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Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
April 2003

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A MOUSE OF A SIN

When I was confirmed, I took St. John the Baptist as my confirmation saint. "A voice crying out in the wilderness," I thought, full of adolescent pride. I had priestly leanings at the time and knew almost no Catholics my age who looked to have any real conviction about the Faith. I would preach to my generation, lead them back to the Faith they had never really known.

Now that I am a little older and a little more humble -- if only as a result of years of sin and failure to do much crying out -- I find myself dwelling more on another of the Baptist's lines: "He must increase; I must decrease." And now that we have entered another Lent, I am once again dreading the inevitable question from the priest at Lent's end: "Have you drawn closer to Christ these past 40 days?" Has He increased; have you decreased? Do you think of His supreme sacrifice every time you find yourself thinking of a self-denied cocktail? Have you even been able to explain to your five-year-old why it is good to give things up for Lent?

These are not decreasing times. Not only is man often seen as the measure of all things, each individual man often sees himself as the measure of all things. The very existence of the Magisterium implies that people need to be taught and formed, and yet the Pope and the teaching Church are ignored on this, that and the other as a matter of course. When Hamlet declares, "What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god!" we are tempted to nod in recognition.

But Hamlet also said, "I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in." The trouble is we do not have eyes to see; we cannot imagine saying with the psalmist, "My sin is before me always." What sin?

Pick one, pick an easy one -- say, complaint -- and try to give it up. Try to control your tongue (to say nothing of your other members). Your first reaction may be to dismiss complaint as hardly any sin at all. Granted, it is not mortal. But is it not pride, the supposition that you are due better than you have received, you who have been given life and redemption by no merit of your own? Is it not ingratitude? Are you not grumbling after your fleshpots even as you are fed manna from heaven? Yet complaint is common currency, the stuff of small talk: "Let me tell you about my day...." It's a mouse of a sin, nibbling at the edges of the soul -- not as serious as detraction, or snapping at someone. Very well -- should it not therefore be easier to avoid? So go ahead, try to stop it.

You say you do it without thinking, that you're barely even conscious of it? That just means it's habitual, practically second nature, and therefore that much harder to root out. (Let's not even start on custody of the eyes.) So you start concentrating on avoiding the near occasion of complaint. You start catching yourself just after complaining, maybe wincing at the twinge of guilt. You start catching yourself before complaining, feeling good about your success and losing vigilance. After a while, you get tired of the struggle -- surely, you're blowing this out of proportion, expending way too much effort on such a minor offense?

And it is a minor offense. It's not the sort of sin that clouds the intellect, not a perceived good that not only outweighs other (more genuine) goods, but drives them from the mind's eye altogether. It is not one of the seven deadlies -- lust, greed, anger, sloth, gluttony, envy, pride. It is not the constant desire for more material gain, for the satisfaction of the senses, for self-justification. Those are much more serious, and in my case, much more firmly entrenched. I know there is danger is dwelling overmuch on man's wretchedness -- where sin abounded, there grace abounded all the more, after all -- but it helps to keep in mind those aspects of the self which must decrease if He is to increase. And I know that He must be the ultimate cause of that decrease. For now, I will work on complaining.

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