Why do we need a modern Sin Bin? Recycling sinners: Touching Base
It’s been a big week for sin. First, a Vatican official talked about sin in a newspaper interview. Not a big deal, they probably do it a lot of the time, but this suddenly became ‘Vatican announces 7 new deadly sins’, and before you could say Magisterium every blog and media outlet was following the story (but credit to Reuters for reporting the facts).
It probably didn’t help that the Vatican was slow off the mark. This particular horse was 2 laps round the track by the time they shut the stable door and pointed out that everyone had got it wrong (they should have asked Rowan Williams for advice on that one).
But it was all worth it for the this cartoon from Indexed (the Pope might not agree):
Sin When You’re Winning
Staying with horses, the weather accurately reasoned that a government who promote casinos probably weren’t going to tax gambling in the budget. After 2 days of the Cheltenham festival were cancelled, the wind abated, point made. The Director of Racing at William Hill estimates that around £500million is bet at Cheltenham.
Meanwhile the UK is inching its way towards a US-style gambling regime (a country which has 7 times the UK rate of problem gambling), and the BMA wants gambling to be clinically recognised as an addiction. We have to ask in this context whether it’s right for an iconic event in the gamblers calendar to have royal patronage. Maybe the Queen Mother, God rest her soul, liked the occasional flutter. She could afford it. 300,000 other people can’t. The effect on the jockeys is something else, and the bigger the sport gets, the more we’ll see the kind of breakdowns that have hit cricket in the last year or two.
Sin Tax: Error?
And so to the budget. Sin hogged the headlines there as well. As most of his budget for this year had already been written for him 12 months ago by Gordon £rown, the only thing left for Alastair Darling to do was an upward tweak on fuel, drink and smokes. The Beeb called it a ’saints and sinners budget’, thus accepting implicitly the new Vatican line that pollution is a sin.
Sin as a Power Tool?
What is sin anyway? The Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood (don’t click the link with the volume up, it’s not pleasant) depicts sin as a tool used by the church to wield power over people. When Pastor Sunday finally has the upper hand over Daniel-Day Lewis’s amoral oil prospector, he humiliates him by having him ‘confess his sins’ in public, and submit to baptism. In turn the prospector’s confession is a sham, he is only going through with the charade in order to seal a deal on some land. Neither churchman nor capitalist takes sin seriously enough.
There are over 20 words for ’sin’ in the Old Testament. This doesn’t represent an obsession, but rather a concern for accuracy.
Anyone who’s ever been to the doctors and been told ‘its a virus’, knows the limits of vagueness. No treatment, no comfort, no understanding of what to do to sort it out, just ‘a virus’. We long for a specific diagnosis, something to get our teeth into, a real reason not to go to work.
We want a specific diagnosis for sin too. This powerful clip from ER tackles this in a brilliant way, as a dying man seeks real forgiveness for his real guilt, and all the chaplain can give him is platitudes and psychobabble:
“I need answers. And all your questions and your uncertainties are only making things worse… I need someone who will look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness, because I am running out of time.”
I Don’t Want to Talk About It
The language of sin, at it’s best, is diagnosis of dis-ease. The original ‘7 deadly sins’ tried to diagnose the most common motivations for wrong behaviour, and the classical list of pride, lust, greed, laziness, envy, gluttony and anger does cover a multitude of sins. Fr Girotti’s interview was an attempt to apply these to specific situations, and to social sins in particular.
Unfortunately, when you talk about sin people get all defensive. We don’t like being accused of stuff. We don’t like being in the wrong.
But unless we discover that we are in the wrong, and deal with it, sin will never go away, and other people will suffer. A leader with no sense of sin, and his own fallibility, is a curse upon his people (ask a Zimbabwean). A parent with no sense of sin and fallibility is a curse upon their family. We may not like the language - maybe it’s our cultural aversion to guilt - but we can’t escape the reality.
John Ortberg writes (with a bit of paraphrasing):
“Some time ago I became painfully aware that I had lied to a good friend. This had several consequences:
- I walked around under a cloud of guilt
- a silent breach opened up in our relationship because I had placed a barrier of untruth between us
- I was a bit more inclined to tell a lie next time
- I found myself avoiding God.
When I recognised all this, I knew I had to confess to my friend. Even then it took me some time to face my embarrassment. However, when I’d looked at the results of my actions as honestly as I could, a wonderful thing happened: I found myself not wanting to lie again. Unravelling the knots of the motives and consequences of our sin requires a patient, quiet spirit. But what price wouldn’t we pay to be free?”
Wrapping Up
As Easter week starts, we’re reminded again of how desperately God wants to forgive sins, to the extent of his own suffering and death. The journey to the Cross is not a guilt trip. It is both a mirror on the human soul - that the best man who ever lived is condemned by his peers and executed by his own rulers - and a mirror on the soul of God. When Jesus is tortured and killed and still prays ‘Father forgive them’, that shows us a God who is always, relentlessly, looking for a way to inject grace. Sin is not about feeling guilty, it is about getting better, and opening ourselves up to God’s help to do so.
I’m told that the rug makers of North Africa deliberately put a mistake into every item they make. It’s a spiritual act, to remind them that ‘only God is perfect’. It’s ok to be a sinner. God knows you are already, and can cope with it.
Can you?
David Keen is a sinner, and blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor.
Categories: All WW, Columns, Touching Base
‘Non-union moat diggers’ has to be one of the best one-liners I’ve seen.
The main thing here, I think, is the Vatican trying to assert itself as a valid source for moral guidance in the modern age by engaging with contemporary issues. Unfortunately, it is unable to see that morality by diktat has no persuasive ability; it’s fine for people who are already convinced, but merely saying that seven essentially random things are bad without explaining the reasoning behind them will do little to ‘bring people into the fold’. The reasoning behind it, however, has not changed at all.
The problem then is that they need to explain context, and the worldview behind it - which brings us back to the problems of communication, attention span etc that everyone has.
Agree with Matt. The blogosphere/media created the ‘new 7 deadly sins’ headline, and then used the traditional grid we use on everything coming out of the Catholic church - that they must be trying to impose morality on the rest of us. The reasoning is there, and if you attended Fr Girottis week-long seminar on confession then it’s probably crystal clear, but all that most of us know about is the list of 7.
The challenge is to get past the headlines to a decent debate on human nature. At the moment our politicians are trying out all sorts of ‘treatments’ (e.g. multiculturalism) without really working out what the disease is.