APRILS. 1995 VOL. 172 NO.

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A Sane Sense of Sin

HAT HAPPENS TO A GENUINE SENSE of sin when hell seems no longer in session? Even if hell exists, for young people it is far. far in the future. What's more, isn't Jesus the reliable Good Shepherd who just tells us to "be not afraid"? Jesus wasn't into guilt; Jesus was into loving. Guilt is bad for you. In 30 years of teaching religion in seven high schools and two colleges in the United States. Australia and England, I have found consistent responses from young people to the question, "Is it difficult to admit when you commit a genuinely serious sin?" "I consider guilt unhealthy because it tends to slow you down and keep you from living properly." "! don't even think about it unless it really hurts someone." "Guilt is very unhealthy because you're always down." "The feeling after the actual sin was bad enough, so why should I keep on thinking about it at all?" Actual quotes. For most, sin occurs only between themselves and some impersonal, iirbitrary law. made up in ancient Palestine or modem Rome to keep people from enjoying themselves. That is the reason some students waste so much class time trying to undermine the credibility of Scripture and the church. These are the only reasons young people have been given for moral integrity: "It's in the Bible." "The church says...." If they can overturn them, they can be free to have all the fun non-believers supposedly have. When asked what the core of Christianity is, they speak about being moral, which would make every moral Jew. Moslem and atheist a Christian. Conversely, if they could just rid themselves of their Christianity, they could rid themselves of "all those Catholic rules"the majority of which any non-religious woman or man of integrity would espouse. Further, at least when I get them, after 11 years of what they consider Catholic brainwashing, they believe almost unanimously that morality changes from age to age and culture to culture. Society decides what is right and wrong, then tells us. And our societythe media. Playboy, rock lyricshas decided on a quite different level of moral acceptability from what reigned in the Draconian days in which I was a lad. It takes about six months of relentless repetition to make at least some understand the difference between objective morality (rooted in the unchanging natures of WILLIAM J. O ' M A L L E Y , S.J., recently published Biiildit\g Your Own Conscience (Batteries Not Included) (Tabor), which attempts to teach morality by reason alone.

W:

By WILLIAM J. O ' M A L L E Y

When I get them, after 11 years of what they consider Catholic brainwashing, they believe almost unanimously that society decides what is right and wrong.

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appeals lo altruism or authority as it was to convince Hitler Youth to be kind to Jews. The way to begin with an audience such as ours is to convince young people that it is in their own self-interest to be moral. If, for instance, you are flat-out honest with your parents when they accuse you of missing curfew and lake the punishment without complaint, the next time you look guilty but are not, they'll believe you. Not exactly altruism, but a baby step closer, because the motivation is internalized, not merely confonnist. Moral Evil First, Then Sin. Although we frequently use the two terms interchangeably, there is a significant difference between moral evil and sin. Even good atheists with no belief in God or sin are well aware of the pervasiveness of moral evil (inhumanity). Whether there is a God or not. there is a web of human relationships, a moral ecology, that joins each of us in responsibility to all the human beings with whom we share this planet. It parallels the biological ecology that binds us in responsibility to the planet itself. Even the least religious can understand the fragility of the biological ecology. If any of us violates that web of relationshipsby shooting poison into the atmosphere, spewing chemicals into rivers, or even throwing a single hamburger box out the car windowwe all pay, even the perpetrators: an ugly, deadened, deadly world. Just so, there is an objective web of relationships between each of us and all our fellow human beings. If any of us violates that web by holding human beings in slavery, raping or murdering or assaulting them, or even lying to them, we all pay. even the perpetrators: a world in which no one can tnist anyone else. Perhaps there is no hell, but no one can deny the real effect of moral evil and of our attempts to deny our own guilt for it. Mean-spirited people inflict punishment not only on those around them but on themselves. It is what Don Richard Riso calls "the law of psychic retribution." Because of the objective nature of the human psyche, we bring upon ourselves a kind of punishment for our bad moral choices. Carson McCullers said the heart of an inhuman person becomes "hard and pitted, like the seed of a peach." Moral evil is a sin against oneself, in which we curtail our own freedom and gradually weigh ourselves down with the anchors of habit. It changes our characters, and by that very fact affects the people who care for us. Every moral evil is a failure to become what we might have been, and gradually it corrodes our ability lo be that fullest self. Our self-absorption becomes almost literal; we devour ourselves till there is no self left. What consistent moral evil does to our souls is captured in Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Grey," in which a handsome and gifted young man gives himself over to a

things), and subjective morality (our abilityand willingnessto decipher those natures), which does indeed change from age to age and even year to year. Moreover, ihey believe that the law or commandment itself makes the action a sin, rather than that the action is objectively sinful, and therefore the law was framed for people unable to figure that out tor themselves. It was evil for Cain to slay Abel, even though the Ten Commandments were published thousands of years later. If laws make an action sinful, it was sinful to hide runaway slaves and European Jews. Today it is not just the young who armor their minds against anything likely to lead to a guilt trip. Long confession lines have gone the way of the Coca-Cola bottle. Yet, leaving Catholicism aside for a moment, that sense of guilt (when the cause is undeniably real) is a very healthy human feeling, like the hunger pains that keep our bodies alive. It is a hunger in the mistreated soul urging us to make things right again. The healthy human soul turns guilt into responsibility first by acknowledging it, then by admitting it openly and then by doing something to change our deadening habits. What you get in a world without guilt is Auschwitz, gang rapes, pushers, saturation bombing, toxic waste dumps, drive-by shooters, terrorism. Is that the kind of world we want? If not. then we need legitimate guilt more than we would like to admit. Our societyand religious education desperately need to stop suppressing legitimate guilt. We forget that youngsters are just emerging from nearautism, where the only things real are those that affect them personally, and they are now at the most anti authoritarian stage of their lives. So if they are self-absorbed, chafing against the goad, why not start from there? It is as useless lo try to motivate moral integrity in the young today by

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life of self-indulgence, degrading women, exploiting others' weaknesses, defrauding his friends. But one day he notices that his portrait over the fireplace looks a bit different, and as time goes by it becomes so obviously shriveled and defonned he has to hide it in the attic, where it continues to mirror his corrupted soul. In class after class, I find kids definitely do not want to acknowledge, "I'm not O.K." They'll say 60 to 70 percent routinely cheat, yet will not admit the inescapable corollary that then they are cheats and dishonest. "No, I am a good and honorable person who cheats only when I have need and opptJrtunity." The same is true of lying, casual sex, character assassination, failing to give their parents an honest day's work fora $15.000-ayear subsidy. They dig in like balky mules before an admission thateven without reference to God or othersany moral lapse that one refuses to acknowledge is a He told to oneself. "I can preserve my guilt-free 'I'm O.K' image, even in the face of my own genuine culpability." When parents ask, "How do I get them to go to Mass," I say draw up a list of every cent you've spent since the child was conceived. Then say, "Okay. You're free to live here, eat our food, absorb our heat, raise our insurance, and not go to Mass with us. But you pay back that 200 grand first. And if you want to treat this as a handy hotel and not as a family, start paying rent." The problem isn't an irreligious child. The real problem is a self-absorbed ingrate. And fearful parents. Students bristle when I say. "Your mother carried you around for nine months with considerable discomfort, risked death to birth you, washed you, sat up with you. has dinner ready every night. If that woman asks, "Please, just go to Mass with us,' and you refuse, you've told me what you are: a mean-spirited swine. We're not talking sin, just about your right to feel good about yourself. A self-absorbed ingrate." They hate me for that. Because it's true. Not because "the Bible says" or " the church says." The facts say. If our adolescent audience is self-absorbed and antiauthoritarian, it is better to treat morality by reason alone first, rather than from catechisms of dos and don'ts. Cain's murdering Abel was evil. Tt was written right into the nature of what Abel was: not a sheep, but a human being, and Cain's blood brother at that. Children can understand things fall because they are heavier than air; that's the nature of things. So too they can understand the fact that fruit is more valuable than snowballs because it can feed people and

Our society and religious education desperately need to stop suppressing legitimate guilt.

therefore shouldn't be lobbed around in food wars. They can grasp that you can't herd human beings like cattle simply because human beings are a species far more valuable than beasts. To treat human beings like animals is to degrade themand oneself God's will was written into the natures of things long before God found it necessary to write that will on stone tablets. With painful irony, the narcissism of our young is not rooted in over-inflated egos but in their lack of any ego at all. We all have a penionality. merely from responding to the ways others treat us. But a true egoa personally validated ethos (character)comes only after a great deal of reasoning atid testing. Which our schools do not teach. Nor do even the best graduate schools, How else could we have produced Ivan Boesky? Aquinas said sinners don't think too much of themselves; they think too little of themselves. Healthy self-esteem would never demean the self to cheat on a quiz he or she will forget in less than a week. No one with a sense of self-worth would stoop lo the quick lie, the easy lay, without soon seeing it as a fault and making amends. The students who finally wake up and admit, "My God. he's right!" often say, "But what do I do now?" The only answer is to go back to the first wrong tum and start over. You've defrauded your parents; make a schedule now and stick to it. "But that's so hard!" Right. Like an alcoholic going off booze. But as A.A. claims, the first essential step is to acknowledge you have a problem, then resolve to change, then get someone with whom you have to check in pericxlically. You can't do it alone. That's what teachers and counselors are for. The Added Dimension of "Sin. " The word "religion" comes from the Latin re-ligare, "to bind fast." Religion therefore means a connection, and if there is no genuine connection between the individual and God through prayer (and, for a Catholic, the sacraments), there is no genuine religion. You may sign yourself Catholic checking into a hospital, but it is a self-delusion. Baptism doesn't dissolve after a certain number of disconnected years, but such a person is no longer any more Catholic in a real sense than I am still a Boy Scout. Moral evil perpetrated even by an atheist violates the horizontal web of relationships one has with every human being with whom we share planet earth. Sin adds another dimension to the same action: It violates the vertical relationship we have with God, with the one who opened the

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door to life, and therefore to all the joys and challenges being alive involves. Thus if your mother's expenditure of herself obligates you to gratitude, honesty and hard work, all the more does God's gift of existence itself obligate you. You can't say, "Oh. yeah, sure. I believe in God," and let it go at that, holding God in abeyance for those moments when you moan, "Oh, God, please... !" Not if you're honorable. Sin is one of the most basic terms in the Christian vocabulary, as common as grace and God. because sin really means being out of a relationship with God, being disconnected. The church not only preaches penitence, but promises forgiveness and a healing of that disconnectedness. There is unarguably a dark side to human nature, a penchant for screwing up. But there must be some virtue in imperfection, since God made us imperfect. Perhaps God made us that way so we could grow, evolve ever so slowly into the kind of person Jesus was. Like any psychotherapy, the sacrament of reconciliation is, on a strictly human, self-interested level, an invitation to be truly honest with ourselves about the ways in which we have betrayed our potential selves, those who have been generous with us, and the whole web of humanity. More profoundly, it is a way of apologizing to God for abusing the gifts of life and freedom.

The Greek word for sin is hamartia. an archery term for missing the marknot just making an error in judgment in a particular case, but missing the whole point of human life: not just the violation of a law, but an insult to a friendship with the one to whom we owe existence itselfand all the gifts that followed from that first one; not just a servant's failure to carry out a master's orders, but the ingratitude of a child to its parent. The whole scenario of a deteriorating relationship between child and parent is an exact parallel to what sin does to our relationship with God. We try to outwit, to the point where the relationship dies. Communication ends, and with it the connection. There is no longer much likelihood that a child and parentor a person and Godwill ever have an adult relationship, not when one side is a misunderstood victim and the other an arbitrary cop. The state of sin is an enslaved consciousness, a surrender of freedom, and one can get a real insight into its nature by comparing it to chemical addiction. Like habituation to drugs, habituation to sin causes a hiirdening of the heart. Even petty sins, if there are enough of them, can immobilize us, just as the tiny threads, which were hawsers to Lilliputians, incapacitated Gulliver. Like drugs, habitual sin becomes an unshakable habit, so that every next time makes it easier to absolve ourselves. And the

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indifferent sinner dies as a human being, just as addicts do. because one's best self never has a chance to be bom. The continued state of either sin or grace is what theologians call the fundamental option, one's whole basic disposition toward Gtxl. It is rooted at the depth of self, the soul, and controls the overall pattem and choices of one's life. Hitler and mob hit men have a fundamental option quite different from Thomas More and Mother Teresa. They are in two races, going in two directions 180 degrees opposite to one another. None of us believes he or she is as heinous as Hiller or as holy as Thomas More. The crucial question is: In which direction are you heading most of the time? It is therefore important to see that the fundamental option deadliest to good is not evil. The most lethal threat to our connection to God is bland indifference. As God says in the Book of Revelation: "I know you are neither hoi nor cold. How 1 wish you were one or the other! Because you are neither hot nor cold, 1 am ready to vomit you out of my mouth" (3:15-16). Sean Fabin, S.M., says: "The third chapter of Genesis [the story of the Fallt tells us ^^^^^ nothing about what happened I^HV at the beginning of time, but it is a story to explain what is happening all of the time." It is a skeletal sketch that every sin since then has duplicated: ingratitude, sell-absorption, the arrogance that believes we can get along without God. We can determine what is right and wrong, despite the quite explicit purfwses written by God into the natures of rocks, vegetables, animals and human beings. In those rare moments when we do open our eyes, we realize, like Adam and Eve, that we are naked and helpless. Not only have we tumed away from God, but we no longer feel at home even with ourselves and our neighbors. And like Adam, we resort to alibis: "The woman you put me with gave me the fmit, and I ate it" (3:12). The story in Genesis is not a historical record, yet it happens uncountable times every day. It may be a mythical story, but it tells the whole psychology of sin. George McCauIey. S.S.. puts it this way: "The sacrament of penance is a conversation between Christians about sin." Something very salutary in us wants to talk about the way we've misused the freedom God gave us. That is what reconciliation is lor: complete honesty with oneself, submission to the truth, being humbled into freedom. Like the prodigal, we come home again, rc-connected to our best selves, to the huniiui family, to the church, to God. When we approach the sacrament of reconciliation, we

take one liberating step away from self-deception. We become not just the observers of our weakness, but its accusers. We move beyond admission of guilt to a desire to be whole again. Christianity. Morality is about justice: living up to objective obligations set in place by our horizontal relationships with every human being and our vertical relationship to GtxI. Christianity goes much further; it is about love, which is very difficult for the selfabsorbed to comprehend. Real love is not a feeling. It is an act of will that takes over when the feelings fail. When Jesus enjoins us. over and above justice, to love our neighbors, he does not ask us to like them. He asks only that we give them respect, tolerance and patience. Often he asks us to challenge the neighbor, to stand up to bullies, to offer tough love. And he asks us to be solicitous of them, especially when we sense their need of healing. Passing by a beaten man in a ditch on the road to Jericho may not be immoral, but it is un-Christian. Perhaps the greatest burden Christianity adds to the burden of being a good human being and a grateful child of God is that, as we are forgiven, we must forgive. It is a burden we incautiously accept every time we say the Lord's Prayer. A moment that captures this difficult challenge is shown in the story of the prodigal son. The father sees the boy from far off and runs to him. and the father throws his amis around the boy and kisses him before he has a chance to get out his memorized confession. Justicemoralityrequires that, once atonement has been made, the debt disappears. Christianitylove requires that, even though one demands restitution of the thief, the thief himself is forgiven before that. Jesus said it from the cross: "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do" (Lk. 23:34). It is unreasonable for us to expect that of the young, especially in this litigious age. The best we can do is force boys who have been fighting to shake hands, even though they will continue to seethe within. But we also can convince them, by reason alone, that in order to consider themselves honorable they have to be human beings who respect one another and God. Grace builds on nature; you have to plow before you plant. If we can achieve only that much, they might then be ready when they sense the shadow of the Sower entering their lives. B

The way to begin is to convince young people that it is in their own self-interest to be moral.

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