Sacramentally Speaking

In the Garden, we see the stage set for the coming depravity of Human wickedness. We see Adam and Eve striving to be like God and failing miserably. Under the weight of sin is where we find ourselves as Christians today. Hindsight is twenty-twenty so now, we are left to face the consequences of our fractured relationship with God.

As a culture, it seems as though we’ve become so accustom to normalizing sin, and, in the hearts of some, we have even come to embrace sins which lead to death (spiritual death, that is). There are grave sins that all Christians understand and recognize as sin, however, there are also sins that gets overlooked by many Christians which can be stepping stones to bigger moral failures such as gluttony, gossip, bearing false witness, greed, envy, and many more. While these sins are not recognized by the Church as being equal, they can be just as damaging to our long term spiritual help.

The Catechism puts the distinction of Mortal and Venial sins in a beautifully articulate way:

“Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to Him.

Venial sin allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it.” – CCC 1855

Mortal sin is what turns man away from God, but venial sin damages our capacity for charity which, in turn can make us susceptible to harboring deeper sinful desires in our hearts.

In Matthew 5:28-29, Christ says “… I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Now if your right eye is causing you to sin, tear it out and throw it away from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

Here, the implication is that, just as tradition tells us, there is still the danger of being separate from God due to our own sins. The good news here, however, is that in His mercy, Christ has made a way for us to dwell eternally with Him despite our inclination to sin. This is the beauty in what Paul is writing to believers in Romans 8!

When we repeatedly commit even Venial sins, we are creating an even greater proclivity to sin within our own heart. Personally, when I was at the depths of my sin (which I have since been deliver from thanks to the Grace of our Lord) I would often times, in my drunkenness or what ever state of mind I was in or on, look at myself in the mirror and have a deep realization and self awareness of where I was in my life and where I was headed. The truth is that during my decline, there was a very clear line of sin that I could trace back. One sin after another, my relationship with God was damaged and I plunged deeper. I time and time again, I chose temporal gratification over the eternal and in doing so, I told God that I knew better.

When we sin, just like Eve in the garden, we accuse God of withholding good from us and we tell Him that we want to reject him for the ways of the world because we know better.