Sin

Refusing to please God makes us sad and causes us to suffer. The paths that lead us to sin are many, for example either because we doubt God’s love and his plan in our lives, or through ignorance, through a lack of knowledge of what the Lord would like us to do, or through disobedience: like Adam and Eve, we know what we must not do, but faced with a situation we say, no Lord, this once we have to let it go. Or through rebellion, because our prayers are not answered and, in a fit of anger, we turn against God.

Sin is worse than a snake, yet people love to caress it. When you sin, you are embracing a snake. We excuse sin, we accommodate it, we use words to play it down. Let us stop deceiving ourselves. In the Church, sins are grouped into venial sin and mortal sin. But venial or slight sins must not be neglected, for when you weigh them they are enormous. The repetition of sins, even venial ones, gives rise to vices, among which we distinguish the capital sins, the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us. These capital sins take root in our temperament or in wounds suffered in childhood or in the past. But since there is a part of the will involved, we can get free of them. According to the Fathers of the Church, the capital sins are diseases of the soul. For every spiritual disease, there exists a spiritual medicine. These capital sins are pride, avarice, envy, anger, impurity, gluttony, and sloth.

Pride is self-love, self-sufficiency, vanity, contempt, arrogance. It is a disordered, excessive love of oneself. The proud person places his personality at the center of the world and even at the center of himself. He believes himself superior to others. The remedies: Desire humility; acknowledge that one has been wrong; learn to turn more toward God; cultivate discretion. Avarice is an excessive attachment to money, an inability to spend money out of an excessive concern to keep enough of it. The remedies: we must remember the origin and the purpose of the goods we have. Give in particular to the destitute, and give freely. Envy, jealousy: one can be jealous when one does not esteem oneself enough. The remedies: acknowledge one’s jealousy; avoid comparisons; recognize one’s own good qualities and put them to use; accept that one is not perfect; strive to be more in the register of praise than in that of complaint and criticism. Anger: The remedies: exercise patience; learn to give up perfectionism; step back and take a broader view.

Impurity, lust. It is when sexuality turns away from its purpose to become possession. Impurity reduces the other person to their body. Impurity is something that gnaws at certain people like a cancer. It blocks the spiritual life. One of the most terrible temptations that the devil can stir up in our time is that of impurity, which each day drags thousands of souls into hell. And once one is caught up in this shameful passion, one has all the trouble imaginable in getting free of it. The remedies: Chastity: mastery of one’s sexuality. Either one commands one’s passions and one is at peace, or one lets oneself be enslaved and one is unhappy; be willing to fight, do not let yourself be demobilized by the discourse of today. Avoid certain magazines, certain films, certain kinds of music, certain places, and even certain friends. Speak with words that inspire respect, avoid being coarse. Do not cultivate certain thoughts. Know how to master yourself. Do not believe yourself invincible. Renounce in certain situations; flee so as not to give in; keep hope: because sexuality is far more controllable than one thinks.

Gluttony: The remedies: Do not let yourself be guided solely by pleasure. Does my body need this, or is it merely a craving? Sloth: Sloth in the relationship with God, weariness of the soul, spiritual anorexia, distaste for the things of God, a desire to go looking elsewhere. The remedies: we must rediscover prayer; do not wait until you have regained a taste for mental prayer before beginning to pray.

Sin draws us away from God; it leads us to eternal death. Jesus says that he came for the sick; even if you are full of sin, do not be discouraged. We have gifts from God, such as the sacrament of reconciliation, which is the act through which we run to seek God’s mercy; another gift of God is the season of Lent, this period of 40 days to help us make an introspection, a review of our life, an examination of conscience, and to see the dark points of our lives and bring light to them, to see the sins with which we have grown familiar as well as the acts of love we have set aside, and thus to begin learning to get free of them. Fasting must not be only an abstaining from food but also the beginning of our journey toward abstaining from sin. For it is not what enters the body of a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out (Mt 15:11). The Lord loves us, and what he expects of us is that we return to Him.

Gladys Ngoko