New visitors--please check out all of the entries. The themes here develop over the span of the blog...I hope, anyway.
Sorry it's taken a while to get back to this. Travel for my "day job" took up a lot of time, then at the conclusion of one trip my wife found out she has breast cancer. Dealing with the initial stages of that has consumed much of our lives for many weeks. Things are more hopeful and stable now, and I feel overdue in writing. So here goes. This entry has been floating around inside my head for a while now.
It was bound to happen, sooner or later. A coworker has been visiting me to talk, off and on, about his marriage for years. Things have been unravelling for a long time for him and his wife. Sometimes slowly, sometimes rather quickly. In spite of all the talking about the dynamics of marriage, divorce, and so on one topic came up that I've been waiting for in his case. He wanted to talk to me about the whole notion of sinfulness as it applies to divorce, or at least to the time in a relationship when love seems to end. For him--and for countless others--the marriage vows aren't mere words, and the promises made are meant to be spiritually binding. Life, though, throws us curves that we can't see when we make these vows, and sometimes things truly do "melt down" irreparably. I've also lived through it. I hated it and hope to never ever repeat it, but also admit to myself that it was the "right" decision, even with all the pain attached.
But this entry isn't about that fellow's marriage or divorce in general. I want to talk a bit about sin. It has a lot of cultural, spiritual, and moral baggage attached to it, and most people feel that they "know it when they see it" or at least can talk about it with some personal authority. It's a really problematic topic, however. And I guess I should add right here that "problematic" is an understatement in most cases. In keeping with the general theme of this blog, I'm going to try to give it a whole different interpretation than you're used to. I believe that what I'm going to offer is probably more useful for us, no matter what we beleive, spiritually or morally or in any other way.
In the terms most people talk about sin, it seems to be the breaking of certain "special" rules for which the penalties go far beyond fines and jails and prisons. There are a lot of influential people who readily assign the penalties to the afterlife--where, they believe, we all sit awaiting judgment for our sins and that, it is possible, the penalty can be eternal damnation or karmic pay-backs in reincarnation or something like that. And although the "judgment" for these sins is supposed to come from God or whatever supreme authority reigns in our afterlife, these people are only too willing and ready to proclaim eternal judgments here on earth as well. The "sins" of breaking God's "rules," it seems, can be judged in the here-and-now, long before we get to the eternal part of the journey.
In a very straightforward way, we're pretty much trained to accept this rather dysfunctional judgment. In our secular lives we have a lot of rules and laws that we obey and live by, and for our infractions we understand and more or less accept the punishments delivered. We are used to rules and laws, and we have--for milennia--expected there to be a set of cosmic ones as well. The Hebrew Torah is a good example: over 600 laws that all must be observed and followed in order to stay of God's "good side." Most cultures, though, have such sets of holy laws--ones that are connected with punishments that come from God or gods or whatever. As part of that landscape of holy laws we often also include punishments that God or the gods deliver here on earth. Many cultures believe--even today--that illness, poverty, childlessness, and plain old back luck are based on an individual's sinfulness in life. Some cultures also believe that the problems of the current generation can be traced back to the sinfulness of previous generations. When God (or one of the gods) gets angry, there's no telling how long the retribution will last!
All of this gives the judgment of sin a powerful place in our lives. After all, it goes beyond--at least it seems to go beyond--our crimes and misdemeanors. If we steal from another we might wind up being punished not only here in this life, but according to some, also in the next. And since the people who keep the "holy rule books" up to date and who pass eternal judgment can easily do so based on their own perceptions of scriptures or teachings, they don't have to pass a bar exam or face legal ethics boards for what they do. They can label a person or a group of people as sinful or infidels or ungodly or whatever and culturally we put up with it, always a little bit nervous that they might, after all, be right. Hurricane Katrina was a punishment visited upon the people of New Orleans for their sinfulness, according to some religious leaders. And there are followers who are afraid to challenge such notions.
Sin is a powerful tool in the hands of those who need to subjugate others, and some claim the ability (or so-called "duty") to define sins and declare their severity and punishments. Those knowing of these judgments are called--as the "unsinful" or "true followers"--to join in the judgment and to treat sinners differently and often cruelly. Eternal judgment and punishment can start right here. And the "righteous" always have a score card that proscribes the necessary actions to alleviate the sins' probable punishments. On my dresser I have an "Indugence" issued by the Roman Church a few years ago from a monastery. In fine print along the lower edge it offers the reassurance that praying with this item deducts 100 days from Purgatory each time the prayers are repeated.
This also brings to mind a story I heard some years ago. It was conveyed as a true incident that happened to a young couple who had embarked on a mission of evangelism to a tribe in a more-or-less remote part of the world. In their work, they translated the Christian Bible (or at least parts of it) into the local dialect and lived and worked with these tribal people, gaining their respect and teaching them about God, Jesus, and salvation. At some point they offered the tribespeople baptism as a way of guaranteeing their eternal salvation and saving them from the fires of hell. The elders of the tribe held council and discussed the matter. Their answer, after some deliberation, was "No." The missionaries were, naturally, stunned. They had done all they could to impress on these people the importance of salvation and the punishment for continuing in their pagan (and thus sinful) ways. The elders explained that, after all, they would be the first generation of their tribe to be baptized, and thus all previous generations would spend eternity in the torment of hell. They, however, felt such a bond to their kinsfolk that they would rather spend eternity with their tribespeople in hell than listen to their anguish from heaven. In the final analysis, the promise of salvation that the missionaries offered was only powerful if it carried price for refusal.
And so thus I come to a new way to understand sin. First of all, I believe that we are here to learn how to love--that is, to know how to give and share our own power without the need for reciprocation. If you want to boil it down to some kind of Christian precept, then it's worth noting that it is the rule that formed everything we know about Jesus, in one way or another. The only commandments he quotes--and he quotes them as being all you need to know--are to love God, ourselves, and each other with completely all that we have. But a command to do anything with all of one's heart, mind, soul, etc means that we, as less-than-perfect, must always have another chance. It is, after all, something that we aren't born knowing how to do instinctively and must therefore learn it by trying, by making mistakes, and by succeeding as often as we can. Renewal and what some might call "forgiveness" are built in, automatically. Judgment--especially by experts outside of our own experiences--is meaningless. We have written and enacted enough secular laws to cover almost anything a human can do in our societies. If we are called to become loving beings, laws will not work. Fear of punishment will never succeed. Hell is a myth. I have felt for many years that we are as close to hell in this life as we will ever be.
In wrapping this entry up, I'd offer that sin is what we experience when we haven't managed to live in love (and justice--see previous entries) and need to back up and try again. And it didn't come from Adam or Eve or your great-great-grandparents. It is a process of learning that we all share, and there is no judgment attached to it that can send us anywhere in the hereafter that we don't want to go. But sin, as a tool for those seeking power, can become a weapon that world entirely against all of this. Judgment, in its most common form, is perhaps the greatest sin of all, since it closes the doors to our ability to grow in love and justice.
My coworker and I discussed a lot of this material, along with a lot of other stuff about life's struggles and how to make the best choices for everyone concerned. I'm just waiting to see what happens next.