JUST A PRACTICING SINNER AM I

If the truth were told, I would have to admit that I am a practicing sinner. Well, no use beating around the bush: I am a practicing sinner. I practice sinning every day. But, then, I am not alone. Everyone I know is a practicing sinner. Fortunately and thankfully that is all we are. It could be worse. We could be full-fledged sinners.

The fortunate part is we are still learning how to sin. We have to learn how to sin. Sinning does not come naturally. We were not born sinners. We were born innocent. We learned how to sin and we had some pretty good teachers: our parents, siblings, grandparents. We watched how they sinned and we learned.

To be sure, they did not realize they were helping us become learned in the ways of sin and selfishness. They never deliberately set out to teach us to think of ourselves first and others second. But they did and we saw how they did and we learned and now we teach our children, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors. As has been said, and truthfully and tragically so, we have to learn how to hate. Hate does not come naturally and neither does sinning.

But, again, the fortunate and thankful part is that we do not have sinning down pat. A true sinner is one who puts himself or herself above everyone else, including God, and does everything from a purely selfish motive with no concern about the consequences not only to others but also to self, even if those consequences be one’s eternal damnation. The truth is, and again very fortunately and very thankfully, we do not even come close to being such a person.

Yes, there are times when we are mighty selfish and deliberately so. There are times when we choose to be very, very sinful. All sin is by choice, of course. We never sin accidentally. We choose to be selfish, know we are selfish and know what we are saying and doing are wrong. But we do it anyway. That is what it is sinful. Yet we never go so far into ourselves that we exclude everyone else. The thankful part is that we stop short of being totally selfish.

What keeps us on the straight and narrow path, if sometimes only on the berm of the road, is the grace of God. Left to our own devises we could and perhaps would wander off into only God knows where. For that we must be thankful. But it is not simply the grace of God that keeps our sinning to a level we can live with – if we could not live with it, we would cease. It is also the help and support and prayers of our faith community that keep us from becoming unhinged and going off on our own and “to hell with everyone.”

None of this means that just because we are all only practicing sinners and not total sinners, only partially selfish and not purely so, that we are allowed us to be passé about it and somehow be off the hook as it were. We cannot. We must not. It does mean, however, that we cannot call another a sinner while failing to use the same term to describe ourselves. We must always strive to be less sinful and more loving, which, of course, also takes practice

ABSENCE

No one seems to know who it was who astutely observed that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It was no doubt someone who was away from his/her beloved and suddenly realized just how deep that love truly was. And that love grew even deeper as the length of the absence was extended. If no one had ever made that observation before, each one of us could have. We’ve all been there. Sometimes we truly need to be away from the one we love in order to realize just how deep our love truly is. This is true not only of our relationships with people but also with places and times as well.

On the other hand, the obverse can be just as true. For instance, there are times in our lives when the present may not be what we remember the past to have been. And so we read into the past, because we are absent from it, perhaps more than was there. We long to go back to the old days, the old place, the former times and circumstances because we perceive them to have been so grand and glorious – or at least better than what now is. Perhaps they truly were. Perhaps.

Yet there is one absence from which there is no return. We can neither go back in time nor can the future fill the void. The absence is permanent and all we have left to hold onto are the memories of the one we loved and who loved us. Such is the reality of the death of someone we love. We will be absent from the other until we meet again in eternity. In the meantime there is a void that will not be filled. Again, what is true about the absence of a beloved is also true about other past loves: other people, other places, other times.

It is trite even though it is often also quite true that time heals the wounds of the separation. Time does, but it also leaves a scar. The wound of the temporal loss of the loved one may be healed. It is no longer an open wound. The pain is gone, or at least most of it, but the scar remains, the reminder of the loved one whom we can no longer hold and hold onto to see us through our dark nights and lonely days. When we rub that scar, some pain comes back to the surface, if only for the moment.

Some may be tempted to insist that God, our faith in God, fills the gap that is left in our hearts and lives. But we know this is only partially true. God is always with us even during those dark nights of the soul. But God does not completely fill the void. God allows some emptiness to exist, I think, so that we do not forget the one who is now absent, even as painful as that sometimes truly is.

Absence, if nothing else, allows us to be thankful for what was, to remember the other, to remember the past, to remember what was important and meaningful and to do so with gratitude even as painful as that will be at times to do. The truth is that absence is painful because who or what is gone was and still remains a very important part of who we are. If there is no pain, not even a twinge, then it means that we know we have moved on with our lives. Thankfulness for the one who is now absent, for that which is now absent, is not so much a cross we must bear as it is a reason to give thanks for the gift that was once given and still is part of us.

ALTARS ARE EVERYWHERE

Barbara Brown Taylor in her magnificent book An Altar in the World makes this observation: “To detach the walking from the destination is in fact one of the best ways to recognize the altars you are passing right by all the time.” In today’s world that is not always easy to do. Even more the thought probably never occurs to us so much in a hurry that we all seem to be.

The destination, the end of the journey, almost always seems to be foremost on our mind from the time we set out till the time we arrive. Everything and everyone else along the way are rarely ever observed. Granted, when driving we should never take our eyes off the road. But the point is that there is so much to see between here and there and that we are in so much of hurry to get there that we never consider the thought of taking more time to get there so that we can see what is along the way.

And what we would see along the way, no matter how long or how short the journey, are altars to God, places to worship, places and people to see God and God at work. We know this to be true whenever we have taken the time to get somewhere and pull off the road to see the wonders of creation. When we get back into the car we sometimes wonder why we don’t do this more often.

Those altars, of course, are not simply places here and there along the way. They are everywhere , everywhere we look. But we first have to stop and look and then look deeper. A casual look around, a quick glance, won’t do it. Just as a first impression of another doesn’t really tell us much if anything about that person and, in fact, may be the complete opposite of what we think we see, so, too, do quick glances.

We know all this, of course. We know we need to slow down. We know we almost always move too fast through life. We often wonder why we are in such a hurry to get somewhere especially when we have more than enough time to do so. Yes, yes, yes: there are times when we just do not have time to stop and smell the roses, to see God in all of God’s creation. I get that. We all get that.

Yet the truth still remains, as Taylor reminds, there are two parts to any journey: the destination itself and what awaits us once we arrive and the trip along the way there. I wonder what life, my life, everyone else’s life, would be like today had we taken our time over the years getting to our many and varied destination to stop at those altars we’ve hurriedly passed along the way.

I have to believe that our own lives and the world itself would be so much better. We would be so much more at peace with ourselves and with one another because we would have seen both our God in all of creation and, more importantly, in one another. The truth is creation is God’s altar and so is each one of us.

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IT'S ALL GOD'S FAULT

Let’s cut to the chase: the mess in this world is all God’s fault. Tsunamis, hurricanes tornadoes and their aftermath: it’s all God’s fault. If God had not created the world the way it is, such disasters would not occur. Murder, mayhem and the multitude of other sins that abound, all that is also God’s fault. If God had not created us with free will, none of this would happen. So we are off the hook.

Not so fast. Yes, in the Grand Scheme of things, whatever that Scheme is, and God only knows what it is, it is God’s fault that bad things, both natural and intentional, do happen. Why nature acts the way it does and if there might have been a different way of creating that precluded natural disasters no one knows, not even the best and the brightest. Only the Creator knows.

What we know is that natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes do occur. We can also waste our time wondering why they are part of God’s created order, which certainly sounds like a contradiction in terms. How can a hurricane that causes so much disorder be considered part of an ordered universe? See what I mean? Nevertheless, if it makes us feel good, let’s say all natural disasters are all God’s fault.

That said, what we also know is that we do not have to fall victim to them. God may be blamed for hurricanes that destroy much of a city because it was the result of the way God created this universe. It was not God’s fault, however, that people built where they should not or that the levees were not strong enough or high enough to protect the people and the land. It was and is ours.

When we freely do that which is sinful and/or foolish, it may be God’s fault that we are able to do so because God created us with free will. But we know we do not have to engage in foolish and sinful behavior if we do not want to. It is our fault when we do and we know it. It would certainly make us feel much better if we could blame God for such behavior or at least hold Gold partially responsible.

In fact, I believe that the main reason why God forgives our sins is that God created us sin-enabled. God knew we would sin when God created us with free will. We do not have to sin. We do not have to build where we should not, under-protect what we should, kill when we should not, not love when we should. But we freely choose to act the way we do and God in God’s infinite love forgives us.

It may be God’s fault that hurricanes are able to devastate and we are able to sin, but it is our fault if we do not do what we can to prevent both the devastation of the natural order and the sins of the human order. In both cases it is easy to play the blame game. We can cut God some slack and we can cut ourselves the same, neither of which addresses the main point, namely, free will notwithstanding, that we take responsibility for our sins both of commission and omission. Until we are ready and willing to do so, we will continue to find and makes excuses for our failures and nothing will change, at least not for the better.