What Kind Of Sinner?

 (Reflection prepared for our vocation department's social media)

Wednesday of the 1st week of Lent

The people of Nineveh were said to be wicked enough to have their wickedness rise up before God (Jonah 1:2) and yet Jesus offers them as an example of repentance. (Luke 11:32) And their conversion was indeed thorough; even the animals had to fast and wear sackcloth! (Jonah 3:7-8)

This can serve to remind us—notwithstanding our often sloppy speech about spiritual things—that saint is not the opposite of sinner. A saint is just a sinner who has refused to let the experience of sin—the boredom, frustration, and unhappiness of its ‘empty promises’—harden and close his heart, but instead has allowed this pain to break his heart open, open to God and to his fellow sinners in their suffering.

On this our Lenten journey toward either baptism or renewal of our baptismal promises at Easter, let us make up our mind to be that kind of sinner.

Pornography, Confession, and Amendment of Life

Recently I saw online a video of a priest preaching about folks who go to confession over and over with the same sin—in this case, pornography—and how they may be 'abusing' God's mercy.

Certainly pornography is a serious issue. Any priest who hears confessions knows that it has become a serious public health crisis. It has the potential to deform imaginations and consciences and to weaken and even destroy real relationships.

And it’s true enough, to go to confession without any contrition or willingness to ‘amend my life’ (as we say in a common version of the Act of Contrition), would be something sacrilegious and a sin of presumption on God’s mercy.

But is that what is going on when people come to confession over and over, especially in the case of this particular problem? In my estimation, no. Or at least it must be rare. I think what is usually the case is that someone wants to make a change, to find freedom from the emptiness and ennui of this problem, but doesn’t know how to begin to succeed.

They want to make amendment of life, but fail. Why?

On Masturbation

I received a message via the contact form, and given that it touches upon an issue that arises with some frequency in confession, and which probably touches the consciences of many of the faithful who try to live chastely according to their state of life (whether in marriage or in the single or consecrated life), I thought I would answer in a post rather than privately.

Here's the message, with the personal details removed, of course:

I just have a serious question about our faith which needs a clear answer. I believe that you can help me reflect and understand what is really true. I am now...years old and I am still struggling with masturbation. I have tried many times to get rid of it. For the record, I was able to stop it for 8 months. However, there came a time that I can't resist it anymore. Honestly, it feels so natural but a voice in my head says its wrong. I am really confused if its a sin or not? This is a hard battle.

Deordination

Catherine of Siena is beautiful in the Office of Readings today:

The eternal Father, indescribably kind and tender, turned his eye to this soul and spoke to her thus: 

‘O dearest daughter, I have determined to show my mercy and loving kindness to the world, and I choose to provide for mankind all that is good. But man, ignorant, turns into a death-giving thing what I gave in order to give him life. Not only ignorant, but cruel: cruel to himself. But still I go on providing. For this reason I want you to know: whatever I give to man, I do it out of my great providence.

That's the whole story of misery and sin; we twist the good gifts God has given us into a sort of violence towards ourselves, We grasp at what is freely given to all and try to hoard it for ourselves. We cling to miserable little consolations rather than risk opening ourselves up to the Consoler who is the Spouse of the soul.

The moral theology of the devil starts out with the principle: "Pleasure is sin." Then he goes on to work it the other way: "All sin is pleasure." 

After that he points out that pleasure is practically unavoidable and that we have a natural tendency to do things that please us, from which he reasons that all our natural tendencies are evil and that our nature is evil in itself. And he leads us to the conclusion that no one can possibly avoid sin, since pleasure is inescapable. 

After that, to make sure no one will try to escape or avoid sin, he adds that was unavoidable cannot be a sin. Then the whole concept of sin is thrown out the window as irrelevant, and people decide that there is nothing left but to live for pleasure, and in that way pleasures that are naturally good become evil by de-ordination and lives are thrown away in unhappiness and sin. (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 93)

Cardinal Burke on Sinful Habits

I've been reading this book of retreat conferences for priests by Cardinal Burke. In one of the conferences on the sacrament of Reconciliation, the Cardinal speaks about certain special situations. The first is vocational discernment and the second is scruples. Here's the third:

"The third situation is that of the person enchained by a sinful habit. In this case the temptation is not the sin in itself, but the first and more fundamental temptation, the temptation to discouragement. Whereas as good pastors of souls we try to help the penitent to discover the roots of this habit and to heal them, we must first of all help him to not fall into discouragement. Once the penitent becomes discouraged, as Satan well knows, he will remain paralyzed and will no longer succeed in carrying on with his battle against sin. Acts of trust in Divine Providence, the intercession of Our Lady, Refugium Peccatorum [refuge of sinners], and recourse to patron saints are all every effective tools against discouragement." (p. 75)

This resonates with my own experience as a sinner and a confessor. If we are afflicted with sinful habit X, often 'stop doing X' is not the best strategy for our spiritual effort. Often it's better to look at the rest of our life apart from X, in order to (1) avoid the occasions of X, and (2) to find the function of X in our life so as to be able to heal the problem at the root.

As the Cardinal points out, the greatest temptation is the discouragement that makes us despair of ever healing our sinful habit. We give up whatever means are given to us to avoid the occasions of sin, we stop trying to let and abandon ourselves to God's Providence and the prayers of Our Lady and our saintly patrons. This is the danger that is usually much more grave than the acts of the sinful habit itself.

From My Confessor

I've taken to going to the Lateran basilica for confession. They're OFMs there and sometimes it's just easier to confess to a Franciscan in case I want to refer to our Rule or the Testament of St. Francis. Besides, Francis recommends that we confess to "priests of our religion." (Earlier Rule, XX:1) So here's a paraphrase of what a priest of our religion said to me last night:

In a certain sense it's a good thing for you to have an experience of sin, of being a sinner. There is so much suffering that comes to you as a priest in the sacrament of Reconciliation, and you must receive it with all gentleness and mercy, knowing yourself as a brother sinner who prays to God and celebrates his mercy together and in communion with his brother and sister sinners. Our Pope Francis has emphasized our role as confessors in this sacrament of mercy. You must know the suffering of sin, the frustration, the difficulty, the feeling of being trapped in precisely what you don't want to be and what you know is less than the person God creates. From this comes real compassion, the suffering-with that moves beyond superficial sorts of kindness.

On the other hand, this is not enough. As a priest you have an even greater responsibility to overcome sin, to be about all the means available to you to allow the Holy Spirit to defeat sin within you. Only with this will you be able to communicate real hope to those who come to you for confession; you must believe in the possibility of liberation from sin with a belief that comes from your own experience. You must know at least something of the rest and peace that comes from this freedom from sin--which is freedom for God--if you want your promise of its possibility to be genuine and confident.

So repent and be converted for God's sake, but also for the sake of your brother and sister sinners.

The Road of Iniquity

As a sort of token effort at interior consent to my new life in Italy I have been making my slow way through Manzoni's The Betrothed. I read some in English (trans. Bruce Penman, Penguin Classics, 1972) and then if I feel up to it I go back and try to read the section again in Italian.

About half done after a year, I came across this wonderful description of how it feels to be a sinner:

Our manuscript remarks here that the road of iniquity is indeed wide, but that does not mean that it is a comfortable road to travel; it has its stumbling blocks and its difficult stretches; it is a painful road and a tiring one, although it goes downhill. (337)

Fleshly Religion vs. Christianity

There is an idea of religion that is preached by the flesh, and it says--among other things--that religion is a sort of binary project, a choice between being a saint or a sinner. 'Saint' in this case means somebody 'holy'--given an idea of holiness as something that is accomplished or possessed, a sort of spiritual capital analogous to social, cultural, or political capital. Being a 'sinner' in this scheme is then the opposite: being impure, dirty, unacceptable, without value.

The God of this fleshly religion is at best a sort of cosmic landlord, a deity that allows us to live in the fleshly security and comfort of something like a 'state of grace,' so long as we pay the dues of our successful efforts to be 'holy.' Those who succeed in this holiness may approach their god with the rotten satisfaction of being his favorites, the children he likes best, knowing that they are better than the lazy, unholy remainder of humanity whom they imagine their god despising as much as they do.

Christianity liberates us from the tyrannical binary of this fleshly religion, revealing that holiness isn't like that at all. For the choice given to the Christian isn't whether to be a 'saint' (that is, according to some pre-conceived idea of sanctity we have woven out of our vanities) or a 'sinner,' but a choice that clusters around what sort of sinner we want to be. We have all sinned, and we continue to be sinners. Our choice is whether to be the sort of sinner for whom the misery and suffering of sin hardens the heart and spirit, or the sort of person for whom the experience of sin becomes a path to humility and gentleness.

We live in a world broken by sin, a world scarred by all of us who have taken the easy path of allowing suffering and violence to reproduce in ourselves, responding to hurt with more hurt. And this continues to happen because this broken world is inhabited by all of us broken-hearted people, folks whose ability to make good choices has been injured by the legacy of brutality to which we are heirs.

But the good news is that Jesus Christ, in his Passion and Resurrection, has taken all of the misery and suffering that we insist on for ourselves, all that we are at worst, disregarding, torturing, and killing each other, and has given nothing back but blessing and new life. In this Mystery he has blazed a new path for the humanity he borrowed from us through the consent of our Blessed Mother. This is the path of letting our broken hearts break open instead of closed, of allowing our experience of ourselves as broken and sinners to teach us the humility and gentleness of the Kingdom of God rather than the bitterness and disregard of the world and its culture of death.

Shrimp and Blindness

Ash Wednesday. My twenty-first Lent. Every Ash Wednesday I write some version of the same old post. So this year I won't. But if you want to read it anyway, here's a simple version and here's a more baroque one.

This morning I was praying on the fast today, and praying for inspiration about fasting during Lent. Into my thoughts came a memory and a new understanding. With the new understanding, came a new repentance.

Lost, Unworthy, Burning, and Sent

I was thinking about the calls of Isaiah and Peter as we have them in the readings for Mass today.

It's funny; we tend to think of heaven as pleasant, or at least comforting--at funerals we are consoled by our hope that the faithful departed are now on their final journey to heaven and we take courage for our own lives in looking forward to heaven ourselves--but the prophet Isaiah, faced with the heavenly court, is afraid. Finding himself in that blessed firmament, the first thing created after the light, Isaiah can only say, "Woe is me! For I am lost." (Isaiah 6:5a, RSV)

et vobis fratres

Yesterday at our house chapter one of the friars brought up a tradition I had never heard of. He said that at one time, when a friar was transferred from one place to another, he would kneel in the middle of the refectory before leaving, asking pardon of any of the brothers whom he might have offended and announcing his forgiveness for anyone he might have sinned against.

It seems to me a pity to have lost such a thing.

Maybe I'm being overly dramatic or indulging temptations to shame, but I think of my various transitions in the Order, my moves from one place to another, and I can't help but imagine that my heart and my vocation would be more at peace if, before leaving a place, I had the chance to kneel in the middle of the refectory and ask the brothers' pardon for any way that I had sinned against anyone, and to say that in whatever way I was able to accept the grace of forgiveness from God, I desired to forgive them too.

Vocation and Pathology

From time to time I'll see something ranting against celibacy, saying that it's a pathological choice or at least can't be healthy, etc. It seems to me that these usually fall into the kind of black and white thinking that doesn't take seriously the work of grace.

Sure, some people take up the celibacy of religious life or the priesthood for imperfect reasons, and even from pathology. And, of course, some celibacies end in disaster and suffering not only for the would-be celibate, but also for others, as we know all too well in our time. In religious life one has the joy of seeing old celibates for whom the charism has worked as advertised, having broken them open to a chaste and non-exclusive love for the world which reflects the love of God in its own particular way. But one also gets to see the celibacies that have gone wrong, leaving celibates dried up in an affective dead-end.

One can say the same things, mutatis mutandis, of marriage, or of any vocation we enter into with every good intention, but as the wheat and weeds of our blessed and broken selves.

The danger is to think that reasons and motivations are all good or all bad. We are mysterious messes, made of the goodness in whose image we are created together with the festering and rotten injuries left by the effects of sin. Can God call us to the vocation he gives us for our salvation--and for our chance to participate in his salvation of the world--as this total person? In other words, can God call us to our vocation with both our good reasons and bad for our attraction to the choice, with both our sanctity and our pathology at work? Yes. It's called redemption.

When it works, when someone succeeds in surrendering to this work of salvation, it's a truly blessed and amazing thing. Pathologies are flipped, turned inside-out--pick your metaphor--by the opportunities for grace and growth that the vocation brings and become gifts given for the encouragement of others and their salvation. Just because it sometimes doesn't work when we don't succeed in surrendering to grace, just because sometimes pathology swallows up what would have been sanctity and uses it for its own rotten and meaningless ends, that doesn't make it the fault of the vocation.

The Deepest Sadness, the Greatest Danger

In my current state of being between assignments, I've been able to get to several books I had meant to read but never did. One of the books I'm in now is Dom Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia, which has already shown up in a couple of posts. It's one of those books that I'm so grateful to have finally got around to reading. Sometimes I think this is an operation of grace; the Holy Spirit means for us to read a certain book at a certain moment in the journey, and makes it happen just that way.

Another book I had meant to read but never got to until now is Peter Steinfels' A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Whether you agree with Steinfels or not, it's an important book. Though still fairly recent (2003), it's a little jarring how dated it already feels, given certain events in the Church: the election of Benedict XVI, Summorum pontificum, the election of Timothy Dolan as president of the USCCB, etc.

I'm enjoying the book, particularly in its communication of a love and reverence for the whole of Catholic experience in the United States. As a convert without a family history in the Church, that's something good for me to sense and feel, and to hold in reverence.

What grabbed me for a post today, however, was a little line in the section in which Steinfels is correcting nostalgia for the liturgy before the reforms following Vatican II, as if this were a time of universal reverence and awe before the mystery of God. As an effective strategy for doing this, Steinfels describes the experience of being an altar boy in the days before the Mass of Paul VI: "Other priests quickly communicated to the altar boys a smug familiarity with all things sacred, a kind of authorized irreverence in which we were privileged to share." (177)

How that speaks to my experience! Not that I was ever an altar boy, but I have received the same initiation: 'Here you go, brother, accept this false liberation to which you are now entitled by being admitted to our little club. It will only end in sadness and is ultimately ordered to your damnation, but for now let me admit you to this happy irreverence that frees you from worrying about God and lets you relax and be yourself.' Boo.

I remember in one place I lived we had a public chapel where there was adoration of the Blessed Sacrament each weekday afternoon. I would often spend some time praying with the odd assortment (one has to admit) of folks who would come. One day when I was going to the chapel one of the priests asked me bemusedly if I was on my way to join those who spent their afternoons "quietly screaming at the wafer."

That comment hit me so hard that I could hardly pray for a couple of days. It's bad enough that a priest was making light of the real presence of Christ in the sacred species. In a way, though, I was even more bothered by the way he was mocking the prayer and piety of the people. Fine, maybe adoration isn't your thing, or not the way you pray. Maybe you even think it's contrary to the spirit of the reformed liturgy. (You're wrong, but that's not the point.) But none of this grants permission to treat the grace of prayer in someone--as imperfect and confused as it is in any of us--as an inside joke on which we build our own rotten and fleshly communion.

It just goes to show how vigilant and cautious we have to be in any of our disagreements and conflicts. The world, the flesh, and the devil get into them so easily.

When we invite each other into the false liberation of the "smug familiarity" and "authorized irreverence" for the things of God, it won't be long before we are also trying to build our rotten solidarity on irreverence for persons and their experience. And the incarnation has rendered all irreverence for the human person a sacrilege.

On Being an Unreasonable Person

One of the most dangerous things in community life is the idea that I'm a reasonable person. Of course it is true that salvation, at least in this life, consists in becoming reasonable. The only-begotten Word, the logos of God, who is Reason and Wisdom, became man so that my injured and sick humanity might be renovated in the divine Reasonableness.

As St. Paul says in St. Jerome's translation, being transformed in mind rather than conformed to this age is our rationabile obsequium, our 'rational' service. In Paul's Greek, it is λογικὴν λατρείαν, our 'logical' worship. To become rational, logical people in the logos, is our happiness and freedom and salvation. (Romans 12:2)

But this salvation is a work in process. A brother might have grown from the unreasonableness of his infancy to have become reasonable in some areas; he might be a reasonably good preacher or liturgical presider, or a reasonably good friend or listener or cook or cleaner, but most of us are not yet saints and remain unreasonable and immature in various ways. Often these can be blind spots or eccentricities or family of origin roles of which we are in denial or don't even notice, and this makes it all the easier to notice and get worked up by the annoying craziness of others while simultaneously forgetting how much unreasonableness the rest of the community puts up with from us ourselves.

Of course this is an application of the Lord's advice to notice the wooden beams in our own eyes before we are solicitous to remove the speck from the eye of our brother. The world, the flesh, and the devil are all eager to help us make excuses for our own faults and sins, so long as we deny any excuse or benefit of the doubt to others.

When I forget that I too am still an unreasonable person, I remove from myself the protection of remembering how much pointless idiosyncrasy and maladaptive eccentricity I am forgiven on a daily basis, and the world, the flesh, and the devil will have an easier time tricking me into condemning my unreasonable brother or sister.

Inverted in Many Ways

The other day I was paging up a breviary and I came across the holy card from this post, and Fr. Venantius's reflection on a priest seeing his reflection in the chalice during the consecration. (I have three sets of breviaries going right now: Latin, English, and Italian.)

I was just thinking about how, most of the time, the reflection one sees in the chalice is inverted. It's like when you see yourself in a spoon; the concave surface refracts such that your reflection is upside-down.
Thinking on this, I'm reminded that the person I think I know as myself is not the same person known by the Creator. My distraction and sin distorts my self-knowledge. Coming to know myself as God sees me is the substance of the spiritual journey. So it turns out that you really should take the advice of your kindergarten teacher when she said to 'be yourself.' Trouble is, it's not something you can just do, but a long and sometimes terrifying work of the spirit.

Perhaps it's a trite reflection, and if it is I apologize, but maybe when I see my inverted reflection in the chalice I can be reminded that Jesus Christ died and rose into the Eucharist and the other sacraments precisely that I might be 'reverted'. That I, one who finds himself as a homo incurvatus in se, a human being bent over and turned back in on himself, might learn to stand up and be the flourishing creature willed by God. This new person, as he emerges in the course of my journey of prayer, might appear upside-down and foreign because of my confusion and my attachment to false selves, but this is an optical illusion of the spiritual vision. The image that appears to be upside-down only looks funny because my confusions and disordered affections have distorted my perspective; in the end it is he who will turn out to be the real me.

Walter Hilton on Slips and Detours

From the Scala Perfectionis, as quoted in Augustine Baker's Sancta Sophia:

"But if it shall happen sometimes, as likely it will, that through some of these temptations and thy own frailty, thou stumble and perhaps fall down, and get some harm thereby, or that thou for some time be turned a little out of the right way, as soon as possibly may be come again to thyself, get up again and return into the right way, using such remedies for thy hurt as the Church ordains; and do not trouble thyself over much or over long with thinking unquietly on thy past misfortune and pain--abide not in such thoughts, for that will do thee more harm, and give advantage to thine enemies. Therefore, make haste to go on in thy travail and working again, as if nothing had happened. Keep but Jesus in thy mind, and a desire to gain his love, and nothing shall be able to hurt thee."

Motivations in Temptation

If you struggle in temptation and fight against sin because you are in love with an idea you have of yourself as a holy soul or a religious person, you might succeed for a little while, but sooner than later you will fail and fall into sin. And this, in fact, is God's mercy, for you are only flattering the flesh.

If you struggle in temptation and fight against sin because you believe in goodness or morality or the sovereignty of God or because of your duty to observe the state of life you have chosen for yourself, you might succeed for a time, but eventually you will also fail.

But if you don't fight temptation at all, but instead rejoice to find yourself in temptations because you realize that in them God has found you worthy of embracing Christ crucified and sharing in his sufferings, and that this suffering is the resetting of the dingy sack of broken bones that is your mortal nature deformed and miserable in the effects of original sin--a procedure for which there is no anesthesia--then you have found the remedy for sin and the path from death to life.

Whining and Salvation

Once I was trying to pray and I realized I wasn't praying but whining. I was trying to pray in contrition for my sins. By God's grace alone I noticed that I wasn't contrite. In fact, I was annoyed at my sinfulness. The same thing went for trying to pray in temptation. I might have thought I was praying for the strength to fight, but really I was whining to God about having to deal with being tempted.

Sin bothered me because it wasn't really God that I loved. Instead, I was in love with the idea of myself as a holy person. My sins and faults kept pointing out to me that this wasn't the case and I was annoyed. This is the passion of vainglory. Sometimes a subtle commercialism would get into it too; I realized that part of me expected certain graces and holy victories in exchange for what I had 'given up' by becoming a religious.

To our shame sometimes we try to sell religious life this way; the emotional rewards of ministry and the fraternal intimacies of community are supposed to supply what we have renounced by our obedience, poverty, and chastity. Of course this doesn't work out, and we can come to see ourselves, half-consciously perhaps, as cheated. The flesh, after all, fights against abnegation; it wants something in exchange for what it is denied. Failing that, it wants something to numb it, and any number of self-medications are readily available in religious life, publicly and to our shame: alcohol, food, internet, video games, etc. All of this is very pleasing to the devil. Not that he's happy. In fact, he's miserable, and that's part of why he wants everyone else to be miserable too.

Every time I have any sort of trial or temptation--and by the grace of God they have become more terrible and subtle as the years have gone on--and I try to pray through the experience, the whine is there. It's the whining complaint of the unregenerate man who feels as though any suffering is an injustice to him, and any difficulty is an outrageous imposition. Fortunately and after some years I recognize him right away most of the time. I thank God for him as far as he teaches me the humility of knowing I have hardly made a beginning of living a spiritual life, and I turn my intention to thanking God for the tremendous gift of being tried or tempted.

Trials and temptations are the school in which God trains us in letting go of ourselves, our arbitrary tastes, and our attachment to our moods, opinions, and cravings. Not that this is an end of in itself; the purpose of it all is to help us to a greater freedom for charity. God desires that I become free from the tyranny of self so that my love of neighbor can be more complete and transparent. That's salvation. That's the Kingdom of God.

The Beginning of Humility

As I continued to reflect on the 'examination of conscience' post from yesterday, a quote from Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation came to mind. This happens often; the book had an early and deep influence on my Christianity.

"Everything you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values. It vitiates your choices so that you cannot clearly distinguish good from evil and you do not truly know God's will." (203)

The problem with being a sinner isn't just that sin offends God, or that by our sins we not only insist on our own misery but also inflict that misery on each other. Each and every sinful act we commit also deforms our mind and imagination. Every evil or detracting word forms and reinforces both interior and exterior speech in uncharity. Every unchaste movement to which we consent deforms our ability to see other creatures as God made them. Every self-indulgent act reinforces our taste for whatever it is.

The sinner must recognize and admit that because of sin, he or she can't think straight. Though we are made free and clean from original sin in baptism, the wounds of sin still fester in our bodies, minds, and personalities. To know oneself as a sinner is also to admit that all of our reflections and thoughts are also so tainted.

This is the beginning of humility: to recognize that, because of my sins, even my judgments, reflections, and discernments are not entirely trustworthy. I don't see things for what they really are because I have refused to do so by attachment to my sins. I don't know everything, I don't have the sense to say something about a lot of things, and I'm certainly not fit to direct myself in the spiritual life.

Whenever we notice that we are giving ourselves every benefit of the doubt and excuse for our failures and sins, but doing no such thing for others, we can remember that it's time to get back to this beginning of humility.

The Gift Is Not Like The Transgression

The feast of Bernard of Corleone today was my first chance to pray the new preface for "Holy Virgins and Religious." There was one change in particular for which I was grateful:

...For in the Saints who consecrated themselves to Christ
for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven,
it is right to celebrate the wonders of your providence,
by which you call human nature back to its original holiness...


I appreciate the "holiness." (The Latin is sanctitas) The old preface said "innocence."

The change reminds me that "the gift is not like the transgression." (Romans 5:15, NAB) The redemption we have in Christ is not just a restoration of the original innocence--or even the blessedness--of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Our salvation goes beyond even this to raising us to the holiness of the Origin himself, that we might come to participate in the infinite delight, joy, and creativity of the Blessed Trinity.

Jesus Christ is not God's 'plan B' for fixing what was lost in the fall. Christ accomplishes this, of course, but does even more, fulfilling God's eternal plan to make his rational creature a sharer in the originary, creative delight out of which everything else that is comes to be.