Lenten Meditation: Original Sin II
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.