TURNING AWAY FROM SIN

FEBRUARY 18, 2007

Wednesday of this week, February 21, is Ash Wednesday, the day we begin the penitential season of Lent, and commit ourselves afresh to do what we are told to do when we receive ashes: “Turn away from sin, and be faithful to the gospel.”

What does it mean to turn away from sin?

The simplest definition of sin is, no doubt, the one given by St. Augustine: any violation of God’s law.

Augustine packed a lot of meaning into his definition, but unfortunately, it has left many feeling the Church’s moral teaching is a rigid set of legalistic rules, and that God is only a lawgiver and judge. The Christian moral path, however, is not really just about keeping rules. It is about attaining fullness of life and avoiding death, about finding happiness and avoiding sadness and despair, about being free and avoiding slavery.

Augustine said that God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses on stone because people had become morally blind and could no longer see these laws written on their own hearts. How did this blindness come about? It was the result of Original Sin. When Adam and Eve chose their own will over God’s will for their happiness, and ate of the forbidden tree in the garden, their minds were darkened and their wills were weakened. They could no longer easily see the good, nor could they easily attain it. Now, they had to struggle to understand God’s plan for their happiness. Even though they desired to do good and avoid evil, their moral will was so weakened by sin that they found it very hard to control their actions.

The mystery is that we sin not so much because we want to, but even though we do not want to. St. Paul the Apostle spoke for all of us when he confessed that the desire to do good was in him, but not the power (Rom 7:18). He immediately added that “I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (7:19).

This is what happens when we sin. We desire to attain happiness, but make choices that harm us and others, leading us to guilt and shame. We aim at, say, self-gratification through comfort, pleasure, wealth, power, or fame; or we simply aim at getting what we want, without realizing that it won’t bring us happiness. We seek to impose our will, then discover we’re only agitated instead of being at peace.

The blindness and confusion brought about by original sin keeps us from being aware of our pride and selfishness. Nor can we see, in our false self-confidence, that our own will is destroying us. We muffle the inner voice of conscience, which is trying to speak the truth to us, and instead justify our wrong actions through unending rationalizations.

By following our own will, we allow ourselves to be deceived again and again, and the result is always the same. We lose more and more peace and control over our passions and appetites. We are less and less free, less and less able to see the truth of our condition of slavery, and less and less willing to admit it.

God’s law frees us from this sad condition. It is like a North Star that enables us to get our bearings and steer our lives toward the happiness we long for but cannot attain on our own. God’s law is like a navigational map that unerringly leads us to the life and happiness we seek.

By following God’s law, we free ourselves from the unbearable burden of trying to be gods ourselves, of having to make all the heavy navigational decisions alone, of having to chart a course for our lives with nothing to guide us except our own egos, and with no assurance that our path will eventually lead us to life and happiness.

The heart of happiness is love, and the problem with sin is that it never leads to true love, but always away from it. It was love for which we were created, and no one can supply the love our hearts long for except God. By our own wits and will, we are powerless to attain love. We must allow love to come to us.

God’s law leads us to God, who is love. He gave us his law out of love, to lead us to love. To obey God’s law is difficult, but God is ready to help us if we turn to him. What we need is to admit that we are in sin, that we have become lost in our efforts to be our own guides to life and happiness. To do this is to turn away from sin. Being faithful to the Gospel means faithfully trusting that the path of God’s law will infallibly lead us him, which is to say, lead us to the fullness of life and happiness for which we were created.

May you have a blessed and spiritually enriching Lent!

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap