Sin Before Death

 Why do we sin? Why do we do that which we do not want to do, as Paul laments in Romans 7? Why are we even attracted to it, if it is not good for us, offends our Master, and earns the wages of death?

Pious Catholics can sometimes imagine themselves as martyrs, resisting sin at the barrel of a gun. But the fact of the matter is, most of us disrobe willingly rather than by force and walk into sin's chamber of our own accord and desire. This is the eternal mystery of concupiscence, and can leave us flabbergasted when we wake up feeling the piercing rays of morning-after shame on our cheeks wondering "how did I even get here?"   

There are many reasons why we fall into sin, and I think there are a few:

We desire the perceived pleasure of the act.

We shrink from the pain of resistance of the act.

We fall into the act through ignorance like blind men into a pit.

We minimize the consequences of the act and rationalize it.

We weigh the pros and cons and determine that the cons of the act do not outweigh the pros.

We feel powerless to resist the act because we do not trust God to be able to deliver us.

We buckle under the tension, tricked into thinking that if we give in we will have peace.

Most of us sprint out of the gate at the beginning of Lent, forgetting that it is a marathon and not a sprint, relying on our own inner reserves and resolutions to carry us. But a good reminder of the peril of this way of thinking can be seen in the story of Fr. Walter Ciszek's humbling while in a Siberian prison camp:

"Initially, Fr. Ciszek wasn’t too worried. He was innocent, after all. And he had "a great deal of confidence" in his ability to stand firm against any interrogator.

His strength, discipline, and habits of prayer certainly helped. But Lubianka wore him down with its constant hunger and isolation and the all-night interrogations, with their mind games and agonizing afterthoughts. After a year—brutalized, drugged, threatened with death—Ciszek did what he had been sure he would never do: He signed papers that gave the impression he had been spying for the Vatican.

Afterward, burning with shame and guilt for being "nowhere near the man I thought I was," he finally faced the truth.

'I had asked for God’s help but had really believed in my ability to avoid evil and to meet every challenge. . . . I had been thanking God all the while that I was not like the rest of men. . . . I had relied almost completely on myself in this most critical test—and I had failed.'

The interrogations continued, and Ciszek fell into black despair. Terrified, he threw himself on God, pleading his utter helplessness. Then, in a moment of blinding light, he was able to see "the grace God had been offering me all my life."

'I knew that I must abandon myself completely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God. And I did it. I can only describe the experience as a sense of "letting go," giving over totally my last effort or even any will to guide the reins of my own life. It is all too simply said, yet that one decision has affected every subsequent moment of my life. I have to call it a conversion. . . . It was at once a death and a resurrection.'

Many pious Catholics imagine themselves echoing St. Dominic Savio's words, "Death before sin!", which reflects a rightly-ordered spirit, that of St. Peter willing to go to Christ's death with him. But the mystery of how he "ended up here" in the courtyard denying he even knew the man he vowed to join in death is a sober reminder of the comradeship that we share with concupiscence. We are not saints, my dear. We can be. We want to be. But the day is already long spent, and we are still far from home.   

No, the fact is it is not death before sin for many of us, but sin before death. A little compromise. A small withholding. A failing in love. Death is final after all, foreign and scary, whereas we have known sin all our lives. What's one more concession with an old friend to keep that finality at bay? God is a God of understanding. He gets us. 

The hard balance during Lent is the struggle with the wily law (of the Church). "We are called to fast today" suddenly becomes "Man, I'm hungry all of a sudden."  Or the pet serpent sliding in to suggest to us "did you really make this resolution and expect to keep it? Did God really say..."

"You have not resisted sin to the point of blood" (Heb 12:4) and perhaps God will spare you from doing so, if you trust Him and it be His will. But then too know that the trials of our faith, tested by fire, are more precious than gold (1 Pt 1:7). And "there hath no temptation taken hold of you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful; He will not suffer you to be tempted beyond that which ye are able to bear, but with the temptation will also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it" (1 Cor 10:13). 

Lent is your proving ground to be faithful in small things so that eventually you will be entrusted with larger things (Lk 16:10). It is your opportunity to die daily to self, without actually dying in the flesh. You will get weary. You will get worn down. Do the little things well, and the big things will come in their due time. In the garden we were promised to live forever, and yet that our parents would die if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:16-17). There the serpent said "you will not die."

But when he slithers out to our fort in the desert of Lent, he tells us the opposite: "Without sin, you will surely die."  "No man can resist sin; it is the lot of all men." This is when you must keep your eyes on Christ and double down in prayer, begging for the blanket of the Holy Spirit to cover you, for our Lord promises us that he gives all the grace necessary to resist sin, and that it is in fact sin which brings death. When we are hungry, pent-up, under siege, bored, tired, complacent, our minds become cloudy and quick to fold under the weight of our discomfort. 

That's why we spend time with these "little things," little hungers and penances, so that when we are faced with the big things--like Death itself--we will know we can live without sin and all its empty promises and pleasures. We can see through the voluptuous figure of the flesh to the rotting skeleton of the corpse beneath it, to see life and death in its true form.

So, pace yourself. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Do not trust in your own strength. If you fall, get up and confess and get back on the horse. God is patient and merciful, and we are often harder on ourselves than he is on us. Death before sin, but it is not yet our time to die. Skip the snack --not as a "no" but as a "yes" to love of God. When hunger pangs hit, praise His holy Name. Give up the thing. Forgive yourself quickly when you fall, and do not judge your brother either. Get used to little deaths so that you might live.