24 — SIN

Presence of God. — O Jesus crucified, make me understand the great malice of sin.

Meditation

1 — The essence of Christian perfection consists in union with God through charity. Now, while charity, by conforming our will to the divine will, unites us to God, sin — mortal sin — by directly opposing the will of God, produces the contrary effect. In other words, charity is the force that unites man to God; sin is the force that separates him from God. Mortal sin is thus the greatest enemy of the spiritual life, for it not only assails it but destroys it in its constitutive elements — charity and grace. And this destruction, this spiritual death, is precisely the inevitable consequence of sin: the act by which man voluntarily detaches himself from God, the sole source of life, of charity, of grace. As the branch cut from the trunk cannot live, so the soul separated from God cannot live.

If God, as the cause of all being, is always present in the soul of the sinner — in the same way that He is present in all things — He is not present there as Father, as Guest, as a Trinity who offers Himself to the soul as the object of knowledge and of love. Thus the soul, created to be the temple of the Trinity, has voluntarily rendered itself incapable of living in communion with the divine Persons; it has barred for itself the way to union with God; it has, so to speak, compelled God to break with it every bond of friendship. And all this because it has preferred a limited and perishable good — the gratification of some miserable creature, some selfish satisfaction, some earthly pleasure — over the Sovereign Good. Such is the malice of sin, which repudiates the divine gift, which betrays the Creator, the Father, the Friend. “Oh! why do we not understand that sin is an open war of all our senses and all our powers against the Lord, a universal contest as to who can devise the greatest treacheries against one’s own King?” (T.G. Es. 14, 2).

2 — If we wish to understand more fully the malice of mortal sin, we must consider its disastrous effects. A single sin instantly transformed Lucifer from an angel of light into an angel of darkness, into the eternal enemy of God. A single sin stripped Adam and Eve of the state of grace, of friendship with God, depriving them of every supernatural and preternatural gift, condemning them to death, and with them all humanity. A single sin sufficed to dig an abyss between God and humanity, to close off for the human race every possibility of union with God.

But more than all this, the Passion of Jesus tells us how great is the malice and the destructive force of sin. The torn limbs of Christ, His most sorrowful death upon the cross, tell us that sin is a kind of deicide. Jesus, the fairest of the sons of men, was made on account of sin “despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows... He was wounded for our iniquities” in such wise that “from the sole of the foot unto the top of the head, there is no soundness in him” (Is. 53, 3-5; 1, 6). Sin has martyred Christ and reduced Him to death; but on the other hand Christ went to His passion and death “because he willed it” (ibid., 53, 7), because by His death He willed to destroy sin and to restore man to divine friendship.

And Jesus, our Head, invites us His members to associate ourselves with His work of destroying sin: to destroy it in ourselves even to its last roots — that is, in the evil tendencies — and to destroy it also in the other members. This is a law of solidarity, for the evil of one is the evil of all; every sin weighs upon the whole world and tends to shift its axis away from God. Therefore every Christian — and still more every soul consecrated to God — must feel himself strongly committed in this struggle against sin, and must combat it with fitting means: with penance, with expiatory prayer, and above all with love. The love of charity, when it is perfect, destroys sin more than the fire of purgatory, even without any external manifestation. This is why the saints were able to convert so many souls: God made use of the fire of their charity to destroy sin in sinners.

Colloquy

“O my God and my true Strength, whence comes it that, cowardly in all else, we are so bold in offending Thee? To this are the energies of the sons of Adam put! If reason were not so blind, they would understand that all the forces of men would still be insufficient to give them boldness to take up arms against their Creator and to continue the war against Him who in a single instant can cast them all into the abyss. But since in them reason is blind, they go like madmen to meet their death, imagining they will find life... O inaccessible Wisdom! It takes all the affection with which Thou lovest Thy creatures to bear with such madness, to await our healing, and to labor to procure it for us by every sort of means and remedies.

“Behold what amazes me. One has not the courage to overcome even a slight difficulty; one believes oneself incapable, notwithstanding every good will, of freeing oneself from an occasion and withdrawing from a danger in which the soul is ruined — and yet one has the courage and daring to rise up against a Majesty as great as Thine. What is this, my Good? What is this? Who inspires us with such boldness?...

“Ah, Lord! what hardness, what folly! what blindness! One suffers at the loss of some object, a needle... and then remains unmoved before the loss of that royal Eagle who is Thou, O God of glory!... What is this, then, what is it? I can make nothing of it. Heal, my God, such great madness and blindness!... The loss of so many souls afflicts me so deeply that I can no longer contain myself. O Lord, raising my voice to Thee, I beseech Thee to furnish me with some means of contributing to win some of them to Thy service, and to give me the ability to do a little good through prayer, since I am capable of nothing else... It seems to me that to save a single soul of the many that are being lost, I would sacrifice my life a thousand times!... It seems to me, O Lord, that Thou prizest more a single soul that by our endeavors and prayers we, through Thy mercy, gain for Thee, than all the services we could ever render Thee” (T.G. Es. 12, 1 and 2; 14, 4; Fd. 1, 7; Cam. 1, 2).