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But
what if we were taught, more often than not, how to be kind to one another
through charity? Don’t you think sin would then take a back seat? Reading
about sin all of the time is depressing. . . .
 es, some persons claim that the
Church puts too much emphasis on the concept of sin, and that, if parents
didn’t scare children with talk of sin and focused more on
love, the world would be a better place. This argument can even lead
to the idea that we should accept everything in the name of Christian
love, and that we lack charity and are being
judgmental merely to speak about
sin. “It’s offensive to another’s
individuality,” they claim, “to say that something that ‘does
not really hurt others’ is morally wrong.”
Well, it’s a great sadness
that most parents do not teach their
children how to love. Love is hard work, and most
parents shrink from that work. When children do something wrong, for example,
it’s far easier to tell the children they will go to hell if they misbehave
than to show them consistently, by example,
that all behavior should be inspired by love for God. And so the children
grow up being afraid of hell and understanding nothing
about true love.
Still, sin is a
reality. In psychological terms, sin can be described
as a sort of infatuation with the vanity of our personal desires.
That is, most people are narcissistically preoccupied
with their immediate desires and have little, if any, altruistic awareness
of anyone or anything else around them. Psychologically, this behavior allows
you to feel good about yourself (that is, to feel strong and “in
control”) by using, hurting, or neglecting someone else. Sin therefore
leads you away from true love and compassion, and it sends you right into
all the predicaments of self-indulgence. Sin really does hurt others because
sin defiles love.
Sin, as an act of free will,
defiles the very love that created free will. God created
free will as an act of love so that we would be capable
of sharing in His love. But when we abuse our free will to seek our own
self-satisfaction, we spurn divine love.
To see what is required to overcome
this abuse, then, let’s look more closely at the meaning of love
in general and charity in particular.
Forms of
Love
Love, in its purest and
most divine meaning, refers to something so far beyond our comprehension
that it is, well, incomprehensible. Christian theology says that “God
is love,” but most us can grasp that concept only intellectually. Many
Catholic mystics through the ages, however, have had an immediate experiential
encounter with divine love, and they all end up saying essentially the same
thing: I thought my heart would burst and that I would die right
there.
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 But by reason of this secret
and intimate union with God, there remains in the Soul a sweet impression,
so firm and assured a satisfaction, that no torture, however cruel, could
overpower it, and a zeal so ardent that a man, had he a thousand lives, would
risk them all for that hidden consciousness which is so strong that hell
itself could not destroy it. |
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—Saint Catherine
of Genoa
Spiritual Dialogue, Part Third, Chapter X |
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This sort
of love is what Roman Catholic mysticism is all about: a love for Christ
so overwhelming that a person would risk anything and give up
anything to get close to it.
In order to understand this divine
love, however, let’s consider love’s other meanings commonly accessible
to general secular human experience.
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A
child’s love for a parent refers
to a natural emotional bond every child must make with a caretaker in order
to survive the helplessness of infancy and childhood. This childlike love
for a parent aptly describes the love we commonly feel for God as well—that
is, when we are not in mystical ecstasy experiencing a taste of love in its
most profound possibilities! |
• |
We also naturally love our siblings
within our families; this is called brotherly
love, and it is necessary for peace and growth in
families—although sibling rivalry often manifests in
dysfunctional families. |
• |
What we commonly call
romantic love, or
erotic love (from the Greek eros),
is far from true love. Romance—in all truth,
and contrary to popular sentiment—is really a mixture of two things:
a dependent, infantile attachment to a caretaker, and desire. Now, infantile
dependence needs no further explanation.
Desire, in the psychological sense, refers
to our attempts to fill ourselves with things that feel pleasurable or soothing,
so as to hide from ourselves the
reality of our essential human
emptiness and brokenness. When you look at
another person with desire, you do not see a soul enrobed in chaste beauty;
you see only your own exuberant fantasy that your aching throb
of loneliness might be alleviated. Romance, therefore, is the desire to fill
your bodily emptiness with the body of another person—a person as broken
and empty as you
are.
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Desire isn’t
necessarily a bad thing, however. Although Buddhism, for example, teaches
that all desire must be
avoided,[1]
and although Christian theology teaches us that misplaced desire can lead
us straight into sin, desire can be raised to the
level of the divine. In fact, that’s the essence of the Catholic mystic
tradition: to desire union with God as the supreme desire. As the deer
longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God (Psalm 42:2).
In this mystical desire for God we turn away from the
illusory social
attractions of the world around us and turn only
to God for strength and refuge. That’s what
it means to “die” to the world. And that’s a necessary step
toward holiness for everyone—clerics, religious, and the
laity. |
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We can naturally love our neighbors,
too; this is called neighborly love,
or charity, and it, too, is necessary
for social survival—although aggression and war often stain all
societies. |
Charity Raised
to the Divine
Our natural human capacity for
charity is but a faint reflection of the divine love by which God created
and redeemed us. Yet when human charity is rasied to the level of the divine
through Christ, it enters into a true mystery. In regard to charity,
then, Christ told us something very important. Listen to what He
said.
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No one has greater
love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends. |
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—John
15:13 |
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Now, think about this. Why would
someone lay down one’s life for anyone except to save that person
from something?
And this brings us right back
to the topic of sin.
Sin’s
Antidote
The Hebrew word for sin,
hata’a, means to “miss the mark.” And so, to save
us from the emptiness of self-satisfaction into which we have wandered
and to bring us back to the point—the river of life—God gave us
his only beloved Son. In true love for us, God knew that only through his
Son’s freely willed Passion and death can the free
will of a hardened sinner be brought to sorrow
and contrition.
And so our task in life
is to accept the gift of redemption that God,
in His great mercy, offers us. We have only to
do as Christ commanded us—“As I have loved you, so you also should
love one another” (John 13:34)—by sacrificing our
pride and desire for personal pleasure in order
to help save others from their sins.
This, then, explains the Christian
meaning of suffering. Just as Christ suffered and
died for us, so we must “die” to ourselves: to “pray and make
sacrifices” for others (as Our Lady of
Fátima told the children), freely offering our suffering as the price
it takes to bring hardened sinners to
contrition. Remember, this capacity to suffer
derives from a love of such a firm and assured satisfaction that no torture,
however cruel, could overpower it.
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As long as you
are concerned about what you can get from life, you will always be
dissatisfied. Everything material—food, entertainment, drugs, erotic
pleasure—passes quickly only to leave us overpowered by cravings for
more. |
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True
love, therefore, is not about getting noticed or feeling accepted.
True love is a process of giving—not the giving of material things
that merely bribe others to like us, but the giving of qualities such as
patience, kindness, compassion, understanding, mercy, forbearance, and
forgiveness, qualities whose ultimate purpose is the salvation of other
souls.
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Now, many persons
today claim to love Christ. But do they really love Him? Are they
willing to do anything it takes to purify
themselves for His service? Or, instead of really loving Him, do they
simply take satisfaction in the idea of loving Him and let real love
wither and die in the darkness of their hearts? |
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In order to love others in the
way of true love, though, we have to see sin for what it is, in all its
pervasive, ugly reality. This isn’t at all depressing—in fact,
it should be a cause for joy, because seeing sin for what it is opens the
possibility of mercy. What greater charity is there
than this?
But if we can’t see sin
for what it is, then we aren’t loving our neighbor, we’re loving
his sin. And that is depressing.
___________
1.
Buddhism, an atheistic natural philosophy, teaches that all suffering is
the result of desire. Suffering has no value in such a philosophy, so it
teaches a deadening of all desire as an escape from suffering.
Many individuals, therefore, are drawn to Buddhist
practices because they seem to offer an esoteric “spirituality”
while making no moral demands on a person beyond the ethics of non-attachment
and acceptance.
But genuine spirituality
must embrace the redemptive purpose of sacrifice and suffering when endured
in love for others, as Christ demanded, and this true love, therefore, can
be understood properly only in the context of Christian theology. Without
God, there can be no love, only self-indulgence. And without a proper
understanding of love in the first place there can be no meaning in suffering
as the only means to overcome sin: that which
“misses the point” about love.
Considering all of this, it’s ironic that atheistic
Eastern philosophies have so many techniques for achieving self-denial and
self-discipline, and yet they know nothing about love of God. And so many
Catholics, who possess, through the Church, all the graces necessary to dwell
in God’s love, scorn the discipline necessary to make efficacious use
of those graces.
  
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