to articulate it, that her father’s love is larger than her failure. So she runs toward him. She climbs into his arms. She asks to be punished with a kiss. 

What is happening in her soul? 

First, she is allowing her image of her father to be shaped by his actual love rather than by her fear. Every time she runs toward him, she learns more deeply who he actually is. The false father—the illusion of a figure of wrath who seeks to punish—cannot survive in the presence of the real father who receives her. 

Second, something astonishing begins to happen to her sorrow. In the embrace of love, she does not become less sorry for her sin. She becomes more sorry, but in a completely different register.

She begins to feel the weight of her wrong not as threat to herself but as wound to him. She looks up into his face and sees, perhaps, a trace of the sadness her action caused, and her tears begin to flow not from fear but from love. 

This is the birth of perfect contrition. And it cannot be manufactured. It can only be received, in the arms of the one we have offended. 

The prophet Jeremiah heard the Lord speak of this transformation: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3). Notice the order. His love is not the response to our faithfulness; our faithfulness is drawn out of us by His everlasting love. We do not climb our way up to Him. He has already come down to us. 

 

Taking Hold of His Heart 

There is a remarkable phrase in the prophet Isaiah, often overlooked: “let them cling to me” (Isaiah 27:5). The Hebrew verb here carries the sense of taking firm hold, grasping tightly. God invites His people not to approach Him cautiously from a distance but to seize hold of Him. 

This is the posture St. Thérèse understood so deeply. To take hold of the Father’s heart is to make a decision that His love is more real than our sin. It is to refuse to let any failure, however grave, become an excuse for distance. It is to say, in effect: My sin is real, but Your love is more real. My failure is great, but Your mercy is greater. I will not dignify my wrongdoing by letting it keep me from You. 

This is not presumption. Presumption says: “I can sin because He will forgive me.” Confidence says: “I have sinned, and I will run to the only place where sin can be healed.” The difference is everything. 

St. John, writing to a community struggling with its own failures, said it plainly: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Every movement of our heart toward holiness begins as a response to love already given. We do not love our way into His arms; we discover we are already in His heart, and from that discovery, love begins to grow. 

 

The Slow Work of Perfect Contrition 

Here is what is so beautiful about this path: perfect contrition cannot be rushed, and it cannot be forced. It is learned slowly, in the daily return to the Father’s heart. Each time we run to Him rather than hiding, we learn a little more of who He is. Each time we allow ourselves to be embraced rather than obsessing over proving ourselves, over earning our way back, we come to know His love more intimately. And the more we know His love, the more our sin begins to grieve us as a wound to Him rather than as a threat to us. 

Over time—and I cannot stress enough that this is the work of years, not days—the motivation of our whole moral life begins to shift. We begin to find that certain sins no longer attract us, not because we have mustered greater willpower against them, but because we have come to love the One they would wound.

The change is not that we try harder. The change is that we love more. 

This is how holiness actually works. Not by grim determination but by being drawn, slowly and surely, into a love so real that everything incompatible with it begins to fall away. 

 

Practical Application: Living in the Father’s Arms 

How do we begin to walk this path in our ordinary days? 

First, notice your instinct when you fall. When you sin, even in small ways, watch what happens in your soul. Do you hide? Do you avoid prayer for hours, a day, or three, or a week, until you feel “ready” to return? This instinct to hide is itself something to bring to God. Do not wait until you feel worthy. You will never feel worthy. Run to Him as you are, in the very moment you are most tempted to hide. 

Second, practice the immediate return. Make it your rule that the moment you become aware of having sinned, even before you have fully processed what happened, you turn to the Father and say something like: Father, I have wounded You again. I do not come to You because I deserve to. I come because You have told me to. Receive me. This simple practice, repeated through months and years, one day at a time, rewires the soul. 

Third, spend time contemplating His love rather than your failures. Many of us spend far more time examining our sins than contemplating His love. But perfect contrition is born from knowing His heart, not from analyzing our own. Read the parables of mercy in Luke 15. Sit with the crucifixion not as a transaction but as a revelation of love. Let His love become more familiar to you than your failures. 

Fourth, ask for the grace of perfect contrition. It is a gift, not an achievement. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you the grace to grieve your sins because of what they cost Him, not because of what they cost you. This prayer, offered honestly and repeatedly, will be answered.

Fifth, do not flee to an "idea" about God's love, but actually rest in His heart. This is where we see the dividing line between a prideful security that cheapens grace, and genuine perfect contrition that rests in His grace. Do not say to yourself, "Well, God has promised to forgive me, so I'll just ask for forgiveness again and that will be that." This is a kind of "cold" presumption upon grace, it isn't a flight of a child into his father's arms, but into a justification of the self that takes advantage of one's knowledge about God's heart. Do not simply "remind yourself" in your head that God forgives you and let that be that. You must return to God in prayer (and not a quick, heartless, prayer as if it were a magic formula), in genuine sorrow, and in a bold confidence and trust in His heart, deeply aware of the severity of your disobedience, but even more deeply confident in His love. Our confidence doesn't come from having a "theology about justification" that we think gives us assurance. Our confidence comes from an encounter with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the wounded heart, that carried you and your sin on his back when he climbed Golgotha. 

Finally, when you fall again do not be surprised or discouraged. Discouragement is not humility; it is wounded pride. Humility simply says: Yes, I am as weak as I have always been, and He is as merciful as He has always been. And back into His arms we go. 

The child who asks to be punished with a kiss has understood something most of us are still learning. She has understood that love is not the reward for getting it right. Love is the furnace in which we are slowly, painfully, beautifully changed into those who want to get it right, not for fear of punishment, but for love of the One whose heart we have come to know. 

And that kiss, the one we feared would be a slap, turns out to be the very thing that heals us.