ADMONISHING THE SINNER

Our responsibility, according to my old catechism, “to admonish the sinner” was and often seems a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Who among us is not a sinner?  Who among us does not sin at least seven times a day, mostly in thought, of course, but also in deed? Our sins may not be large or cause much damage to anyone else including ourselves, but they are sins indeed.

As such, we may not and should not take them either lightly or for granted. Just because everyone sins, even the greatest of saints, and sins every day, even the greatest of saints, does not give us leave to keep on with selfish thoughts, words and deeds. We must admit them, address them and do the best we can to be a better person, a lesser sinner, tomorrow and the tomorrows to come.

That may be the easy part. Granted, it is often very difficult to both admit to our sins, specific sins, and then work to remove them from our lives. They start small but often become a habit. Bad language is an example. But so is the tendency to always find fault, to be negative, and then to look into the mirror and see someone with the same faults we find in others. Doing something positive to rectify this is easy.

“Easy”, you say? “Try it sometime,” you say. I have. I have to because I have to admit that I am no different than anyone else. I neither like to admit to my faults, my sins and shortcomings nor do I like to work at removing them. But, again, that is easy to do when I compare it to what is also demanded of me: to admonish the sinner.

Try that sometime. Try telling someone else that s/he is doing something that is wrong, sinful, perhaps even evil. The response we will receive, or have received if we have tried it, is almost never a “thank you”. It is a “That’s none of your business” response, or a “Who are you to call me a sinner?” comeback. If we dare to proceed further and assert that it is our business to point out sinful and wrong actions while at the same time admitting we are no better than the one we are admonishing, it may only soften the blow but also may make matters worse.

It does take courage to admonish the sinner. Jesus did it when necessary at the risk of his own life and, in the end, it cost him his life. I suspect it has cause thousands of people to become martyrs, even dead ones, over the years because they believed that they had a responsibility to admonish those in power about their misdeeds. The saving grace is that none of us will probably never be in that position.

Every day we are in position to admonish the sinner. The first sinner we have to admonish is ourself, to admit our own sins and resolve to do something to address them. Then when we encounter someone doing what we know is sinful, to gut it up and speak out. It won’t be easy as it isn’t easy to admit to our own sins, but admonish we must.

INSTRUCTING THE IGNORANT

We all know people who don’t know what they don’t know even as they act at times as if they do know what they really don’t know. The truth be told, each of us could probably add ourselves to that list of sometimes know-it-alls. No one has all knowledge, is all-knowing. That is simply a fact of our human existence. We all would wish to know more than we know. Knowledge is power, not in the sense of being able to use our knowledge to make others look foolish, but in order to be a better person.

Of course, people do abuse others when they deliberately and gleefully make others look foolish because they are ignorant of the issue on the table. That is certainly not a way to win friends and influence people. But, then, those who act that way don’t seem to have any regrets on the way they abuse their knowledge. The glee that those who are abused comes when those people get his comeuppance. They always do sooner or later.

On the more positive side, although it seems negative to us who are experiencing it, is the fact that when we have lost some knowledge that we once had, there are those who will help us remember. We not only learn more and more as we grow older, we also forget more and more as we grow older, or at least take a much longer time to retrieve from our brains what we once stored there. Such is life.

All that said, it is the responsibility of each of us to help others learn what we have learned, both from book-learning and from personal experience. Our elders did that for us. We learned from them even as we often believed we knew more than they did especially when we were teenagers. What teenager does not think he or she is smarter than his or her parents? They’ll learn the hard way, as we all do.

It is difficult to try to teach those whom we know do not know something we believe they need to know. They, as we did, often take it as a put-down rather than a helping-up. Teachers help lift us up from ignorance to knowledge. We know they know more than we do. We come to them to learn from them. Once we have learned what they have to teach, then it is up to us to teach others what we have learned.

The further difficulty that we have both as teachers and learners is that we bring prior experience and prior prejudices with us that color both the way we teach and the way we accept the teaching of others. That is what makes both teaching and learning so very difficult at times, the know-it-alls notwithstanding.

Yet as difficult as it is to teach others and learn from others, that is one of the responsibilities we have both as human beings and even more so as Christians. Jesus was killed because of his teachings. They made too many people, especially those in power, very uncomfortable. The truth hurts and it often makes us uncomfortable. But we have an obligation both teach and to learn no matter how uncomfortable it gets at times. 

COUNSELING THE DOUBTFUL

As human beings it is often evident that out material needs always have a priority over our spiritual needs. We must feed the body before we can feed the soul. When we are hungry or in pain or in circumstances beyond our control, all we want is for the hunger to be quelled, the pain to abate and the situation we are in to be rectified. Once those material-bodily needs are taken care of, we can get on to dealing with the spiritual issues that afflict us, but not until then.

Sometimes we try, of course. During the penitential seasons of the year the Church asks us to set aside some special times in our day to reflect on our spiritual life. But as we have all learned, even when we attempt to do that, oftentimes simply making it through the day taking care of our physical health needs consumes us and we never get to asking ourselves about our spiritual health.

Yet, just as our physical needs never go away until this physical body is in the grave, so, too, our spiritual needs stay with us until we die. What adds to the burden of this life, of course, is that we are not only required to take care of our physical and spiritual needs, but our faith demands that we are often asked to help care for the physical and spiritual needs of others – all at the same time. It can be overwhelming to say the least.

One of those spiritual needs brought to us from outside, from others in need, is to counsel those who have doubts about their faith. When we stop to think about that, we have to wonder if God is asking a little too much of us. Who doesn’t have doubts? Remember the “scandal” that was caused when it was revealed that even Mother Teresa struggled all her life with doubts about her faith?

We are not alone. Yet, even amid having sometimes serious doubts of our own, we come into contact with those who may be having even more serious doubts about their own faith. When that happens, we cannot, must not, simply brush them aside with a “If you think you have doubts, if you are struggling with you faith, let me tell you about my doubts and my struggles.”

What we have to do for them is what others have done for us when serious faith issues cropped up in our lives: just be there. Let them know we understand, that we have walked that road, are probably still walking it. For the truth is faith is not knowledge. We do not and never will understand our faith. That is why we struggle perhaps daily to understand just a little more about what we believe.

Counseling those in doubts mostly means holding hands with them. That won’t alleviate their doubts and it won’t alleviate ours. What it will do is help each of us make it through this day into the next. That may not be much, but at the end of the day, it will be enough. Tomorrow? We’ll work in that once again – and together.

LENT: A TIME TO CLIMB A MOUNTAIN

Most of us live from day to day, one day looking very much like the next. This, I think, is true whether we are a child, a teenager, college student, employee or employer, or retired. Days go by faster and faster as we grow older and older. Tine flies whether we are having fun or simply plodding through each day. Before we know it, we are celebrating our next birthday or anniversary. We wonder where time goes anyway.

How we use the time given to us, and none of us knows how much time that is, is what is important. We can waste it or use it to improve our lives. It is always up to us. No one forces us to make the best use of our time. We can only do that for ourselves. And we only do it if we believe it will be helpful and beneficial to do so. Otherwise we will probably spend most of our time counting time.

That said, it is time to remind that Lenten Time is upon us. It is a time the church sets aside for us to take a deeper and personal look at our lives, both our material and our spiritual lives, both-and and not either-or, one or the other. They go hand in hand. If are bodies are out of sorts, so are our souls. And vise-versa. Lent is a time to look at our body and our soul.

To do so what we have to do is, if you will, climb a mountain to get away from it all, away from the distractions that consume our daily lives, needed distractions like work and study, but distractions nevertheless. In order to adequately look deep into our body and soul, we need to put aside everything else. And even when we are able to do that, it is still difficult to concentrate on the issue at hand: the health of our body and soul.

That is why I like the metaphor of the mountain. Moses had to climb a mountain to get away from the mess in the desert when the people were ready to hang him for bringing them out on what was becoming a godawful exodus march. He went up that mountain, reflected and prayed for forty days and came down with the Ten Commandments, or as I call them, Moses’ Rules for the Road. If the people followed those rules, they would make it to the end of their journey. They were good rules, but Moses needed to climb a mountain to be able to reflect on what he needed to do.

Jesus was always climbing mountains to get away from everyone and everything in order to reflect on his mission and ministry. He could not do that while engaged in it. He had to disengage, find a mountain, climb it, pray and reflect, then come down the mountain refreshed and ready to meet the days to come.

We are no different than Moses and Jesus. We need, on occasion, like Lent, to find a mountain, a space off by ourselves, to pray and reflect on the condition of our bodies and souls. That place can be anywhere we can find peace and quiet for ten or fifteen minutes each day. It may not be easy to find the time or space, but it would be good to do so.