Month: March 2011

This is the third of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here.

“A house divided against itself falleth”

In the course of these little considerations of the big theme of “original sin”, I have tried to locate our reflections in the propers for the Sundays in Lent. The Third Sunday in Lent would seem to offer a particularly dismal view of our humanity that complements perfectly the negativity, as some would see it, of the doctrine of original sin. To the contrary, I would hope to argue, since the doctrine of original sin is really part and parcel of the good news of human redemption. Without the honest appreciation of the sin-wracked nature of our humanity, it is pretty hard to make sense of human experience and the grace of Christ crucified.

In other words, the honest recognition of how compromised we are by the habits of sin is really the entry point to the transformative power of God’s grace that leads us as Dante puts it, “from misery to felicity.” It does so by working on our hearts and minds. We are drawn into the drama of our redemption. The doctrine of original sin belongs to that drama.

We are, in the words of the gospel, radically divided within ourselves. The many divisions and tensions and contradictions within the institutions that drive our social and political lives are really a further extension of the idea and the doctrine of original sin.

The doctrine of original sin is the necessary counter to a variety of social and political viewpoints in our world and day. It is the counter to the ideology of progress, the idea that things are always going forward, that our humanity is constantly on the march towards the more and the better, the better, of course, always measured in terms of the more. It is the counter to the idea that the future is ever brighter and the past always a yawning abyss, the proverbial dark ages. The doctrine of original sin reminds us instead of the perennial darkness of the human heart, the much more persuasive concept of “the heart of darkness,” to borrow Joseph Conrad’s title.

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“And the last state of that man is worse than the first”

It is a terrifying picture really, the picture of the darkness of utter desolation. It is something which our contemporary culture knows about or, at least, experiences in one way or another. We have all been there. “I am desolate and in misery,” the Psalmist says. You know about desolations and miseries. It may because of sorrow and loss; it may be because of hardship and troubles. It may be because of the enmity of others or it may be because of our own sinfulness. “Look upon my adversity and misery, / and forgive me all my sins.”

It can lead to a sense of hopelessness, the sense of utter futility, the sense of the empty nothingness of life.

We live, of course, in a world that is seemingly full of everything; there is a fullness of images. We are constantly besieged and bombarded by a vast array of images which flicker and dance before our imaginations. The consequence is that our sensual imagination is overloaded. What are these images? They are the images of violence and self-indulgence; in short, the images of destruction and consumption.

And yet, there is a terrible emptiness to this fullness of images. They are, as it were, nothing worth and quite unsatisfactory. But, they consume us. We are possessed by what beguiles us. We find that we are strangers to ourselves. We are alienated from ourselves.

What shall we do? Shall we empty our selves of these empty images through some heroic effort of will? Just disconnect the internet? Pull the plug on the TV? Perhaps, but is it really “nirvana,” a state of empty nothingness that we seek? For in the culture of images even the emptying ourselves of the images of sensual immediacy is to find ourselves empty and lost. Whether we are full of these empty images or aware of their emptiness we are nonetheless empty and lost to ourselves. “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.”

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This is the second of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditation is posted here.

“Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David”

Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy upon us. It is the recurring refrain, not just of the season of Lent, but of our Anglican liturgy. In a way, it is an implicit acknowledgment of the condition of our sinfulness, the on-going legacy of original sin, if you will, the mystery which we are pondering in this series of Lenten addresses.

The Canaanite woman in the Gospel story for the Second Sunday in Lent cries out for mercy. It is, evidently, not a cri de coeur that is restricted to the people of Israel. It is universal. She cries out for mercy to Jesus for her daughter who is grievously vexed with a devil, deeply troubled spiritually or mentally, we might say. But that whole idea of being vexed by a devil suggests the power and hold of evil on our souls. Somehow it seems that we cannot just go and do all that we would like to do or even believe that we ought to do for ourselves or for one another.

Paul expresses that deep sense of how we are divided within ourselves. He states the condition of our divided wills, “the good that I would I do not, the evil that I would not do, that do I do.” We are a divided house and we cannot stand on the power of our strength of will, crowing to the universe, like Frank Sinatra, that “I did it my way.” Time and time again, the Church in the liturgy through the Collects and the Scripture readings especially, reminds us of this deeply disturbing feature of our human lives, the condition of our divided selves, the reality of our corrupted wills.

And yet, to pray for mercy is to acknowledge this reality without succumbing to the utter hopelessness of despair. To pray for mercy is to be open to God’s power and grace which is greater than the contradictions of our being. This is an important point, I think, because logically there is something incomplete in defining ourselves negatively. It presupposes something positive. Sin, original sin, is about privation, a lack or absence of being and truth. But it is totally dependent upon what it denies. Sin is nothing in itself.

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“Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table”

It is a powerful and amazing Gospel story. And very disturbing. I wonder if we can hear it. Sometimes, I think, ours is the culture of fragile, wounded and broken souls, strong, perhaps, mostly in its sense of entitlement and in its sense of injury. This story surely disturbs and disquiets us. Why?

Consider what we see here. A mother whose daughter is sick. Ordinarily, we may uphold the strength of a parents’ love for their children as being quite powerful and most strong. Isaiah, in a remarkable passage asks the question whether “a woman can forget her sucking child” and suggests that even that form of love is not as strong as God’s love. “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you,” he has God say. His point is that our human loves are always incomplete in comparison to the divine love. “Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands,” God says in a wonderful image.

And yet, we may wonder about such loves, the love of a mother for her child as a limited love and the unlimited, unforgetting love of God, in the wake of this story. We may see here the power of a mother’s love for her daughter, to be sure, but we may question the love of God. If the love of God is what we are meant to see in Jesus Christ, then that love seems very odd, harsh and strange; indeed, disturbing. So what then are we to make of this story?

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