Per Ipsum

There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him                                Proverbs 6:12-19 A few months ago I wrote about sin, in which I lamented the Church's historical tendency to "a way of thinking that sliced and diced, analyzed and categorized sin into smaller and smaller bits. I spoke of the relationship of petty sin to petty virtue. What I failed to say in my previous essay is that guilt is pointless. It is guilt that the Church is often accused of fostering by this pettiness, and to some extent that may be a fair judgement. Guilt is a kind of self-centered wallowing. Repentance, on the other hand, is an outward turning reach for The Other, a turning away from what pulls you down. The fundamental necessity is to empty ourselves in order to be filled with the love of Christ, not to keep, no never that, but to be overflowing into the world around us. The poet, ...

Then the man of God began to weep. (2Kings 8:11) I grieve. I have never been able to comprehend the hard positions over abortion, the binary world of all this or all that. The human, political, spiritual and ethical issues are much too complex for the sign waving, name calling, rush-to-the-extremes mess we have now. Sides have hardened again, as if at war with one another at the expense of both women and babies and I grieve. We're plunging into chaotic positioning in every state. There is much I don't understand and I have questions—many, many questions—some have been with me for a long time.  How can someone call themselves pro-life and oppose universal health care especially for women and children? Why doesn't supporting health care get the same energy as criminalizing abortion? How can someone call themselves pro-life and support allowing eighteen year olds to obtain military grade weapons with few if any controls? How indeed can they call themselves pro-life and refus...

  If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.   If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. 1John: 8-9 Recently a friend lamented some of the Church's failures, among them, focus on sin. I sympathize. Bishop Barron has said that leading with sin or leading with rules is a sure way to drive people from the churches. Two words are important in those two sentences, "focus" and "leading." The focus ought to be on our friendship with Christ, on His love and mercy. We should lead with that. But wait. Mercy? Doesn't that imply we need it? We live in an era in which the very word sin is frowned over. Someone very close to me announced—after following a new age spiritually program—that sin doesn't exist, it is a human construct. My answer to that was, "Have you read the newspaper?" On the other hand, many of us grew up under a form of Catholic pr...

  But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,   gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23 Last but not least: self-control. We struggle. I struggle. Even Saint Paul said " I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." (Romans 7: 18-19) That brings us back to where I started.  The fruits of the spirit are those things that manifest themselves in our lives when we've surrendered to the Holy Spirit and live in the spirit. They are signs not of our own efforts or holiness but of the Spirit itself working in us. It behooves us to remember that. On my own I can do nothing. In God's grace I can do anything.