Conversations: Sin - What Is It?

In this episode, Fr. Graebe discusses Sin. What is it, and how to avoid it. An important topic to reflect on as we journey through lent. This is part of our Higher Word Conversations series, set in a loft in New York City. Catholics and Christians, young and old, gathered for a thoughtful and memorable afternoon.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In this episode, as we journey through Lent, Father Gravy discusses Tim. What is it? And how to avoid it. These gatherings are designed to provide a perspective that maybe you haven't heard before, or something to think more deeply about. To attend these events, sign up at higherword.org for our mailing list. And please, share this episode with a friend who may be interested. It helps people discover HigherWord.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Well, hi everyone. Great to be back with you. Um, thanks to our hosts for letting us use once again their beautiful apartment here. Uh, I thought obviously we're we're in the home stretch of Lent now. Today we entered into passion tide, the last two weeks of Lent. And it's a season of repentance, of deeper conversion. And I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a little bit about sin, which we hear a lot about, but maybe to drill down a little bit and make some important distinctions, um, categorizations that I hope will give each of you sort of just a better understanding of what sin is, what the different types and degrees are, how do we know what is a sin and what isn't. And that can help us to have what all of us want, which is a well-formed conscience, to be able properly and accurately to tell right from wrong, right? We learn this as a little child, but our faith should not be on the level of a little child. Our spiritual disposition should be, we should have that childlike openness to the Lord, but we should understand these things with the developed adult mind that the Lord has given us. What we don't want is a conscience that is malformed and unable to make these distinctions. And we can err on in one or two extremes. On the one hand, someone can have a lax conscience where they think nothing's a sin. The opposite extreme is a scrupulous conscience where someone thinks everything's a sin. Both are discerning improperly. It's like people don't use antennas anymore, but it's like an antenna that's that's getting a skewed signal, right? We want it to come in clearly and accurately, to see that picture as sharp as it should be. Okay? And that's what I hope this little talk will give us. This is also a topic that I think particularly lends itself to some questions and discussion and conversation. So I hope that it will elicit much of that once the talk itself concludes. So as I go through my notes here, if there's something that you know triggers a question in your mind, do hold on to that because I would encourage you to throw that into the mix once we're finished here. When we start to talk about sin, it's worth saying from the outset that every action we take is either good or bad. There is no morally neutral action. All right, if it's a hot summer day and you go to order an ice cream cone, that's a morally good act. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's not neutral. You're doing something, you're doing something that's classified as morally good. Okay? So every one of our actions has a moral category to it. How do we know if any of those actions are in fact sinful? Well, there are three criteria. There's the moral act, there's the intention, and the circumstance. Let me touch briefly on those. The moral act is not just the physical act, it's it's what I'm actually doing in a moral way. So, for example, killing someone, taking someone's life is simply a physical act. The moral act of what I'm choosing to do, that could be a morally bad act. If I'm killing an innocent life for no reason, right? That's that's called murder. But if an armed intruder has just come into my home and is threatening me and my family, and I kill that person, that's a morally good act. Okay? It's again, it's not morally neutral, it's morally good. I I have protected my family. That's what I should do. Killing that person is not just not wrong, it's it's praiseworthy, it's virtuous. So that's the action itself. Then there's the intention. What my motivation is in doing this act. Again, killing the intruder, my intention is to protect my family. That's good. You can have a morally good act, but a bad intention. So let's say I make a huge donation to a hospital. That's good. But my intention is to have my name on it and be well thought of and inflate my pride and ego. That's bad. That's bad. That makes that action now a sin. Because I have done something that is an act of pride, okay, rather than an altruistic charitable gift. So there's the act, there's the intention, and then there's the circumstance. You can have a good act, a good intention, but the circumstances can make it a problem. So a married couple engages in marital relations. That's a good act. Okay? Their intention is to cooperate in God's plan of unitive and procreative love. That's a good intention. So far, so good, right? They're doing it in the middle of Central Park. Not good. Okay. The circumstance makes that now a problem. All right. So for the total evaluation of an action, all three have to be good. If any one of them is not good, now we have a sin. Okay? If any one of those is off, now that action is a sinful action. All right. That married couple in Central Farga is committing a sin because they're obviously giving scandal and whatever. Okay. So let's say something's a sin. What type of sin is it? What are the two types of sin?

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Venial and mortal.

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Mortal and venial, right? And we know the difference. They're all sick, they're all sins, right? Even the smallest venial sin sent Jesus to the cross. Okay? All sin is bad, that there are degrees of badness. A venial sin damages our relationship with God. A mortal sin, as the name itself implies, kills our relationship with God. We are cut off from the light of grace. I use this analogy back in January, leading into the talk on discernment. Venial sin to think of a lamp that's plugged in, right? Venial sin is like fraying the cord, all right, like the lights. The current is not flowing as well as it should. Mortal sin is cutting the cord, pulling it out of the wall. We're cut off from the like of grace. What makes something a mortal sin? Again, there are three criteria. Grave matter. It has to be a serious thing in and of itself. Sufficient reflection. You have to have really thought about it ahead of time. And full consent of the will. You have to freely choose to do it. All three of those have to be operative for it to be a mortal sin. Okay? If any one of those is compromised, it's not a mortal sin. And we see this reflected in the legal code, right? Western law is mostly based on the church's moral law. In terms of murder, for example, right? We have first degree murder, which is premeditated, versus, you know, I just walked in on my wife in bed with another guy and I shot them both. That's bad. It's very bad. All right, but it's not, it would not be categorized as the same type of crime nor the same type of sin. I didn't think about this ahead of time. I hadn't plotted this out. It was just a reaction in that moment. There was no sufficient reflection. Okay. So let's say, for example, um missing mass on a Sunday is grave matter. It's a serious thing. But if I totally forgot that it was Sunday, or I'm going to bed tonight, I'm like, oh my gosh, today was Sunday. I didn't go to Mass. There was no sufficient reflection there. I didn't commit a sin. It was objectively grave matter. It was wrong of me to miss mass, but I'm not responsible for that because I honestly forgot. It was an honest mistake. Let's say it's Sunday. I know it's Sunday, supposed to go to Mass, and my car breaks down. I'm not, again, responsible for that. There was not full consent of the will. I didn't choose to miss mass. The situation prevented me from going. We can see this in various other situations. Um someone who does something very bad but under extreme duress, you know, they're being tortured. They're being held at gunpoint. The action they do is grave matter. It's really bad. But there's not full consent of the will there. I didn't freely choose to do this. My will is compromised. All right. So all three of those have to be operative. And it depends on the situation. Let's say stealing$20 from someone, is that a mortal sin or a venial sin? It depends. Again, this is where all of this vocabulary and uh distinctions come into play. If I'm stealing$20 from Bill Gates, that's wrong. That's a sin. I have no right to that money. But it's a venial sin. Okay? I'm not going to go to hell for that. If I steal$20 from a homeless guy on the street, it's probably a mortal sin. All right, like that that might be his food for a week. That's much more serious. So all of this factors into how I evaluate the gravity of a given action. Likewise, let's take something like slander. All right, slander or calumny is when I say something about someone that's not truthful to damage their reputation. Okay, that's a sin. It depends on what I'm saying, whether or not it's mortal or venial. Okay? If there's this guy I don't like at work, and I go around spreading a rumor that he picks his nose, it's a venial sin. Okay, like that's not a serious harm to his good name and reputation. Okay? It's bad, I shouldn't go around saying that. But it's a venial sin. If I go around saying like the guy's a serial philanderer and you know sexually assaults people, it's really serious. I am damaging this person's reputation and good name in an almost irreparable way. That's a mortal sin. Okay? It's actually classified under murder. I have killed his good name and reputation, which every one of us has a right to. To avoid what we call the occasions of sin. And there are again a couple distinctions here. I know this is a little bit academic, but this is perhaps framing it in a more, I guess, uh adult way that most people have not heard before. Okay. Occasions of sin can be remote or proximate, near or or far. So let's say someone is just a raging alcoholic, totally can't control themselves. All right. If they're going to a business convention and he knows that the wherever he's going, that there's a bar, you know, five blocks away from the hotel, that's a remote occasion thing. He knows it's there, he knows it could be a problem, but it's it's fairly easy for him to avoid that. Okay. If his friends are saying, hey, come with us after work to happy hour, we're going to Joe's bar, and he thinks to himself, oh, that's okay, I'll just go and have an iced tea. That's a near occasion of sin for him. Once he walks in and everyone's, you know, throwing them back, he knows it's much more likely that he will end up sinning. Okay. He should not put himself in that situation, even if, even if he comes out of it unscathed, he's still culpable for putting himself in such a risky situation to begin with. Likewise, occasions of sin can be voluntary or involuntary. Let's say someone works for a huge corporation and he's married, but there's this woman in the company that like he just has, you know, a huge crush on. He's like weak in her company, is just he he would love nothing more than to have an affair with her. Okay. He knows he might end up working on a project with her, but that's unlikely. Okay, they're in different divisions or whatever. Um that would be a a remote occasion of sin. All right. If he signs, he knows she's working on a certain project and he signs up for that project. Now that's voluntary. He has put himself in an occasion of sin. If she works at the desk next to him, there's really not much she can do about it. It's going to be difficult. He has to try his best to avoid anything that will signal his interest in her, but that's involuntary. He's not putting himself in her company. He can't help it unless he like leaves his job and then has to find a way to provide for his family. So what we are most bound to do is to avoid close near occasions of sin that are voluntary, that we can control, to keep ourselves as much as possible from risking any fall in that area. All right. If and when we do sin, that's why the sacrament of confession is there. We are obligated in confession to confess any and all mortal sins. You can't pick and choose. It's the full package. You don't have to confess venial sins. It's praiseworthy to do so. But venial sins are very easily remitted. A lot of people have never heard this before. Venial sins are remitted, removed, simply through an act of contrition or receiving holy communion. We should not receive holy communion in a state of mortal sin. To do so is actually to commit an additional mortal sin, a sin of sacrilege. But if we only have venial sins that we're sorry for, going to receive communion removes all of those venial sins. But we confess mortal sins in number and kind. We should be specific. We don't go into details, but we name what the sins are. And you can see a lot of people just have no idea what confession is or what it's for. You see a lot of people coming to confession, which is good, but they think it's sort of like um poor man's therapy. Right? Oh, father, I'm working on some stuff. Or just confessing very generic things, like, you know, I haven't been the best version of myself. I don't know what that means. Um that's it's not a sin. Like, I'm sorry for your struggle, but it's not a sin. Um, or just father, I've done some bad stuff. Okay, you you need to give me a little more there, all right? So to state what the actual sin is and generally how often it's been committed, all right. It's a difference from Father, I, you know, has I cheated on my wife at a one-night stand 20 years ago, versus, you know, I cheated on my wife hundreds of times over the years, right? Those are very different things. Both are adultery, but they're very different types of adultery. Okay, so number and kind. I want to run through a general list that, again, I hope might be informative, but also might prompt some questions when we can delve a little deeper based on your questions and and comments. This is an examination of conscience that is comprehensive. It's not exhaustive. This isn't like the total list of all sins it's possible to commit, but these these would be among, you know, it covers most bases. All right. So just to read through this the first commandment, I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods beside me. Okay. Did I doubt or deny that God exists? Not questioning, doubting. Questioning is, I think this is true, but I don't understand it. And I would like to know more. That's good. Doubting is, I've thought about this and I'm pretty sure it's not true. That's an act of the will. Okay. Did I refuse to believe what God has revealed to us? Did I partake in fortune telling, horoscopes, the occult, good luck charms, Ouija boards, or seances, anything involving that stuff, guys, it's super, super dangerous. Don't touch it with a 10-foot pole. It's not innocuous, it's not entertainment, it's not amusement, it's opening a portal to hell, and don't go anywhere near it. Did I deny that I was Catholic? Did I leave the Catholic faith? Did I fail to give time to God each day in prayer? Did I despair of or presume on God's mercy? Despair is thinking, there's no way I can get to heaven. Presumption is thinking, of course I'm going to heaven. There's no way God can't save me. Both are failing to let God be God. It's saying that my sins are more powerful than God and his mercy. Second commandment, don't take the name of the Lord in vain. Did I blaspheme or insult God? Did I use the holy name of God or Jesus carelessly, uselessly, or in anger? How often that happens, how terrible it is. Like, don't say the F-word, but I'd rather hear the F-word than saying the name of Jesus in in an unholy way. That hurts God way more. And we should make a little act of reparation when we hear that, you know, from coworkers on TV shows, just to say to ourselves, blessed be the name of Jesus. Like that's a holy name. And that's why we have the pious practice of bowing our head at the name of Jesus. It's a reminder to ourselves and a witness to others that this name is holy. Did I curse or break an oath or vow? Did I get angry with God? Not angry in just a reaction, like we all get angry times, but like holding on to it. Again, as a choice, as an act of the will, like I choose to be angry with God. Third commandment to keep holy the Sabbath. Did I miss Mass on a Sunday or holy day of obligation? Obviously from my own fault? Did I come to Mass late, leave early? Those are venial sins. Did I perform unnecessary work on Sunday? Do unnecessary shopping? Did I fail to show reverence in the presence of Jesus in the most blessed sacrament? Fourth commandment, honor your father and mother. Did I disobey or disrespect my parents or legitimate superiors? That includes bosses at work? Did I neglect my duties to my husband, wife, children or parents? Did I neglect to give good religious example to my family? Did I fail to take an active interest in the religious education of my children? Did I fail to educate myself on the teachings of the church? Did I give scandal by what I said or did, especially to the young? Did I cause anyone to leave the faith? Did I cause tension and fights in my family? Did I fail to care for my aged and infirm relatives? Did I fail to give a full day's work for a full day's pay? Did I fail to give a fair wage to my employees? Fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill. Did I kill or physically injure anyone? Did I have an abortion, or advise or help someone else to have an abortion? Did I attempt suicide? Did I become angry, impatient, envious, unkind, proud, revengeful, jealous, hateful, lazy? Did I give bad example by drug abuse, drinking alcohol to excess, fighting, quarreling? Did I abuse my children? The sixth and ninth commandments are related. Sixth commandment is is action, don't commit adultery. The ninth commandment is thought, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. Did I willfully entertain impure thoughts and desires? Again, that willfulness, like this is a considered choice that I made. It's not just something that you know ran through my mind. This is this is something I indulged in. Did I use impure or suggestive words, tell impure stories or jokes, listen to them? Did I deliberately look at pornography? Read impure material? Did I engage in sexual activity by myself or with someone who is not my spouse? Did I practice artificial birth control? That includes sterilization, which is like a permanent form of birth control. Did I marry or advise anyone else to marry outside the church? Did I fail to avoid occasions of impurity? Did I abuse my marriage rights? The seventh and tenth commandments are also related. Seventh commandment is action, thou shalt not steal. Tenth commandment is thought, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's good. Did I steal, cheat, help, or encourage others to steal or keep stolen goods? Again, just as an example, we talked about how killing is not always a sin, depending on the circumstance, so too with taking something that's not properly yours. If I walk into a bakery and just steal a loaf of bread because I don't want to pay for it, that's a sin. It's a venial sin, but it's a sin. If we're in the midst of a famine and my child is literally starving to death, and I go into a bakery and take a loaf of bread, that's not stealing. That's not a sin. We have what we call in Catholic vocabulary the universal destination of goods. The rights of private property end when someone else's right to life is at stake. All right, that's a high, there's a hierarchy of goods. My child's right to life supersedes that baker's right to a profit on his product. Okay, so again, this is where circumstances affect whether or not the same action could be classified as a sin. Did I fail to fulfill my contracts, give or accept bribes, rashly gamble or speculate? Gambling is not a sin. But if I'm gambling away my paycheck and my children have no food on the table, yes, that's a very serious sin. Did I waste time at work, school, or home? Did I envy other people's families or possessions? Right? And social media has been great for this. You know, going through, oh my gosh, look at their house and their family vacation. Um, don't pay attention to that. All right, they have their own crosses. Um, they're not posting those. And lastly, the eighth commandment, not to bear false witness against your neighbor. Did I lie? Did I deliberately deceive others or injure others by lies? What we were talking about before with slander. By the way, slander is saying something untruthful about someone. Detraction is when I say something that's true, but I have no good reason to share it. You know, I'm trying to think of an example. Um, there's a guy at work who, I don't know, got arrested 20 years ago for a bar fight. All right, there's no reason to bring that up. Like it was if Ben I did his time, whatever. Um I'm just trying to hurt his reputation. What I'm saying is true, but I shouldn't go around sharing it. Like that's just not helpful. Did I commit perjury? Did I gossip or reveal others' faults or sins? Did I fail to keep secret what should be confidential? Okay, so again, a pretty thorough list there. And to stick to these sins, let's say you committed slander, or you just indulged in gossip. That's all you have to say. Oh, Father, I was talking about a coworker because he got on my nerves, and so at the office party I decided to tell people that you know he picks his nose and I shouldn't have said that, but I don't just I gossiped. That's it. I got it. You can move on. All right. Um so one of the one of the best, I guess it can be exhausting, really. And you know, people are very vulnerable in that moment, of course. And so you try to be very pastoral and patient, but you do also need to just help people to make good confessions, right? And it's also a consideration to everyone else who's waiting to go, right? We shouldn't go on and on about these things. A great piece of advice, some of you have heard me say this comes from back when England was a devout Catholic country for a thousand years. Um, the three B's of a good confession. Be brief, be brutal, be gone. Okay. Be brief. Just citizens, number and kind. I gossiped a lot, I missed mass twice, uh, and I don't know, forgot to do my homework. Okay. Um be brutal. Like, just just throw it up, just put it out there. You will you will confession is embarrassing for the penitent. It's it's not embarrassing to the priest. Like, trust me, he's heard it all a million times. You could say the most embarrassing thing. And he's gonna be like, all right, anything else? Okay. The joke, there's an old priest who says he laughs every time he hears people talk about original sin. Like, I haven't heard an original sin in 40 years, okay? Just get it out there. And then be gone, right? This isn't a conversation, this isn't a therapy session. You get your absolution and you walk out reborn in the grace of Christ. All right, and how beautiful that is. There needs to be a purpose of amendment. You have to really intend not to commit these sins again, right? If I've been cheating on my wife and I confess that, but I'm meeting up with my girlfriend tonight, I'm not really sorry, right? I'm not really sorry. And if I'm not sorry, I can't risk the priest can say the words of absolution, but there's no can there's no absolution. It's not a valid confession because I'm not truly sorry for my sins. Now you might say, well, Father, I have a certain habit of sin, right? It's a bad habit. I've been committing this sin for years and years, and I feel like a hypocrite because every time I go to confession, I say the same thing. And I know it's probably just a matter of time until I commit this sin again. It's okay. As long as I'm just walking out that confessional saying, I'm gonna do my best not to commit it. And I know I'm weak and God knows I'm weak, and with his grace and in time, I'll overcome this. But as long as that's my sincere intention, that's what matters. Okay? And remembering the seal of confession, it's the most sacrosanct obligation that a priest has. He can never, ever, under any circumstances, no matter what, speak about what he's heard in confession. A lot of people think that the screen is there for the benefit of the penitent, right? Because they're shy or embarrassed. It's really there for the benefit of the priest, because he has to keep the seal of confession, and it's easier to do that when I have no idea who the person is because I can't see them. And that's why, under the universal canon law of the church, every penitent has the right to an anonymous confession. Every priest has the right to insist upon an anonymous confession. So that's worth keeping in mind. Why do we need to confess our sins to a priest? Right? Why can't we just confess them to God? Well, we can, and we do, and we should. But it's because every sin affects the whole church. There's no such thing as a private sin. The sin I commit in the privacy of like my own room, that affects we're all mystically connected as members of the church. Every virtuous act you perform adds to the sum total of grace in the world. It lifts all of us up. We all benefit from your virtue. Every sin I perform, I commit, hurts the whole body of Christ. We're all in some way damaged by that. The church is wounded. And so, because of that, every sin requires a somewhat public act of atonement. And that public act of atonement is going to the church. The priest is the representative of the church, the instrument to pronounce God's mercy. Because God doesn't want simply to forgive our sins. He does. Be like, why can't God just forgive my sins? He can. But he wants more than that for us. He wants better than that for us. He wants to wash them away. It's like if you bang up someone's car and you say, I'm sorry, and they say, I forgive you. Well, that's great. The car is still banged up. God wants to complete, that's like the body shot, right? Come out good as new. That's why he wants to absolve our sins. The same word absolve that we heard in the gospel today with Lazarus, untie him. To absolve means to untie, to loosen, to let that go, untie him and let him go to be free from the death that has taken over our soul there. And we know we have a church that is mediated grace. God works through things. He comes to us through a mother, through bread and wine, through water and baptism, and through the unworthy instrument of his priest and the sacrament of confession. All right? And as we wrap up these comments, keep in mind, we all face temptation. We're all drawn to sin. It's one of the effects of the fall. And the devil is great at making it look so alluring. And when we're in the midst of temptation, it seems so hard, and God seems so far away. And the moment we sin, devil's God. He's got, you know, He's done his work. And we're left with our guilt. But God's mercy comes flooding in. God's always right there to pick us up, which is why we should never, ever, ever give in to discouragement or despair. God knows how weak we are. If we weren't, we wouldn't need a savior. We wouldn't need the Holy Week, the Good Friday that we're about to celebrate. Think of it again in sort of a courtroom terminology. Remember that Jesus is not just our judge, he's also our advocate. Like he's our personal attorney. He's the one arguing the case on our behalf. How beautiful that is, right? That the one who's judging us is also on our side. One Catholic writer had a beautiful line. He said, In hell there are no sinners, because sinners are the friends of Jesus. There are only the malicious. And you go through the gospels and you see the heart that He has for sinners. You have to really be wedded to your sin to be cut off from God's mercy in the end, right? To really end up in hell. Not weakness, but wickedness. And this is where Jesus will do whatever it takes to get us to heaven. Whatever it takes, he'll look for any opening, any angle. It's like a lawyer who looks at everyone, like, give me something. Okay, I can use this. Any hook that we can give him is what he will take. And I'll leave you with this line regarding St. Augustine. I remember I was in seminary and we had this wonderful professor who was an expert on St. Augustine. St. Augustine, you might know, is the doctor of grace. Like he's just such a beautiful theology of God's grace and mercy and sin. And it might be worth holding on to this, especially going into the events surrounding our Lord's Passion, you know, how he died for us. He says, in Augustine's theology of grace, Jesus looks at every one of us from the cross and says to us, if you end up in hell, it will be over my dead body. And I think that's so powerful and beautiful. So I hope that you learned a few things that it gives you some food for thought. And thank you. And I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.