“Blessed would be the sins that left any shame in you”

The Blessings of Sin

by Regis Martin

When asked once about a sermon he’d just heard, the legendarily laconic Calvin Coolidge managed to summarize its theme in a single word: “Sin.” Pressed for details concerning the preacher’s views on the subject, President Coolidge added four more: “He was against it.” Where Coolidge himself stood on the matter, the record does not show. But it’s a pretty safe bet that he too was against it. Aren’t most people averse to sin? Yes, even as they perversely persist in the practice.

In the teeth of that apparent truism, however, I once knew a fellow who seemed so positively fixated on the fear of committing sin that he could hardly function. The odd thing about him was that he had just recently become a Catholic, a fact that surely ought to have relieved him of some anxiety. Instead he felt himself so trapped beneath the sudden and unforeseen avalanche of grace that he was simply too immobilized to move. Thus intimidated by the gift of an overpowering and undeserved mercy, he could not budge.

“What if I start sinning again?” he cried. I told him it would not surprise God in the least. After all, had he not made wise provision for human weakness and malice by instituting the sacrament of penance? Where the rate of recidivism, by the way, is one hundred percent. And it certainly wasn’t intended for the angels. The medicine box, we cradle Catholics would sometimes call it, where, to quote a lovely Irish poem, “Beneath the stirrup and the ground, / was mercy sought and mercy found.”

Provided, of course, one is willing to pass it on to others. And, really, there is no better way to drink the dollop of divine forgiveness than to demonstrate at least a minimal willingness to go and do likewise. In the chronicles of human corruption, we are told, everyone has got his or her own chapter. So why shouldn’t the need for forgiveness be equally universal? I rather think that was the point of the pope’s answer to the very first question put to him in that long and widely misunderstood interview that appeared in every Jesuit journal on the planet. “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” And pausing a moment to consider the question, Pope Francis replied, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

Holy halo! A sinner? The Holy Father’s a sinner? Pray, what sin could he possibly have committed? The answer of course is the same bloody sin of which we all stand convicted. Pride. Self-love. Whose aggressions stand athwart the truth of all that is real. Resulting in a self-exaltation as ridiculous as it is ruinous. “The only sin,” says Chesterton, “is to call green grass grey.”

.................

Read more here: www.crisismagazine.com