I apologize for the sensationalism of the title and editing. Had I quoted the full verse, you may not have continued with this page, for having sin is not something this world wants to hear. St. John knows that, and so he tells us plainly: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.” Sin is not a topic in vogue. Perhaps if it were, this world might not be where presently it is. Indeed, sin does not want us to talk about it. It prefers we be kept in the dark. Yet, in this forum my postings on sin have been amongst the most read.[i] Could it be a prurient interest flowing from the fascination the dark and evil hold for us? Why else would our mythic mother, the happy Eve, who had everything one could wish for stop to talk to slithering Satan ever wrapped in his darkled mantle?
Read more: We have no sin (1 John 1:8)Before I say more about sin, allow me a word about Carl Jung. In his analyses of the psyche he discerned levels or orbits of power. Among them was one he termed the Shadow. It is the reality of our constitution wherein is deposited, consciously or not, all those aspects of ourselves with which we would prefer not to deal, to bring to light. But only in bringing them to light, only in understanding their hidden power over us, can we harness that power into the creativity of our selves. In 1 John 1:5 we read: “God is light and in him there is no darkness.” But light can cast a shadow when something obstructs it. If we are called, by both God and the psyche he has created, to be transparent in all we do and say to ourselves and to the world, we need to be realistic enough to say we are not. Transparency—in all we do and say and are—is an ideal. Thus, we all have a shadow side to us, and we know it. Only the most hubris filled heart can deny it. But in that denial it needs be explained the raison d’etre of psychologists and psychiatrists whose labour is to reveal it.
If we are reading our scriptures sequentially before we ventured into St. John’s first epistle we would have read St. James’. There, sounding rather like Buddha, he speaks of desire as leading to sin, and sin to death. But desire is natural to us. We are not abiogenic and self-sustaining entities. We have needs, and needs pulse out desires. But desire, like unto any type of pulse, can go awry. Ask anyone wearing a pace-maker. St. Augustine, who loved to play with words and sounds, compared cupiditas and caritas. Caritas, most often translated as charity, but better understood as devoted care, is the desire natural to man. By it man is opened to his true needs: God and the panoply of world as God’s gift. Cupiditas, cupidity, is its corrupted form. It is not open towards others or things. It is acquisitive. As Martin Buber would say, it treats others and things not as venerable, not as relatable, not as a Thou, but as objects to be had, collected, used. Because it is a disorientation, it can rouse an attitudinal dilemma such as that the writer of Ecclesiastes bemoans when we speaks of all his toils and accomplishments as vanities. And where does that bemoaning bring him other than to a despair. Man can glory in his work and accomplishments, and shout them to the world, but as long as they are just objects he has set in orbit around himself to robe himself in his own self-glorification, they will always have a hollow ring. And, yes, some are so vain as to be content in their vanity, their hollowness.
But psyche, the soul, is no sluggard. It does not drop into ennui or rouse to despair as an end in itself. It does so to reveal the self- and world-wastefulness of cupidity, and to push towards the human righteousness of caritas, of devoted care. It wants to realign the psychic level, the spiritual level, upon which life is moving. It wants to reveal to the ego-driven man of many masks, personae, and shadow that the creative light that man truly needs, and therefore ought to desire, is not the possession of people and things, but the integration of self into the full range of one’s internal powers, and the giving, the sharing, of that self with others and the world in community.
Sin has gotten a bad name. We think of it muchly as murder, theft, lying. We forget it is something far worse. We do not see how deeply it holds onto to us, spins us in its orbit. We omit from consciousness that it is foremost about the worshipping, the con-forming to, false gods—gods of wealth, power, control, influence, prestige. It is from these false gods and their lack of charity, that all manner of falsehoods arise. We become self deceived not enlightened. We spin out of the proper orbit of creativity of self and world, out of orbit of care and integrating power. We spin out of our proper orbit around God who is Light. We spin into the darkness of self-absorption, eating up everything in our path, and slowing killing our-Self in gluttonous cupidity. St. James says it well. Desire grows into sin, and sin into death.
But we gather in church, we sit in prayer because we do not believe desire needs to be dis-oriented. We believe it bears the power of self correction. It bears an orientation to the creative, to the grace of the Creative One within. St. Augustine says desire was made in us primarily for God, for “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” St. Paul tells us the great moral dictates—starting with the ban against false gods—were given that we might be confronted with our inability to perfectly live up to them, to prepare the heart and mind for the revelation that we need the grace of a power greater than our everyday world-navigating and too often world-weary selves, “a power working in us that can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” We need a power to keep us in proper orbit, and that power is the God whose name is Love. Thus again it is St. Paul who tells us: “Whatsoever be your goals, make to be loving the first and highest of them all.”
When, by that we do or that we fail to do, we walk not in “Thy holy ways” we sin. But when we sin “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” On his cross, in his distorted body he reveals to us our distorted souls. In his rising out of death he offers us his unbounded life. God, the Son of God, atones for our disorientation. In so doing, in that cosmic tone of a God-man’s dying, he draws us back into the orbit of love. He makes us partakers of that love, which love alone creates this world, redeems this world, sustains this world. Yes, we sin, but sin does not define us, God does.
[i] Cf.: Occidental Ideas, Part 8, February 2014; Spirituality, Part 5, May 2017; Sin and Sinfulness, September 2023.