From "Occupied Territory" to Freedom In Christ | February 22, 2026

In this episode, we rethink sin not as a list of wrongs but as a power that shapes habits, culture and the heart, and we frame Lent as training in freedom through grace. Stories, theology and poetry converge to show how confession, prayer and the sacraments move us from bondage to hope.

• why images of sin as simple stains fall short
• Lent as a reset for deeper truth and renewal
• Feynman’s maps and how pictures both help and hinder
• the slow schooling of compromise and conscience
• sin as occupying power and infectious force
• confession as rescue and victory, not mere bookkeeping
• shared bondage and shared grace in the Church
• practical courage to begin again and recalibrate

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Host Introduction And Mission

SPEAKER_01 0:03

This is Living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. Deals with Living the Catholic faith in our living God's cousins in our lives and finding hope in his word. And now your host, Father Don Wolf.

Learning On The Road With Feynman

The Limits Of Mental Pictures

Turning Toward Lent And Renewal

Childhood Confession And Sin As Stain

Sin’s Current And Forming The Soul

Hazing Story And Stepwise Corruption

Sin As Occupying Power

Shared Bondage, Shared Grace In Confession

Freedom, The Kingdom, And Awakening

Catholic Universality And Sacramental Life

Faith In Verse: The Ashes Smudge Easily

Encouragement For Lent And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, welcome. It's a Living Catholic. I'm on Senior Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Wester Stanley Rother. I was ordained in 1981 at Our Lady's Cathedral. It was always my idea to be involved in the life of the Archdiocese, not just in one sole parish. After all, I was ordained a priest of the whole church, not solely one place. To that end, over these years, I've put more than a million miles on my car. 99% of those miles have been here in Oklahoma, and 99% of those miles have been in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Fortunately for me, in these years, I've had the chance to do more than simply drive. I've been the beneficiary of the developing technology of information distribution. That sounds complicated and intricate. It just means that while I drive, I can listen to talks and books and lectures. It used to be cassette tapes, then it was CDs. Later I downloaded and translated Facebook lectures to MP3 on memory sticks. Now I can just link my speakers with Bluetooth and listen to just about anything on the Internet. Father Mike Vaught, who was the associate pastor in Woodward when I was ordained, thought his cassette player was so important that he said once, if he had to choose one over the other, he'd give up air conditioning in his car in order to be able to listen to his tapes. A million miles on the road with the chance to listen and learn has its advantages. Just recently, I've had the chance to plug in and listen to a whole series of lectures by the physicist, the late Professor Richard Feynman. Over the years, I've read a lot about him and his brilliant career, beginning with his work on the Manhattan Project when he was still a very young man, and extending to his groundbreaking work in quantum chromodynamics. He's always been celebrated because of his piercing intelligence, but he became renowned for his incisiveness as a teacher and an all-round explainer. As we all know, being able to contribute to knowledge is an important skill, but being able to explain in a way that's both interesting and informative is a whole other level of ability. Feynman was famous for his contributions in both areas. His lectures bear this out. They're fascinating, or at least I find them to be so. One of the points he makes over and over again as he communicates the intricacies of the atomic world is that the pictures we use to represent atoms and their structures are not only inadequate, they're also completely wrong in every way. While they're useful to some extent in describing the components of an atom, they're misleading as we try to fit what we know about them into the pictures we have in our minds. For example, the planetary model of the atom that we grew up with, with the electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom, like planets orbiting the sun, that gives us an idea that there is a nucleus made up of neutrons and protons in most atoms, with electrons surrounding it. But what we think of orbiting and what we imagine of the makeup of these components makes no sense in the real world. While he doesn't say so directly, he thinks that these pictures we carry around in our head are more destructive in understanding what's really going on in the world than not to have a picture at all. Then he goes on to explain why our pictures don't really work. It's a great lecture, although it makes any confidence I have in understanding the atomic world pretty much empty. But that's the price of knowledge. We have to affirm that what we once knew we may have only known incompletely, or in fact we may not have known it we mo we may have known it completely wrongly. The price of accuracy can be humiliation. Alas, as they say, there's no humility without humiliation. Feynman's lectures are all like this. He begins with some notion we have, often uninformed, or at least unexamined, and he slowly moves from there to give us some deeper sense of what's actually taking place. He isn't really trying to humiliate us or crush our inadequacy. He simply begins with the pictures we all know as a doorway into the topic so that it can be explored more thoroughly. If we didn't have any idea of what an atom is, we might not have any notion of the facts and realities he's trying to deepen. It's something like looking at a map with an X that marks the spot where the treasure's buried. We might know there isn't really an X there on the ground, but if we didn't have the map, we wouldn't know where to go look for the treasure at all. So all of this brings to me to mind our preparations for Lent. Very soon, or at now we enter this penitential season with our focus set on recognizing our sinfulness and turning our hearts to the Lord, accepting the fullness of His reconciling love for us. Our hearts and minds turn toward the fullness of the Lord's gift and the promise of new life the resurrection embodies for us. True, all these facts of the gospel are available to us at any time. We're not restricted to Lent in order to encounter them, but we all know, unless we set aside a time and enter into its promises, each day becomes just a repeat of the day before. We might never get to what's important and necessary in life. Lent is when we pause, look up from the ordinary and the regular, and respond to the invitation to go more deeply into the truths of life. As we do, we can receive these truths that lie there for us, truths that offer us the prospect of renewal and the promise of hope. But many times we're hobbled by an inadequate view of what sin is. This isn't our fault. There's a kind of built-in limit to understanding that we all carry around because the pictures we have in our imagination. Just as in Feynman's example, we often don't get to the heart of what we're picturing because the images we have can hold us back as much as inform us about what's really going on. This lint we might take the chance to get beyond the common pictures we use to enter into a more adequate description of the presence and power of sin in our lives. If we do this, we can begin to encounter a more powerful and a more satisfying picture of what the Lord offers us in the gift of redemption and the promise of salvation. A better understanding of our journey with the Lord gives us a more complete vision of the landscape of our lives. When I was about eight years old, I was waiting for the neighbors to come by and pick my sister and me up to go to school. My older sister was in the second grade, I was in the first. My parents were down at the barn milking. They left my sister in charge. She was nine years old. As we were waiting, we began to play tag in the house. As kids do, we were completely absorbed in our game, running from room to room in our little house, tearing around the furniture and twisting and juking to avoid being tagged by the other. In my haste to avoid my sister's tag, I ran from the back porch into the kitchen, slamming the door behind me hard. The door had a large window in it, and as soon as it hit the door jam, the whole window broke and fell onto the floor. I was horrified, both at the extent of the damage and at what I knew would be my parents' reaction. It was an accident, of course, but it was also the product of our careless playing and the thoughtless choices I'd made. But it was my sister's reaction that was the most notable. As the glass crashed onto the floor, my sister said in a loud and triumphant voice, Now you'll have to go to confession. She was getting ready for her first confession and had just made it. Looking at the shards on the floor, she knew this was material for a first class sin. I had done wrong, clearly, and I needed to be set right. It was what she had learned. At least it was something I had to keep in mind when I was going to make my first confession the next year. I had sinned. And that's what we mostly understand about the power of sin in our lives. We're expected to do right and we do wrong. Whether by accident or by thoughtlessness or by the sum of our actions, we end up doing what is forbidden and end up with destructive results. It may be hard to tell the difference exactly since the destruction goes along with the forbidden, but it's a scenario we all recognize and understand. It's a perfect eight-year-old's scenario as he looks at the gloom of the mistakes he's made and wishes all could be put back together so that his life and the window could be made right again. In the first grade, we found out that sin was a kind of stain on our soul. By doing what was wrong, we made our soul dirty. By doing what was right and appealing to God's mercy and grace, our soul was made clean. God's power could fix what we had done wrong and could heal the brokenness of our lives. And while our understanding of God and grace and the role of Christ in our lives becomes more sophisticated, often our understanding of sin doesn't always grow. Many times we're left with the notion that sin is the stain left behind. It's there the mark against our name as we've stumbled and rushed through life, breaking what is fragile and harming what should be protected. When talking about sin, we almost immediately think about the wrongs we've committed and the actions we've taken. Quickly, we grow out of the mistakes a rambunctious kid might make, only to find that the mistakes available to us grow in seriousness and depth. The stakes become larger as our souls grow to fit our bodies, and so the stains by which we mar them become darker and more extensive as well. Often we don't think beyond our pictures of the stains left behind and the remedies we're offered for making things right. Our thinking often becomes a kind of list of what we've done wrong, of the mistakes we've made, of the accidents of our decision making, and the results we're forced to live with. And we go about addressing these realities more, and as we go about addressing these realities more completely, we make the lists longer and the possibilities more extensive. And it all makes sense. But the picture we use isn't quite adequate to the whole of life. There is more to sin than simply making a mistake or doing wrong. Sin has a kind of current in it, a sort of potential that can carry us away. This is not adequately informed by the pictures that we carry around. This power often doesn't make it into the lists that we prepare. Let me give you another example. My brother went off to college in the mid-70s. He wanted to belong to a group of guys there who offered to make him feel more at home and more at ease in the big, faceless world of the university. He was all on board and wanted to become one of the guys, but they had a program of what they wanted from the guys who desired to join them. My brother told me about all this about the time he turned 65. I didn't know any of these things while they were going on. The program the guys had developed was demonic in its subtlety and its effect. My brother and all the others who wanted to be a part of the group were told that they had to go to a restaurant, order, eat the food there, and then pay without leaving, and then leave without paying. It was an introduction to breaking down their sense of themselves as honorable and decent. After a whole series of other steps, each more dishonest and transgressive than the previous, the Des Nouveaux was to go to one of the large hangouts in one of the cities away from the campus, chat up some of the girls there, and then steal something out of their purses, something of value. Imagine it. They were being primed in a step-by-step manner to forget the sense of dignity and honor that they had received from their upbringing in order to receive a new character beyond the boundaries of decency and goodness. Like I said, it was demonic. And my brother did all those things. He didn't turn into a monster, and he didn't spring his life he didn't spend his life doing monstrous things. But what he did was more like pranks than crimes, although they did hurt people, and they were offensive in just about every way. And after finally joining the group, he left after his second semester, never to return. He never spoke of the impact of what he'd done, and he never spoke of what he really felt about how offensive the sum of his actions was. I think he mostly put it down as adolescent foolishness, which mostly these things are. But the intent on the part of those who were pulling the strings was something much more sinister than playing the fool or joining an exclusive group. They were intent on rooting out the goodness of his soul, or at least the unexamined notion of goodness he entered college with. I think it really truly affected him greatly. It wasn't simply a series of stains on his souls. The power of sin is the sinuous interlacing of shame, desire, appetite, fear, accomplishment, conventionality, surprise, delight, innovation, disgust, risk, acceptance, rejecting rejection and relief, and each aspect building on the other all at the same time. One small step at a time prepared each of these young men for the next step. It was kind of kind of a slow getting into shape for the next thing and the next state of being until he was to become a different kind of person. At least that's what those guys were proposing. If we examine their agenda as only a list of things done wrong, we missed the point. It was an energy moving through them, a way of acting and thinking all those in his group were being introduced to. Sin has a kind of current in it, a sort of electrical potential to disrupt, to dismay, and to destroy. C.S. Lewis gets to this point in one of the images he uses in mere Christianity. He describes the presence of Jesus in the world as coming into occupied territory. That is, Jesus' mission wasn't simply to come and found the church or to deliver his teaching or to challenge the Pharisees and the Romans. And certainly his mission wasn't simply to do what was necessary to remove the stains from our souls. No, Lewis was intent on inviting us to consider that Jesus entered a world given over to sin and destruction. His mission was to bring the world something it needed in order to begin to overthrow the occupying power. As in any attack, there's a response. Jesus came into the world to address sin and death like a soldier on enemy ground. The enemy, finding itself besieged, fights back. It was Lewis's way to invite his readers to see through a different lens. Sin is something more powerful than simply doing wrong or choosing badly. It's an occupying power in the world that presses against us. The author, Fleming Rutledge, uses a couple of images that I think are key to expanding our notion. She wrote She writes that, quote, we are enslaved by Satan, which covers all the basis, systemic evil as well as individual sin and error, unquote. It also includes the danger of giving in to small gestures and little evils. After a while, we can't move much, and our range of freedom becomes more and more limited. Even a slave can begin to have a measure of freedom, one which his master then can quickly limit or eliminate by shortening the chains on the shackles. She adds, quote, Sin is not so much naughty actions or even egregious wrongdoings. It's an infectious disease, unquote. Rutledge knows sin has a presence, a certain kind of force in the world. If we don't get to this insight, we're not quite ready to address sin in our lives. And she ends her section by saying, quote, Sin is the colossal X factor in human life. It's not something we do as much as it is something done to us by our mortal foe, the alien power that has lured us into becoming its agents, unquote. It describes the challenge my brother faced in all of his naivete. He thought he was just going to be one of the guys. He didn't know he was going to be lured into the merciless powers of this world. Or, as she continues, quote, but it's not enough to say that we are in bondage to sin. A result of that bondage is that we have become active conscripted agents, unquote. Which is another way to acknowledge that my brother's temptation was simply one version of what we're all faced with. Each one of us, by our presence in this occupied territory, is conscripted into the army. We all have to recognize that no matter how different we are and how much we want to be different, we all begin by acknowledging we're wearing the same uniform. The stories of sin and the tales of our mistakes bring us to the common understanding of how we are. We're all in this together. This is an aspect of the ministry I wish more people understood. I wear the same uniform as everyone else in this army. I'm happy to celebrate my role as confessor in the confessional. Day after day I hear people unburden themselves of the sins they have committed and the errors of their lives. They narrate to me their capture by the powers of the world and their desire to be free from what binds them. And time after time I remind them of the grace of baptism and the promise that we've been given by the Lord to be free from the slavery of sin built into the world around us. At the culmination of the celebration of the sacrament, I offer them the absolution from their sins, the gift of Christ's victory over death and sin, and thus the hope entrusted to the church enacted in the sacrament we celebrate together. It's like raising the flag of the winning army in the middle of battle, our claim of defeat of the occupying force. But in all of this, I know that all the weakness I hear recounted by the penitents, and all the failure of resolve and intention they confess, as well as all the evil they're lured into, I share with them. My album stole do not keep me from seeing that the penitent and I wear the sh the same uniform underneath, drafted into the same army even against our intention or our will. We are set free by the same graces and are accompanied by the same Savior. But I'm not accompanied or graced more certainly or more finally than they. We who minister the sacraments live in the same world and depend on the same graces as they do. Again, Rutledge expresses it so powerfully. She writes, quote, Note that St. Paul does not say Jesus never sinned or Jesus did not commit sin. That's because sin in Paul is not something that one commits. It's a power by which one is held helplessly in thrall, unquote. Jesus was the one not bound by this enslavement. He was no one's thrall. His presence was the promise that this power is overcome and our exodus from slavery can begin. This is what we're offered to be led out of the land of miserable conditions and into a world where such things will not be. We're offered a whole other place, so different, so transformed as to be known as a whole new kingdom. Jesus' presence in the world and in our lives is to bring the kingdom about, which is one of the reasons for Lent. It is possible for us to be marinated in the promises of God's kingdom and all of the promises of freedom and hope it brings, and yet at the same time live our lives as if this promise were not ours. There are parallels of this condition throughout our lives. Our Constitution gives us the right of redress of wrongs, for example, and most everyone has a long list of the wrongs and evils of our times and arrangements. Yet most of us never even begin to contemplate addressing them, and especially of what it would take to address them in the fora in which they might most thoroughly be attended to. We go on living as if this aspect of our communal life were not real or recommended. Well, so it is with our citizenship in the kingship of heaven. We are entrusted with the promise of a life in which our chains have been chiseled off, and we've been hurried across the barriers of recapture and re-enslavement, only to wondrous sleepwalkers, unaware that the gates are unlocked and the doors are swung open and the guard stations are abandoned. Lent is the time when we can begin to consider there may be more to life than the lists we keep, and certainly more to the promise of God than the ultimate relief when we close our eyes on this world to open them on the next. One of the great advantages of being part of the Catholic Church is its universality. This is an advantage that is greater than simple geography. We have the advantage of not being locked into simple pictures or colorful descriptions. Instead, we have the full range of thought and insight woven into the scriptures and lived out among the saints. In addition, there is for us the promise that we are accompanied by the graces of the sacraments, all of which are living encounters with the living Christ, not simply lessons offered for us to learn or pearls of wisdom for us to weave. To live life in Christ is to live deeply and fully, which means to go beyond the pictures we have and to dive into the deep pools of living. And that's what we're here for. So let's make Lent a world of promise, and let's think about sin a bit more deeply. Sometimes there's more to what we know than what we think we know. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called The Ashes Smudge Easily. The ashes smudge easily off our foreheads and disappear in just an hour or two. True, you can see them starkly highlighted on the brows of the TV hosts for Wednesday's view. But for us more normal, our marks don't last long. Our blackened crowns fade quickly through the day, as our admonitions to turn fade, like a song, as we ponder our next steps on our new way. Lent is for the long weeks, more the first few, to repent of evil, begin anew. Our path is to tread where the road is new, to avoid easily evil and common sin. Worry not at the fading of the ashen marks, nor the passing of the first strong convictions. The penances we endure remain stark. Ashes mark the moments of easy friction. That's the ashes smudge easily. Liv has begun, and we've begun the process as we draw closer and closer to our ultimate goal, which is our encounter with the risen Christ on Easter Sunday morning. It's certainly important for us as we begin this season to remain focused on our acts of penance and charity and prayer, and not to be discouraged because it's not too late to begin, and it's certainly not too late to begin again. So don't be discouraged by something that hasn't worked out at the beginning, and it's not too late to recalibrate what we have in mind with regard to our penance and our opportunities this season. I hope that in the weeks to come we can continue to grow in what it means to be Living Catholic.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.