Universalism

By Universalism I mean the position that all are eventually saved; in other words, that the population of Hell will be zero.

Edward Feser has had several back and forths with David Bentley Hart on the issue. My point here is not to enter the debate between Feser and Hart but to consider Universalism from a different perspective.

Let us suppose that Universalism is true, and that we know it is true. Then we know that everyone will eventually enjoy eternal bliss; in particular, I will eventually enjoy eternal bliss no matter what I do on this Earth. For me, at least, this is a very dangerous thing to believe, for I am always looking for reasons to remain in my sins, which I find quite comfortable even if I know intellectually that they are essentially bad for me.

I almost wrote "ultimately" bad for me, but that isn't quite right if universalism is true, for in that case no sin is ultimately bad for me, since I will ultimately enjoy eternal bliss. But even if that is ultimately true, it is nonetheless true that I know I would be objectively happier if I were not sinning rather than sinning.

There is no hurry, though, is there, if universalism is true? I might be more perfectly happy if I shed some of my sins, but I am not unhappy and in fact I'm quite comfortable as I am. So why stress out about confronting and conquering sin? Christ in the New Testament exhorts us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. That's nice advice for someone with ambitions to be a saint, but I have no such ambitions. If I'm ultimately destined for eternal bliss, why go through all the hassle? As the Five Man Electrical Band sang - "Thank you Lord for thinkin' bout me, I'm alive and doin fine."

Sure, I might have to go through some pain in the next life before experiencing that eternal bliss, but that's all a little vague compared to the very real suffering and inconvenience involved with confronting sin in this life. I've never been one to seek out the hard road when the easy road is available - especially when I'm assured they both end up in the same place.

These points are not meant to be rhetorical or flip. I abandoned the Catholic faith after high school because I found it entirely irrelevant to my life. The upshot of my 70's Catholic education was that sin wasn't really a big deal, Jesus wanted to be my friend, and he was always willing to forgive anything - which, I presumed, would include ignoring him. So why not get on with the business of this world and then get back to Jesus sometime later?

It was only later when I began to understand that my Catholic "education" was no education at all that I began to rethink things. For me, the reality of sin and its eternal implications is the only reason to take Christianity seriously in the first place. If universalism is true, then sin is not (in Kierkegaard's terms) "eternally decisive."  Neither is our relationship to Christ in this life decisive. Follow him, reject him, ignore him, twice-a-year Catholic him, what does it matter? Ultimately, it won't.

I wonder if there is a mode of existence in hell that is universalist (this is NOT to claim that anyone believing in universalism is going to hell). But if universalism implies that there are no decisive eternal implications for a lack of a relationship with Christ in this life, why not in the next? Perhaps there are individuals in hell who recognize their sins but are comfortable in them, and tell themselves they will repent tomorrow, with tomorrow (naturally) never arriving. Maybe C.S. Lewis treated this idea in The Great Divorce. It's been a long time since I read that book.

I'm in danger of being one of those eternally procrastinating guys - which is why I find the idea of universalism a temptation to be rejected.

Original Sin, Paradise and Irish Music

In a comment to my recent post concerning Chesterton and Original Sin, M asked the pertinent question: If this is our true home but we don't know how to live here, how do we learn?

The short answer is we can't, at least on our own. That's the problem with the Fall - we fell in our entire nature right down to our core, so there is no place we can fall back on from which to pull ourselves up. Any attempt we make is doomed to fail because the attempt can only come from fallen nature, and so is already affected by the problem it is trying to cure. That's why our attempts to find a way to live always have a ring of artificiality to them. They must, because we are trying to construct a way to live from degraded blueprints and with degraded carpenters.

The only answer is for someone to save us - which, of course, God has accomplished in the Incarnation. Christ shows us what it really means to live naturally, in our home, and gives us the grace to do it, if we will but accept it. Just how far we have fallen is indicated by the shock with which we apprehend the crucifix:

Christ is the perfectly natural man, but the way He lives is not something that comes naturally to us (anymore).  And it never quite will, as long as redemption is not complete. The best we can do is imitate him, ask for His grace, and hope we can through Him learn to live again in a truly natural manner. In the meantime, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that the strangeness we feel, the feeling of never quite fitting in or knowing quite what to do, is a consequence of the Fall, and will be with us to some degree for the rest of this life - but it is not the end of the story, and we can look forward to truly being home when history is finished.

And we can even in this life get a taste of what paradise - another word for living in our true home - is like. We know that in paradise we will live in the presence of God and no longer feel the longing that we do in this life, that something isn't there that should be but we can't quite say what. God will fill us and we will rest satisfied in Him. It's difficult for us to imagine how this would be possible, how we could rest in God without becoming bored (another indication of our fallen nature). For me, I imagine paradise as a "dynamic restfulness",  active yet not going anywhere or feeling the need to go anywhere. One way I get an idea for this is playing Irish music; when you get the rhythm right in a reel, it feels effortless and as though you could ride the rhythm all day without trying but without getting bored. It's that "dynamic restfulness" I strive for in my playing and when I approach it, I feel I am getting a little taste of heaven. This is the Irish reel Lucky In Love:

Chesterton and Original Sin

From the introduction to The Defendant in the collection of essays In Defense of Sanity:

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall.

The rest of the animal kingdom has an advantage on us: They are what they are and can be nothing else. A bear cannot fail to be bearlike, or a worm wormlike. But man can fail to be human. Chesterton's wonderful description of Original Sin, imagining what it might be like should an animal suffer it, illuminates what it means for us. Imagine a fish that forgets the sea; meaning, I think, a fish who forgets how to live in the sea as a fish. Such a fish is never home, for the only home it could possibly know, the sea, is foreign to it. It must live its entire existence as a stranger in its own home.

Even better is the ox who forgets the meadow. Unlike the fish, for whom the entire sea is all home to it, or should be, the meadow is peculiarly the home for an ox. An ox in the city or on a mountain is not home. But the ox who forgets the meadow is still not home in the city or on the mountain; like the unfallen ox that finds itself in the city, it would search for home. But while the unfallen ox would recognize the meadow as home should it find it, the fallen ox may find the meadow but would, tragically, not recognize it as home... it would wander right through home and continue to pine for the home it already found.

The great fall for man means that he has lost the knowledge of how to live as man in the world; he feels that he is not at home, or that he should be home but somehow isn't. So what does he do? What can he do? A man at home lives naturally; he doesn't have to figure out how to live. Since we are not at home - or at least we have forgotten how to live at home - we must construct ways of living. And these ways are at some level false simply because they are constructed - they can never replace the natural way of living of unfallen man.

Rousseau noticed this artificiality but rejected Original Sin; for him, the social constructions of man are the fall rather than a consequence of the fall. This has the convenient consequence that the fall lies outside us rather than in us, and in dealing with it we don't have to change.

But the truth is that there is no state of nature that is our true home, and in which we would be at peace could we find it. We are already in our true home. We just don't know how to live here.

Dalrymple on Original Sin

Theodore Dalrymple is always worth reading. Besides the grace of his prose style, he is remarkably Chestertonian in his ability to throw off phrases that capture succinctly profound insights. For instance, in his recent work Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality he writes this:

... for Man is not so much a problem-solving animal as a problem-creating one.

(Another reason for loving Dalrymple and his style is his refusal to bow to politically correct grammar. Thank God he didn't write "... for human beings are not so much problem-solving animals...")

What a wonderful encapsulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin! Dalrymple does not call it that and is not talking specifically about sin, but that doesn't matter. For what is Original Sin but the creation of problems where none needed to be created - in the Garden of Eden for instance? And how many of our problems - political, economic, cultural and personal - are not problems that descended upon us but instead are self-created?

It is an essentially conservative insight. If we are problem-creating animals, then we must constantly be on guard that in attempting to solve problems we merely create more.

The Occupy Movement, Sin and the Monastery

This article from The Nation about the Occupy movement got me to thinking. Why do attempts at creating progressive utopias always fail? I don't mean merely the grand disasters like Bolshevism, but also the micro attempts like hippie communes and, recently, the Occupy encampments. It occurs to me that the utopian communities of the progressive dream do actually exist and have survived for centuries: They are the monasteries; communities where everyone is equal, goods are shared in common, and there is no "income inequality".

Why does the monastery work but the progressive commune fail? Because the monks have self-consciously embraced the cross. That is, rather than grasping after justice, they have embraced injustice. Not injustice for others, but injustice for themselves. Every monk understands that life in the monastery will not be "fair." Rather than fairness, the monastery demands obedience, piety, chastity and humility. The modern world, of course, sees in this nothing but the purest form of oppression. It pursues fairness through the assertion of rights and demands, the louder and more uncompromising the better. The active embrace of meekness and submission can only be understood by it as an invitation to slavery.

And yet the monastery produces in fact the ideal society the progressive movement has repeatedly tried and failed to create. At least, it produces a society as close to ideal as we are likely to get in this broken world. The irony of the monastic movement is that it has produced just communities through the embrace of injustice, when the progressive movement has only produced tyrannies through the pursuit of justice.

The reason is that monasteries are based on a true understanding of the reality of sin, and progressive movements aren't. One of the manifestations of sin is that we overestimate the injustice done to ourselves, and underestimate the injustice we do to others. The monastery corrects for this by demanding that justice for oneself be forgotten, and only justice for others pursued. It is the practical application of the Commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, which performs a jiu-jitsu move on sin: it demands that we apply to others the justice that we, in our sinful state, demand for ourselves.

Life in the monastery is not perfect, of course, because sin always remains despite the discipline of the Rule of St. Benedict. But the monasteries have survived for millennia, when utopian communes unfailingly collapse after a few years, because the monastery is founded on the only true basis such a community could have.

The sin that the progressive movement recognizes is not located in the human heart, but in external forces and systems - "sinful structures." Every falsehood is based on some truth, a truth that leads to error when it eclipses other truths. In the case of progressivism, it is true that there are systems and structures that are inherently oppressive and cruel; but it is also true that any system may become oppressive and cruel because people, of any station and at any time and under any system, may become oppressive and cruel. This is the reason for the monastic emphasis on a routine of prayer and confession. Only by keeping the specter of sin - one's own sin - ever present before our eyes, and petitioning God for the grace to avoid it, does such a community have any hope of survival.

The progressive conceit is that by getting the processes right, and without any concomitant change in the human heart (for it is the system that is sinful, not human nature, thinks progressivism), the ideal world can be brought  into being. Or if not the ideal world, then one far more just and equitable than the one we experience now. Thus the fascination with, and near fetishization of, process in the Nation article. They are sincerely and logically consistent: Since it is process that makes the world, creating a novel process should bring a new world into being. The Nation writers approach the Occupy movement like shepherds approaching the Manger, looking for the signs and portents of the new world aborning in the various Working Groups and General Assemblies. Alas, the Occupy movement, built as it must be from the "crooked timber" of humanity, is already accelerating to it's predictable end. The Oakland chapter has turned violent, rapes and various sexual assaults are occurring at many chapters (even as the organizers try to hide them from police), the garbage starts to pile up as the Trash Pickup Squad proves to be, not surprisingly, less popular than the film-making crew or the drum group. It's the speed with which the camps have degenerated that is surprising, as it is the persistence of monasteries that is amazing.

Chesterton and the Discovery of Sin

For my money G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy is essential reading if we wish to understand the modern condition. Chesterton writes in a wonderfully light, humorous style that sometimes leads people to think he was not a serious writer; but he was deadly serious. Like Kierkegaard, Chesterton was not interested in merely scoring intellectual points but in a genuine communication of ideas. Both Kierkegaard and Chesterton used humor and indirection to lower the intellectual defenses of their readers; no serious idea is communicated in such a light manner, the reader supposes, and he finds himself listening to the idea before his prejudices have a chance to kick in.

At the heart of Chesterton's diagnosis of the modern world is the loss of the sense of sin:

In this remarkable situation it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin. This very fact which was to them (and is to me) as plain as a pikestaff, is the very fact that has been specially diluted or denied. But though moderns deny the existence of sin, I do not think that they have yet denied the existence of a lunatic asylum. We all agree still that there is a collapse of the intellect as unmistakable as a falling house. Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell. (Ch.2)

Chesterton traces the loss of the sense of sin to the shattering of the structure of virtue that occurred with the birth of modernity and the collapse of Christendom. The virtues still exist, Chesterton tells us, but they have lost any order and "run wild." Modesty is one of the virtues that has become disordered:

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. (Ch. 3)

One can imagine what Chesterton would make of the contemporary "self-esteem" movement. Any limits to the Almighty Ego seem to us to be intolerable affronts to our ego. But limitation is at the very essence of life and action:

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. (Ch. 3)

This is essentially the same point Kierkegaard made in distinguishing between the aesthetic and the ethical stages of existence. The aesthetic man cannot bring himself to eliminate "possibility" in favor of "actuality." He cannot come to terms with the fact that to choose something, with any degree of decisiveness, is to reject all the alternatives. As to choose marriage to one woman is to reject all other women. Such decisive actions are almost impossible for contemporary man. We must "keep our options open." But both Chesterton and Kierkegaard understood that "keeping your options open" is false freedom. It is freedom without meaning or significance. Of what value is a gift if it may always be taken back? What value is the gift of self in marriage if the gift may, at any time, be taken back by the giver? Such a gift is really no gift at all. The modern man of freedom maintains his freedom at the cost of making the content of his freedom nothing worth doing. Freedom is really found in a few free acts of decisive and everlasting significance, not an endless series of trivial acts of no decisive significance.

We see here the connection between sin and freedom. It is through the sense and significance of sin that true freedom comes into being. The man without a sense of sin (that is, of the limitation inherent in temporal existence) is free in the sense that anything he does is no more nor less significant than anything else, so he may as well do anything and everything. But this is the freedom of the sub-atomic particle in Brownian motion. When sin comes into being, when what we do or do not do carries decisive and even eternal significance, then a free act bears a decisive distinction from other acts; it is an act that determines our destiny.

Essentially, the sense of sin raises the stakes in life, and this makes life thrilling. Chesterton felt that gratitude was a natural response to the human condition:

And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth? (Ch. 4)

One of the clues that something is very wrong in the imaginative world of Harry Potter is that young Potter does not share this Chestertonian sense of gratitude. And why should he? Harry Potter is the greatest of Wizards, the most wonderful of them all, by right of nature. Potter is not a humble , ordinary child like Charlie Bucket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, an average kid undergoing an extraordinary adventure. No, Potter's adventures are an expression of his own extraordinary nature; in fact, they are usually about his own extraordinary nature. Potter has no reason to be grateful; everyone else should be grateful that they have the privilege of encountering "the Harry Potter." The lack of a sense of gratitude is a consequence of the fact that there is no sense of sin in Harry Potter or his world; and that because there are really no limits in his world of the type found in traditional fairy tales:

Any one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance is always, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." The vision always hangs on a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden... the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone. (Ch. 4)

The shattering of the virtues, especially our displacement of the virtue of humility, has led to the loss of the sense of sin and the inflation of the Almighty Ego; finally the Ego displaces God himself. The old fairy tale was a story of the ordinary man discovering the extraordinary nature of the greater world; the modern fairy tale (Harry Potter) is the Ego discovering the depths of its own extraordinariness. Nothing in Harry Potter's world is so extraordinary as Potter himself. Perhaps we haven't really lost our sense of sin but merely displaced it. Sin was once the transgression of divinely ordained limits, limits we might not understand but that carried penalties nonetheless. Now it is not us, but the world that sins when it has the temerity to set limits on our ego. I am with Chesterton in thinking that this modern worship of the self is the most horrible of religions:

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. (Ch. 5)

That phrase "... an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as moon, terrible as an army with banners" is one of my favorites in all of Chesterton's works. One of the things that comes through in Chesterton is the dreariness of the modern world and its freedom to do the trivial. The loss of the sense of sin drains the color from the world; with the reawakening of the sense of sin the world comes alive again as a place of adventure, danger, and hope; a world that is a story told by God but that is also partly told by us in our freedom, a story that may turn out well or badly in the deepest sense of those terms.

M.R. James and the Discovery of Sin

Here I remarked on a problem for the modern Christian, which is more the discovery of sin than the discovery of forgiveness.

One of my favorite fictional genres is the classic English ghost story, especially those of M.R. James. James did not write with any explicit spiritual or pedagogical purpose; he wrote just to give his readers a thrill. But it is in the nature of the great artist to achieve purposes beyond his conscious expectations. Perhaps we can measure the greatness of an artist by how far his work transcends his intentions.

Why are ghost stories a peculiarly modern genre? I am not the first to remark that they may be a consequence of the disenchantment of the world that followed the scientific revolution. Classical man lived in a world of gods, fairies and demons. These were all banished by modern science, with some excellent results (like the end of belief in witches), but also some unintended consequences. A world full of gods and fairies is a world full of personality; it is a human world. The cold, mechanical world of modern science is dead and inhuman. It is a world in which man finds himself a stranger, a world in which his alienation is profound, since he is the only personality in it. This alienation finds its expression in ghost stories. Man is not quite convinced that science has completely disposed of the world of spirits. But what place do spirits have in the mechanical world of modern science? They have no more place than does man, so they become alienated as well. And an alienated spirit is a powerful, dangerous, and downright scary thing.

But the modern, mechanical world also seems to have no place for sin. Yet we cannot shake the feeling that the loss of the sense of sin is not necessarily something good. This theme gets regular play in the stories of M.R. James. A regular character in the James stories is the scientific antiquarian, a collector of old books and visitor of ancient religious sites. This gentleman is the archetype of the Edwardian, scientific man of leisure. He has the appropriate scientific disdain for ancient legends and curses and is not intimidated by warnings from elderly women or village priests. Of course, he gets his comeuppance when the book he obtains or the treasure he seeks contains a little more than he bargained for. James is an absolute master at building suspense and horror in these situations; what I especially appreciate is the way he works in the notion of trespass, which is close to the notion of sin. His characters investigate "interesting" sites or decode "interesting" codes purely out of curiosity, blithely ignoring the subtle but persistent warning signs that some things are best left undisturbed. The puzzles can be so interesting that the reader feels himself pulled in, and be torn between the thrill of solving the puzzle and the dread of what might happen if he does.

Ghost stories are parables for the modern world. James began writing at the turn of the twentieth century, when Edwardian confidence was at its height. His stories show a presentiment that all was not well with the world despite appearances; that our scientific genius, while creating for us undreamt of marvels, also had the capacity to unleash undreamt of horrors. Sin did not disappear with the disappearance of witches, as the world was about to find out in the fields of Flanders and the Somme.

The Discovery of Sin

One of the most famous passages in the Bible is, of course, the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke Chapter 15. The namesake son is usually the focus of our reflections on this parable, but we can learn something as well by reflecting on the character of the eldest son. When the eldest son hears that his younger brother is returning and that their father is throwing a party for him, he becomes angry: "Behold, these many years I have been serving thee, and have never transgressed one of thy commands; and yet thou hast never given me a kid that I might make merry with my friends..." (Luke 15:29)

What is the eldest son's problem? He has a lack of gratitude. And why is he ungrateful? We are ungrateful for what we believe we deserve by right. The eldest son thinks that his years of service have given him a right to his father's generosity. His father owes it to him to throw a party for him, or at least give him the means to a throw a party for himself (it is interesting that the eldest son complains that he was not given a kid to make merry friends with his friends, not with his father). The prodigal son, at an earlier time, felt in a similar manner as evidenced by his demand that his father give him his share of the inheritance. But something changed in the prodigal while he was away and after he had run through all his money. The prodigal son discovered sin.

What was his sin? Notice that nothing in the parable says that the prodigal son was wrong that he had an inheritance coming to him. His sin was not in thinking that he had an inheritance coming, but his failure to recognize that the inheritance, as well as everything else he possessed and indeed his own life, was nothing but pure gift from his father. The only reason that his father "owed" him an inheritance is that his father freely chose to submit to such an obligation. All is gift and mercy, nothing is demand and obligation. The prodigal son, by losing everything in poverty, realizes that he really had nothing at all originally that was not pure gift. The magnificence of the gift and his unworthiness of it becomes starkly clear in the contrast with his state of poverty after he has dissipated the gift.

So sin is not really about immoral behavior, although immoral behavior is a fruit of sin (the prodigal son spends money on loose women as a result of his ungrateful demand for his inheritance.) Sin is fundamentally about a misapprehension and dislocation in our relationship with God; in other words, pride. It has been speculated that the sin of Lucifer, the greatest of angels, was that he believed his high place in the cosmic order was due to his own merits rather than the mercy of God; this sin fermented and eventually grew into rebellion and hatred of God. The eldest son has "never transgressed one of thy commands" yet he also does not appreciate the fundamental gratuity of his relationship with his father. He has yet to discover sin; he is in a state of sin but doesn't know it. And without sin, there is no mercy and forgiveness.

The eldest son is very relevant to we Catholics who have grown up since Vatican II. Similar to the eldest son, it's not the discovery of forgiveness but the discovery of sin that is usually a problem for us. We are more than happy to take the gifts God offers us in the Sacraments, as the eldest son would be more than happy to take any kid goats his father gave him with which to celebrate. But we seem to have lost the prior spiritual movement, the discovery of sin, without which the discovery of forgiveness is meaningless.

There is an easy test to determine whether we are more like the eldest son or the prodigal son. What is the ratio of our partaking in the Sacrament of Confession with our partaking in the Sacrament of the Eucharist? Do we rarely or never go to Confession but always take communion at Mass? Confession reflects the spiritual movement of the prodigal son in his discovery of sin; the Eucharist is the spiritual movement of the celebration of the father in welcoming the return of his lost son. Taking the Eucharist without Confession is akin to the eldest son demanding a party without first discovering his own sin and coming to his father in repentance.

Sin is not a matter of emotion and feeling. It is an objective state of being. We can be "doing just fine" in a state of sin or, rather, feel we are doing just fine without appreciating the deep rot within us. The pernicious lie we have come to believe is that if we feel good about ourselves, then we really are good. But all that may mean is that we have yet to discover sin.

I generally do not like to talk about myself on this blog, but I wish to relate a personal story that, I think, will illuminate the points I am making. As a young man just graduated from high school, I went away to college several hours away from home. One of the perks of living away from home was that I could give up going to Mass. The lesson I learned from growing up in the Church and twelve years of CCD was that being a Catholic was about being a nice guy. And, hey, I was a pretty nice guy, so what did I need all the religious stuff for? In Confirmation classes, we did a lot of meditation and listened to stories about drunks and criminals being converted by the Gospel. Well, meditation was boring, and I was neither a drunk nor a criminal, so it seemed to me that the Gospel was addressed to someone else. It had nothing to do with real life.

During my sophomore year, several things occurred that I now view as moments of grace. One of these happened when I was walking back to our fraternity house from campus (the house was a mile off campus), and I saw an elderly woman carrying two bags of groceries up a hill. I was walking behind the woman and I justed watched her struggle up the hill. My perspective was that of a disinterested, scientific spectator (perhaps a product of my engineering major.) I felt no pity or urgency to assist the woman. You might call this a "sin of omission." When I got back to the fraternity house, I reflected on what happened and it worried me. I didn't feel guilty for doing nothing; what worried me was my lack of guilty feeling. What sort of man feels no compassion for an old woman struggling up a hill? I had been given a brief glance at my true spiritual state of being, and it scared me. Something was dying inside me but I didn't know what or what to do about it. It was obvious to me, however, that such clarity was not permanent. I knew I would eventually get to the point where I would not recognize my state for what it was, and then I would be beyond hope. I was discovering sin, although I didn't know it by that name at the time.

My spiritual life is chiefly characterized by the discovery of sin rather than the discovery of forgiveness. Since returning to the Church sixteen years ago, I have always struggled with the Sacrament of Confession, as I suspect most Catholics my age and younger do, at least as evidenced by the sparse turnout for Confession. It is a real struggle for us to perceive our true spiritual state as sinners; like the "Five Man Electrical Band" says, "we're doing just fine." Actually, we are not doing fine, as evidenced by the divorce statistics, the lack of vocations, and the general cafeteria approach to Church teaching.

We may ask: How does the eldest son discover sin? Must he leave home and squander his inheritance like the prodigal son? Remember that sin is not so much a particular action as a general distortion of our relationship with God. Pride is the root of sin, and pride is the conviction that what we have, we have by right or deserve on our own merits. Catholic piety was once filled with small but significant reminders of our sinfulness that have since been jettisoned in the quest to get rid of "Catholic guilt." We've gotten rid of Catholic guilt, all right, and turned ourselves from the prodigal son into the eldest son in the process.

Re-incorporating these apparently minor acts of piety is a good way to rediscover sin. Bowing in front of the Altar, genuflecting in front of the Tabernacle, holding yourself and your hands in a reverent posture during Mass, not chatting before or during Mass, following the observances of fast and abstinence... all these things communicate the message to yourself that the Faith is not so much "about you" but about what God is doing for you. The most valuable thing I have done in recent years is refraining from the Eucharist when I have not gone to Confession in the prior month or I know I have committed a serious sin. This has forced me to Confession more regularly and also given me a renewed appreciation for what God is doing in the Eucharist.

One of the tragedies of contemporary Catholic life is the fear with which the Church authorities speak of sin. Priests rarely mention it in homilies and seem to be afraid of "stressing out" youth by even mentioning sin or demanding anything of them. Altar servers, when we have them, are slovenly, sloppy, often don't know what they are doing, and stroll around the sanctuary like it is their rec room. When they are bored with Mass, they chat with each other or fiddle with the crosses around their necks. Then everyone wonders why we have so few altar servers. When Mass is viewed as entertainment, as just another thing to burnish up our Almighty Ego, it isn't long before it becomes boring and is abandoned. What these youngsters are being robbed of is the opportunity to participate in something much grander and more glorious than they are, something that demands the submission of their ego and the renunciation of their pride, something that comes into being only with the discovery of sin; but their is no sin when nothing is demanded of you.