THE DEADLIEST SIN OF ALL

I have a book on my shelf about the seven deadly sins. I even read it. It was, well, deadly. Even for someone who is in the sin business, reading about sin can soon put you to sleep. It would have been helpful, I suspect, if the book was a bit juicier; you know, filled with examples of people breaking each of those deadly deeds. But that would be tabloid theology and as such has no place on a proper theologian’s bookshelf – in his hidden drawer, maybe.

At any rate, I did plow through the book. It was written by a Jewish theologian whose Old Testament theology is ripe with sin and punishment. When one sinned in Old Testament times, one was in deep trouble. Each sin had its assigned punishment. Sin was truly deadly both to the individual and to society. Today theologians wonder, as a not-too-recent book wondered, what ever happened to sin?

Well, nothing, really. We may try to sugar-coat it, down-play it, pass it off as some psychological or genetic deficiency. But it is still there and still very really and still has some disastrous, if not deadly, consequences both to the sinner and the sinnee.

It does not take a theologian to realize that pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, greed and sloth -- the seven deadly sins -- are sinful, and that, taken to the extreme, can be very, very deadly. Too much of anything, especially anything bad, is simply not good for one's health -- physical, spiritual, mental. Sin destroys body, mind and spirit. As deadly as those sins may be, and they are -- you can read the book -- there is one sin that is the deadliest sin of all, at least to my way of thinking. That is the sin of unforgivingness.

I know: the word in not found in any dictionary nor is it found on my spell check on the computer. But that does not mean that it is a non-word. I would maintain that it is very much a word for our dictionaries, and, unfortunately, a word for all seasons and all persons. Unforgivingness prevents us from moving ahead, from eliminating any other sin(s) from our lives.

When we are stuck on unforgivingness, we are simply stuck. We must not only be able to forgive others who have sinned against us, but, more importantly, we must be able to accept forgiveness for our own sins. As dull and as boring as that book was as I read it, I was also aware in the process of reading about those seven deadly sins that I stand accused and guilty of each one of them to one degree or another.

It would be easy to become overwhelmed by one's sinfulness, to wonder how one could ever be forgiven, to believe that one could never be forgiven. It could be easy to fall into the deadliest sin of all: unforgivingness. My suspicion is that we live on the edge of forgiving or not, of accepting forgiveness or not. It’s a life-long tension, a life-long struggle that ebbs and flows throughout our lives.

The saving grace in all this is that deep down we know God forgives us and as God forgives us, we must also forgive, both others and ourselves.

PEOPLE NEED PEOPLE

No one of us can go it alone even though, God knows, we think we can and maybe even try it at times, especially when we are down on ourselves and think we’re all alone. We get into that Nobody-cares-about-me-and-I-don’t-care-about-them” mood. It happens to all of us at one time or another in our lives. It isn’t pretty because there is nothing pretty about it except that we feel pretty badly at that time.

When those times occur, what we discover, but only in hindsight, is that we were and are never alone. It’s like that very, very old line when there were no bucket seats in the car and the wife says to the husband, “When we were dating, we used to snuggle up to each other as we drove and now we don’t.” And he replies, I’m not the one who moved.”

People didn’t move away from us. We moved away from them. Why? The reasons, in the end, really didn’t and don’t matter. What matters is that, when we get out of our funk, we realize that we were and are never alone. And why is that? Because we need one another. We people need people to simply exist. We cannot and were not meant to go it alone. Even when we are all alone, we are not alone.

Granted, when we are in one of those isolating moods, it is difficult for us to realize how much we need other people just to be the person who we are. Self-pity can be very overwhelming at times. Sadly, so sadly, it can take control of our lives and can lead, and does lead, to self-destruction in one way or another. What also happens is that we forget, or do not seem to realize, just how much other people need us.

Even when life is going well, which, thankfully, it is for us most of the time, we sometimes forget just how much we need one another, how important we are to one another. The old song reminds us that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. That is true. It also means that we are all lucky whether, again, we realize it or not, which, sadly, often we do not.

If you are like me, we don’t stop often enough to reflect on how lucky, how blessed, we are to have people in our life who love and care for us as we love and care for them. We all too often take them for granted because, well, they are just there as they always have been and always will be. Lucky us! And lucky them because they have us! What a blessing and even more so where we more aware of it.

My sense is that one of the blessings of this pandemic is that we have come to realize just how much we need other people, how much other people need us, that it is no fun being isolated. My sense is that we had taken for granted how our need for other people had been fulfilled when we were not isolated. Now we know. Now we can foster those friendships and relationships even more. Now we can reflect and be thankful about how blessed we are for all those people in our lives.

ALL OF THIS IS BEYOND ME, WAY BEYOND

Sometimes when I am in a quiet mood, I try to reflect on God.  After I finish my reflection, I almost always wonder why I began in the first place because I no closer to understanding God then than I was when I started. I begin by trying to imagine the time when there was just only God, nothing else: no sun or moon or stars, no universe, no people or animals or trees, just nothing.

That is easy. But then comes the hard part: how did God get there in the beginning? How was the Creator created? Back when I was studying philosophy and hating every minute of it – (okay, I only appreciated philosophy when I studied theology, but that’s another story) – we reviewed Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs for the existence of God, one of which was God was the Uncaused First Cause. In other words, somebody had to start all of this, and that was God.

That, of course, assumed that one believed in God in the first place. If not, there is always the Big Bang Theory, namely, that all of this was created out of nothing. But, then, we know that nothing comes from nothing. So back to the Uncaused First Cause, which still leaves me scratching my head. But, when I get passed that dilemma, and I do quite quickly, I come to the personal part of my reflection and stand back in amazement.

And wonder. I wonder how my God, whom I believe loves me individually and personally, can really care about my petty cares and concerns when God has to be concerned about the cares and concerns of the other eight billion plus people in this world. I have enough problems caring about the people I love. Try eight billion for starters! Boggles the imagination.

And that’s exactly what happens every time I think deeply about God. My mind is bewildered. I quickly realize that God is beyond me, way beyond. All of it. What has happened is that I just don’t go there anymore. Yes, I would like to understand my God, but I cannot and cannot even come close, and never will, no matter how hard I try or how many books I read or how deep my personal reflections become. It’s all beyond me, way, way, way beyond me.

And that’s okay. Does God love me just as I am? No. Why do I know that? Because I know I don’t love me just as I am. I am selfish and sinful like everyone else and my/our responsibility is to become less of that and more loving and caring. I know that. I don’t just believe that. I also know that God has given and continues to give me whatever grace and strength I need to do so.

In the end, trying to understand God is like to trying to understand love. I often wonder why my wife loves me given that I know me. It’s beyond me. But she does, and that’s all that matters. And when I think about God, all that matters is that I know God loves me.

THE (OFTEN) LONG ROAD TO RESURRECTION

The (almost) basis of my theology is quite simple: “Bad things (there’s a vulgar and better euphemism for that) happen. There’s always resurrection.” Bad things happen to each and every one of us. They happen because of our own foolishness. They happen because we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They happen to us because of another’s action, intended or not. They happen because that is what happens in this life and for which we cannot do anything about.

Bad things happen: loss of health, loss of job, loss of relationship and, finally loss of life. Actually, there are too many to number. Some bad things are worse than others but they are all bad because they hurt in some way: physically, mentally, spiritually and usually a combination of all three. No one of us is exempt. No one!

In spite of it all, there is always resurrection, new life. As believers, resurrection and new life comes after our physical death. What that new life is like, will be like, we have not the foggiest idea. St. Paul tells us that it is unimaginable even as we all try to imagine what heaven is like. Nevertheless, with death, we believe, come resurrection and new life, whatever that life will be like.

But, more importantly, I believe, that is also true about the little deaths we encounter in this life – all those losses that come our way. New life, resurrection, comes from them, always. The problem, of course, is sometimes that road to resurrection is long and difficult. It takes work because it never happens on its own. And sometimes at the end of our suffering comes resurrection and new life through our physical death. And sometimes that is the only way we make our way through the pain.

But in the meantime, between now and then, bad things continue to happen to us. Fortunately, thankfully, they are few and far between. When we are dealing with them, that resurrection to a new life seems like a longtime coming, and often is. We don’t suddenly break a leg and then have it heal immediately. And after the bone is healed, there is still physical therapy to endure, painful physical therapy. But eventually there is new life for us.

It is the same for any bad thing that happens because each one is a loss of something, some part of our life, something that changes our life forever in one way or another. We cannot go back and undo what has happened. We have to live with the result and find a way, with God’s help and the help of others, a new life and resurrection. It’s there for us to obtain, again, probably with hard work.

Don’t believe it? Just take some time to reflect on anything bad, any loss, that has happened in the past and realize the new life that came from it. There’s always resurrection, always, even if the road there is a long journey. Never lose hope.