A Sinful Existence...?

How do you personally experience the terms ‘a sinful existence’ and a ‘hope-filled existence’?

When I was younger, everything connected with religion spoke to me of my life as a sinful existence: my mother’s household religion of cleanliness being next to godliness, my catechism lessons from high school onwards that seemed an attempt at controlling ceaselessly shameful behaviour. If I sneezed too loudly, chalk it up on the venial sin scorecard. If I was cheeky, that’s another black mark dangerously close to the mortal sins list. I couldn’t breathe or move without being made to feel guilty about having done wrong by someone, somehow; as Hermann Hesse has Mozart enlighten the Steppenwolf, “Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.” I wanted very much to honour my religious education by being a good girl; but the pressure of having to try to be perfect at all times in order to avoid occasions of sin, or else be as much of a disappointment to God as I seemed to be to everyone else, was absolutely unbearable.

Unable to shoulder this immense burden, I decided that ‘sin’ was an illusion designed to control and manipulate me into submitting to the will of elders and others in authority, or indeed to anyone with a will to reference my subjection to God, who could use my fear of God’s retribution as a means of punishing me if I expressed an opinion or exerted my own will. I saw my experience mirrored in Antonia White’s book Frost in May, in which she describes a convent school teacher remarking about a troublesome potential scholar: “Ah, and here we have another little will to be broken”.

In order to be my own person, because I am who I am (and as Popeye-the-sailor-man famously said, “and that’s all that I am”), I claimed my independence in my late teens and early twenties by defiantly rejecting the notion of sin as a reality. It was then that hope began to blossom for me. Of course, my hope was in myself and not consciously in Christ or in Christ’s presence in me – so my lived ‘sinless’ conduct (in name but not in truth: and it took me some time to see how this philosophy was affecting my relationships with other people) was ultimately disappointing and unfulfilling. I had made of myself a god, reflecting only a distorted image of the God who still lived within me even though I had made up my mind that his existence or otherwise was no concern of mine.

In retrospect, I realise that while I thought that by rejecting all authoritarian claims over me, I was rejecting God, I was in truth sincerely searching for the freedom that comes from knowing God as wise, merciful and caring; God who wants to be connected through relationship to all people. I was looking for responsible existence in relationship with God and other persons and I was rejecting the mechanisms of power-play that coupled and characterised so many of my relationships when I was a youth: this corruption was the sin that I sought to forsake.

By God’s mercy, a sincere religious experience enabled me to encounter God, to look past the pseudo-religious construct that had obscured his visage from me until then, and to see him for who he really is. In my encounter with him, I came to know myself as loved by God. In the light of God’s love, I was able to acknowledge my own failings and sinfulness, ask for and receive mercy and pardon, and be reunited with Christ in a genuinely hope-filled existence: one that recognises sin and its effects as a reality, but that acknowledges God as the source of all goodness and God’s love as the power by which sin is overcome. Out of the ashes this phoenix arose: I grasped with both hands the opportunity to re-evaluate my personal creed, turn away from my fiercely independent rejection of what I had imagined to be God, and be faithful to the good news of God’s compassion and love.

This experience taught me that in finding freedom in Christ, I am in faith able to accept responsibility for my sin. In accepting responsibility for my failure to love fully, I find freedom to accept God’s forgiveness. In accepting God’s mercy, I find the strength to hold onto hope in a world where God’s intervention is always only the becoming historical and concrete of God’s transcendent yet embedded self-communication. In holding onto hope, I can live a life of love as far as I am able, and I can keep on learning how to love – even though I often get it wrong.