Citizen Columns

Citizen Columns >> Answer (June 15th, 2007)

Question

What is your faith's view of sin? Is it a single reprehensible act, or a pattern of behaviours that take us away from our fullest selves?

Answer

Imagine walking through the National Gallery of Canada and that instead of looking in wonder every visitor would spit, urinate or defecate on the paintings. That's what sin is. That's what we have done to ourselves and to God's world. It's "single reprehensible acts" and it's an accumulation of little lies and hatreds and resentments that together corrupts the "fullest selves" God meant us to be as individual persons and as a human race. Saint Paul describes what can be expected. "You must understand this, that in the last days times of stress will come. For people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the outward form of religion but denying its power" (2 Tim 3:2-5).

This depressing picture is recognizable but it is not the whole story. Even our collective sins cannot obliterate the beauty God has implanted in every person and in every aspect of creation. There are still pockets of stunning beauty in this world and in the people around us that remind us of the creation as it was meant to be. And even under the ugliest corners of the mess there remains beauty to be restored.

It is the Christian claim that Christ has come to restore the image to its divine beauty. But we need to ask him to enter our hearts and begin the work himself. "Come and abide in us, cleanse of from every impurity and save our souls, O Good One!" This is a prayer Orthodox Christians use daily, with faith that from his patient and persistent work within us, combined with our willingness to follow as his disciples, comes our own restoration and the transformation of the little patch of world we've been given to work on for a time.

Father John Jillions