A Dialogue on Sin

Blain: I saw an episode of "ER" about a doctor from Croatia who had lost his wife and daughter in the fighting. He went to Confession and said that he had tried to save his daughter and, in doing so, had let his wife die. I didn't think he did anything wrong. In an editorial meeting at The Evangelist, this got us talking about what sin is. Everyone had different ideas.

Even if we went to a more recent concept of sin, the real teaching of the Church was good, in that it said for serious sin, you had to have three things: You had to have objectively serious matter; you had to really understand it and its gravity; and you had to have whole consent of the will -- you had to be free, no pressure.

I think that was lost because we got to the "grocery cart list" -- nine of those; three of those; two of those -- rather than seeing the effect of breaking a relationship or becoming estranged from God and from the Church as the body of Christ. When I rupture my relationship with the body of Christ, which is the extension of Jesus, then I'm being evil.

The problem is that the list is very "out there" and not very much interior. I think that earlier notion of the three criteria captured "Does the person really understand what they're doing?" and "Are they really giving full consent?" Lots of people do lots of things, and I think their reasons are very gray and mixed -- expectations of other people, fear, embarrassment. I think we're going away from the lists and [moving] more into a deeper and healthier understanding of estrangement from God and the community.

Lininger: The post-Vatican II generations have experienced that shift [in understanding about sin] differently than the pre-Vatican II generations and those generations right at the cusp of Vatican II. There's all sorts of theological shifting back and forth. Over the past hundred years, you'd probably find at least seven different threads of thought around grace, around faith, around evil -- and, thus, around sin.

Where your grandparents are at is probably a much different place than where your parents are at, because they have experienced a different type of education. One came out at a time when we had an immigrant Church in the States. Then you have another generation that begins to experience freedom in education and way of looking at life. Yet another generation sees the world drastically different.

The Church has always held onto [the idea] that God does not separate Godself from us. We separate ourselves from God by the choices and the decisions we make within our lives. How do we make our choices; what are the freedoms involved in our choices? It used to be stressed that if you just did it by rote, you'd have the right conscience and make very good decisions and choices. And every once in a while, you'd make an off-color one.

Well, that was one way of looking at it, instead of seeing it as conscience [being] an integrated factor into your life, an understanding of how it is you choose to act with integrity around a set of norms in the context of your life where your faith is core and essential. That takes a grown-up attitude. Earlier generations would have had that faith and [thought,] "My belief in God is according to a set of externals to me" -- which brought up the shopping list or laundry list.

[It is better to ask] what is the quality of the relationships that I'm maintaining with the people that are a part of my life: those that I've made primary commitments to through the celebration of marriage, through the celebration of friendships, through the bonds that I hold with them, my relationships with my children, those that are near and dear to me, those that I live with, those that I worship with? What is my quality of relationship with them? It's the quality of my relationship with God and the quality of my relationship with myself. And how do we move toward a holistic expression of feelings?

St. Augustine had a real, core sense that we are called to wholeness and to greatness, but that we have to wrestle with our humanity as we attempt to make that journey. What he ofttimes would say is that human beings are geared so they always choose that which is good; however, there's a hierarchy of goods. One might be the impulsive, immediate good; one might be a greater good that I'm not going to see [right away]. Maybe my sinfulness is not paying attention to the challenge of growing and moving closer to my own wholeness that brings me closer to my own relationship, ultimately, with God.

Blain: This makes me think of the concept of "cafeteria Catholics" who choose which tenets of the faith to follow. People say, "Well, I go to church when I feel like it, but I'm okay with that. I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong, because I'm acting according to my own conscience."

We oftentimes mistake emotionality for good decision-making. We know by experience it oftentimes is not. People make decisions that are not fully informed under very high-stress moments, moments of passion, of anger, of rage -- but they're not full, human decisions as we understand it, because they're not capable of totally understanding the impact.

Blain: I'm not even thinking of people in high-stress moments. I'm thinking of people who say, "I go to church only on holidays, and I feel like I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm basically a good person."

That lackadaisical attitude you represent, would I build a marriage around that type of philosophy? Would I build a relationship with my child around that same type of philosophy? "I feel good today; therefore, I will relate with you as my spouse." "I feel good about my job -- don't ask me about tomorrow, however." "Don't ask me to deal with a trying decision right now that impacts where we're at next year, or how we're going to use our tax return money, or how we're going to make decisions as a family."

If I make it only about me, I'm very much revealing my own narcissism. That's showing a crack that we need to deal with: We don't want to grow; we don't want to change. But I have to grow up; I have to understand it isn't all just how I feel today. My baby doesn't just go on how I feel, whether I want to get up and feed them, change them, take care of them.

Blain: So what's a mature attitude when it comes to sin?

You can see the ramifications. You were set apart, excommunicated. You could come back only after a long period of penance. For a long time, you could only come back once in your lifetime; and if you again fell into one of these three areas, you were outside the community.

If you follow the evolution of the sacrament, it has very deep relationship to community -- which is your spouse, your children, but also the greater community. You mentioned Mass, for instance, and I like [Father Lininger's] word "narcissistic": "I don't need to go to Mass; I'm a decent-living person." Fine, but Jesus established the people of God. If you disassociate yourself from them, you're cutting yourself off from spiritual growth, from sharing your gifts with them.

The narcissistic person says, "Well, I'm all taken care of." But what about the community that may need you? As the children need the parent, the community also needs its members to be a full, healthy community. I'd rather see sin as whatever choices I make that disassociate me from the faith community.

McGuinness: So it's possible that something can be a sin for one person and not for another? For example, work is a good thing; but with workaholics, their family is suffering, their friends are suffering. Or drinking: It's fine to have a glass of wine, but what about the person whose life is focused on "I need a drink to handle this and that"? In that sense, are sins different for different people?

What's healthy is that we're called by Christ to be a full person: "I called you that you might have life and have it to the full" (John 10). He didn't call you to have a half-life; He called you to have a full life; He's inviting you into that relationship, and it's a communal relationship as well as an individual relationship.

McGuinness: The move to celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation in a communal way seems to make more sense than going one-on-one. If our sins put a strain on the community, then we should be a part of the community to reconcile.

Sullivan: The communal celebration has the plus of pulling us away from the shopping-cart list and reminding us visually that we are part of a community. When we gather as a parish and there are 500-600 people there, it is easier to see that relationship with community I may have chosen to absent myself from.

Going [to Confession] on Saturday afternoon individually and not seeing anybody else invites the idea of "What did I do to offend God?" and missing an understanding of "What did I do to hurt the community?"

In the New Testament, there are 173 sins mentioned. Thirty-three have a relationship directly with God; 140 speak of our relationship with the community. I think the communal celebration with individual reception of the sacrament reminds us of the 140 as well as the 33. For me, the richness is the communal celebration -- a well-planned celebration with good preaching, Scripture -- and within that, the individual reception.

Lininger: What becomes important is that experience of "when I feel fractured, I want to feel whole." That might be an individual celebration of the sacrament; it might be coming back to God privately and saying, "I'm sorry." That's why we have a Confiteor; that's why we have an Act of Contrition. It's being able to say we're bonded together. I want to feel united again, because I feel broken off. And when I'm broken off from the body, I'm broken off from the source of my life.

Sullivan: The roots of what we today call Confession, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, really come from Irish monks in the sixth century and on. I find the origin very interesting because it really began in the monasteries as a way for the small infractions in the community to be dealt with. One went to the abbot and said, "I did this or that, and hurt the community," and the abbot would give a penance. It was almost like spiritual direction -- with a little extra.

That was for the small fractures to the community as opposed to the big ones -- murder, adultery, apostasy. As those monks went out, they did that same routine with the people they were giving spiritual direction to. But it still goes back to the fracturing of the community -- in this case, in small ways; venial sin as opposed to mortal sin. Only in the 11th century did this activity get the name of sacrament.

My point is that whether it's a grievous thing like murder or a little thing like annoying my neighbor, it's still related to my community. That was what was seen as sinful.

Lininger: When you feel fractured, when you feel that you were deliberately spiteful toward a person that you said you loved, did you ever notice how that influences everything else that you're about throughout that entire day? You're no longer present in the same way. When you're with your spouse, when you're with your child, you're not fully there. When you come to work, you're not fully there. There's something tearing at you. It's a wound, and it's throbbing in different ways.

How do you bring a healing to the individual and the community relationships? If you were deliberately spiteful, you turn around and say, "I'm sorry. I lost it, and I was wrong." And the other person says, "I accept your apology."

Blain: If I say, "I'm sorry," and you say, "I accept your apology," why go to Confession?

Sullivan: There's no such thing as a sin that doesn't have a ripple effect. Even if it's something that I did all by myself, I'm making myself less than I could be. You can't sin without hurting the community.

McGuinness: How do we teach people about sin? What's the most important thing people should have in their minds today about sin?

But we lose contact with people when they're in their teens, when it would be nice to help their conscience come along so they would have a mature understanding of what sin is. There's a parish in Schenectady that has more PhDs than in the whole rest of the Diocese of Albany, because of G.E. Research [and Development Center]. But the majority of them have fifth-, sixth- and seventh-grade religious educations --- and they're the ones who say, "I didn't say my morning prayers; I ate meat on Friday" and so on. They haven't been brought along in their spiritual growth.

Lininger: I don't think it's as far as the sixth grade. I think people are still looking out there for God as a Santa Claus who is checking off whether you're naughty or nice.

Post-Vatican II grabbed hold of the languages of a lot of other sciences to help us talk about what it means to be fully human and about the various dimensions that are a part of being human. The average individual always saw religion as something separate from the rest of who I am. Religion was something I put on the outside, not something I grew from the inside. You necessarily are going to go with the word "sin," but you're right to use the words "feeling fractured," "having a broken spirit," "feeling miserable," "feeling empty," "feeling cold."

I sat with somebody this morning who's 50, and he was telling me how empty he feels. He's carrying around a lot of lousy choices he made in his life and the consequences of those choices that he had no control over. It's hard for people to say, "I take responsibility for my life. I made choices. I wasn't a victim behind them," and be able to acknowledge that. Our pride gets in the way.

Look deeper: What was it about my choices? Does my pride get in the way? "I don't need to be with that community on Sunday" -- what is that really about? It might be, "My butt is nice and warm here right now, I'm comfortable here in bed, and I don't want to get out. I don't want to get dressed. I want to be able to lounge around. I've worked all week; God understands all that." I don't want anybody to tell me that maybe, possibly, I might be wrong in the choice I just made.

Blain: I read a magazine article recently that talked about going to Confession and confessing things like not taking a role in ending corruption in big business....

Blain: My view was, "Now I'm not only responsible for my personal sins, but also for the sins of the world?"

Sullivan: An example is buying stock. A few years back, it was, "Don't buy stock in any company that works in South Africa," because they had apartheid. That's the kind of developmental thing I hope people would get to, rather than, "I forgot my morning prayer."

We should pray; it's terribly important to feed the spiritual self. But we can't stop with just looking at me; we really do affect the larger scene. If I decide to buy stock in a cigarette company, maybe that's not so good.

Lininger: The Church has grown in how it looks at those types of items. We are being called to grow as a Church. We're in this together, and we're attempting to grow in a fuller realization of who we are as a people, called in faith.

What makes you different being an American sitting here doing this interview as opposed to someone [in a Third World country]? Your world understanding. You have another responsibility because of everything else you have -- your education, your training, your background, the obligations of what it is you're capable of. You have another type of responsibility that comes with [those advantages as opposed] to those who do not have those things.

McGuinness: Are there any resources about which you would say, "This is what you need to read," or "Here's where you can go to find out more"?

Lininger: I agree, Scripture -- but not from the fundamentalist perspective. One needs to open oneself up to real spirituality. The Church has always supported different types of perspectives on that.

Blain: Some theologians teach that hardly anyone really goes to hell. If there is no punishment, why should people care about the issue of sin?

Maybe the place [hell] came out of our need to understand the place that's on the inside, that feels empty, dark and alienated.

McGuinness: So estrangement from God is hell.

Bonaventurian theology is to believe that Christ is at the center of that universe, that everything that preceded was the reason for Him to be, and everything that comes after Him radiates back to Him. Its fullness is because of Him.

Sullivan: We talk about heaven, the kingdom, as begun here and developed or coming to its fullness in the next life; but I'd like to see hell the same way. We make our own hell, because the more ruptures we make with the beauty of God, the more we suffer.

(07-05-01) [[In-content Ad]]