SIN: Can We Talk?
By Fr. Minimus
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 Sin speaks to the sinner deep in his heart; there is
no fear of God before his eyes. For he flatters himself in his own eyes that his
iniquity cannot be found out and hated. The words of his mouth are mischief and
deceit; he has ceased to act wisely and do good. He plots mischief while on his
bed; he sets himself in a way that is not good; he spurns not evil. Thy
steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, thy faithfulness to the clouds.
Thy righteousness is like the mountains of God, thy judgments are like the great
deep; man and beast thou savest, O LORD. How precious is thy steadfast love, O
God! The children of men take refuge in the shadow of thy wings. They feast on
the abundance of thy house, and thou givest them drink from the river of thy
delights. For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light do we see light. O
continue thy steadfast love to those who know thee, and thy salvation to the
upright of heart! (Psalm 36:1-10).
 It is difficult to write about sin. Not because sin
doesn't exist, as if one were writing about a phantasm of sorts, a figment of
one's imagination. No, the difficulty lies in the fact that denial about sin is
so rampant that our contemporary culture has convinced far too many of us that
talk about sin-to borrow the words of Shakespeare-is much ado about nothing! To
the extent that we who make up the Church are infected by today's culture, we
have abandoned our moral and spiritual duty by complicity in the effort to
banish the concept of sin and hence, talk about it, from modern and polite
society.
The reasons for this are many. Some lie in the
nature of sin itself. Some lie in the effects of sin. Sin is ugly business.
God created us to be and to do good. Sin is just the opposite. It is the
abandonment of our vocation to holiness. It is disobedience to the Divine
Law which has harmful and destructive consequences as a necessary effect.
First introduced through the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, into which we
have all been born, and subsequently experienced in the individual and
collective effects of personal transgressions, sin has grievously wounded
God's created gifts.
First, we briefly examine the pervasiveness of
sin. Sin is the polluted fountain from which springs the legacy of
inhumanity that man has left in every age and throughout every generation to
the present day. It is the source of the unhappiness of the individual and
society experienced throughout the ages. It has left us with abuses,
atrocities, excesses and neglect of every sort. It has spawned every
iniquity from fornication and adultery, to rape, pillage, slavery,
infidelity, homosexual acts, oppression, injustice, bribery, divorce,
contraception, abortion, infanticide, dishonesty, theft, impiety, deceit,
bigotry, religious indifference, materialism, and the like. The list is far
more extensive than the sins mentioned here and we have not listed the
individual and social effects of these sins, but these are representative
and they illustrate the moral cancer that sin is. These acts and all other
sins bring into human life degradation and disappointment that God never
intended man to experience. They have the ability to spoil the best of human
experiences and to weaken that which is strongest among us.
In the face of the overwhelming presence of sin
in individual and communal life, one would expect the reality of sin to be a
common topic. But alas, this is not the case, even though most religions of
the world identify some notion of sin or otherwise categorize blameworthy
behavior. This is more amazing when one considers that even atheists
regularly point out examples of unworthy and inhuman behavior, often
committed by religious people! To the extent that these protestations are
legitimate-and they often are-they are also implicit acknowledgement of the
reality of moral transgression, another definition of sin. One can conclude
that, theoretically, the overwhelming majority of the human race
acknowledges the existence of sin-especially when they are the victims of
it! Extremely rare among men are those who believe that there is no such
thing as a real distinction between good and evil. Nonetheless there is
still precious little meaningful talk about the reality of sin, certainly
not from the pulpits of many churches!
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