With
sin comes sadness
by Fr. Ron Rohlheiser
French philosopher, Leon Bloy, a man very instrumental in helping bring Jacques and Raissa Maritain to faith, once
stated: "There is only one real sadness in life,
that of not being a saint!"
That's not a statement of
piety, but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life
would be better if we understood that. We've always associated sin with badness
more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad.
Sin can also make us bad
because it makes us prone to lie. That's its ultimate danger. Giving into
temptation because of weakness or passion doesn't make us bad. What does is
when we deny, rationalize, excuse ourselves, and accuse others after we sin.
That's what hardens, warps, and embitters the soul.
We see this already in the
Adam and Eve story, the first sin. Their disobedience was one thing, but their
need afterwards to hide and try to cover themselves,
with clothes and excuses, was what ultimately put them outside the garden of
joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin, namely, to try to cover and
excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us.
That, not God's forgiveness, is the problem.
It's not about God's
understanding, generosity, or forgiveness that we ever need to worry. God,
Jesus assures us, is generous and forgiving beyond our imaginings. Jesus
forgives his killers even as they're murdering him and, as the parable of the
vineyard workers who arrive at different hours but still all receive
the same reward makes clear, our real problem is not whether or not God is
generous, but whether or not we can receive that generosity without weighing
merit or being jealous. The danger is not that we won't receive our due; the
danger is more that we might end up getting everything and enjoying nothing.
Sadness, not hell-fire, is what looms as the real threat.
The problem with sin is not
that it makes us bad or puts us outside God's love,
it's that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience,
is not an abstract thing.
To the exact degree that we
sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness, and
become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or
praising anyone. To the degree that we sin too, the sound of joy, the sound of
what's childlike and innocent, begins to irritate us and we, almost-automatically,
begin to protect ourselves by enfleshing ourselves
inside a cocoon of sophistication, cynicism, and hardness. Inside that hardness
we too easily begin to see our bad choice as a moral triumph, as a victory for
freedom, and as something that has made us smarter and wiser than others.
But, with that comes a
sadness that we can't hide from others even when we try to hide it from
ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we walk out of the garden of innocence with our
eyes more open, but with our hearts much less capable of being delighted or
inspired.
Sin robs us of our innocence
by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to
be "un-wounded" and our capacity to experience joy, as known both
from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what's
still childlike inside us. Sin makes us sad precisely because it makes us
sophisticated in a way that wounds the child inside of us. The opposite is also
true.
A couple of years ago, a
group of young priests asked me to join their support group for one of their
weekly meetings. Their group was unlike any group, clerical or lay, with whom
I've ever spent an evening. They'd come together to support each other in their
resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a way that was more honest,
transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly. So each week they met and with
searing honesty confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other.
Obviously this made them better priests, and that was their aim. But what
surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much,
much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of
self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable.
The youngest member of the
group, just thirty-five years old, told me: "Father, I joined this group
last year and doing this each week and attempting to live such a radical
lifestyle is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But it's also the
best thing I've ever done. I've never been this happy!"
When the rich young man in
the gospels walks away from Jesus' invitation to radical discipleship, it
doesn't say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. He remained
good, sincere, and sad. And isn't that perennially our situation?
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author,
is President of the Oblate School of Theology in