Around the year 1200, there was a young man in Italy
who lived the carefree life of a rich man's son. He worked in his father's
business, attended parties, and eventually went to war. But all the while, he
kept having spiritual experiences and visions of Christ. In 1205, on his way to
another battle, he had another vision that made him turn around. He began a
life of spiritual simplicity and care for the poor. His name was Giovanni di
Pietro di Bernadone, but today we know him as St. Francis of Assisi.
In late 1934, a traveling businessman and hopeless
alcoholic named Bill Wilson was admitted to a hospital to recover from a bout
of drinking. Wilson had been drinking for nearly twenty years. He had ruined
his reputation and career, and been told by his doctor that he would either end
up dead, or permanently locked up. But during this stay, something happened.
One night, after crying out for God in despair, Wilson experienced a bright
light, a feeling of ecstasy and serenity. He never drank again, and he went on
to become the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Both men, St. Francis and Bill Wilson, were slaves
to sin and then became slaves to righteousness, as Paul puts it. So we can use
their life stories to learn something. For the passage from Romans is difficult
for us to understand in many ways. We're not really sure what sin means, what
grace means, and we're uncomfortable with the metaphor of slavery. It's almost
offensive to our ears as we're still struggling with the legacy of actual
slavery. And what does Paul even mean by "enslaved to God"?
First, let's think about sin. What is sin? Of
course, it's not a list of things we're not supposed to do. Our faith has to
move beyond such childish notions, and I assume for most here it already has.
The best definition I've come across is this: life
curving in on itself. Martin Luther used this definition, and he may have
gotten it from St. Augustine. In this view, sin is the suffering we feel when
we sever the natural ties we have to all of life. This is not a new-agey idea.
Science tells us that there is a seamless continuation from the first living cells
to ourselves. Science also tells us that empathy is built into our mammalian
nature. We even have so-called mirror neurons in the brain whose sole function
is to make us feel what someone else feels. And caring for one another is one
of the things that propelled human evolution. You can't raise a human child in
an environment as selfish as, say, a chimpanzee horde.
So, our natural state is to be intimately connected
to life in multiple ways. We are a continuation of the biological genes and the
cultural memes passed down to us through countless generations. We are part of
a larger whole in joy and in pain. Wherever people suffer, it is suffering that
could be ours. Whenever we suffer, we bear witness to the suffering of the
world. So when we divvy life up into things we do and we don't care for, we
effectively cut some of our ties with life. And that has consequences we see
and feel daily: in the fissures in our society, in the exploitation of people
and nature, in our own divided souls where we act as manipulative parents to
ourselves, rejecting some aspects of who we are while cherishing others.
Sin, then, is an inner motion, a movement of the
heart and mind by which we say we don't care about life as a whole, only about our
own little territories. And we take those territories so seriously that we even
expel parts of ourselves from them.
There's another thing we can learn from this. Sin is
not moral failure. St. Francis didn't choose to be a rich man's son. He was
born into a lifestyle that entailed luxury and a lust for adventure. Likewise,
Bill Wilson didn't choose to become a miserable alcoholic. He started drinking
to overcome his natural shyness and awkwardness in social situations. He might
never have been a successful salesman without alcohol. He might have never had
a reputation to ruin.
The same is true for all of us. We are all born into
a situation we have to cope with, and we do so to the best of our ability.
Sometimes we behave morally along the way, and sometimes we don't. Sin is an
inevitable part of what it means to be human. We can't help curving in on
ourselves, even when we earnestly wish not to do so. And paradoxically, when we
try to be perfectly good, we actually commit yet another sin: the sin of the
Pharisees, the sin of pretending we're above the human condition.
So it makes sense to say we are slaves to sin. What
is slavery? You are taken from your rightful home, you are placed in captivity,
no longer free to make your own decisions, and you toil away while you get
nothing in return. Being subject to sin pretty much sums that up. Slavery is an
apt metaphor for our spiritual condition.
This situation would be hopeless if it weren't for
grace. Grace is the good news of forgiveness, of restoration to wholeness and
communion. Sometimes grace seeps into our lives slowly, as it did with St.
Francis. His spiritual maturity grew over years and years in which he had
encounters with beggars, with death and imprisonment, with illness and visions.
Eventually he devoted himself to the spiritual path. At other times, grace
bursts into our lives unexpectedly and changes us radically. This was the case
with Bill Wilson. In either case, grace came and freed them from their slavery
to sin.
What happened next is fascinating. For both men, grace
wasn't the endpoint of their journey. It was the beginning. Both went on to do
great things, and hence they set themselves up for more failure. We don't know
much about St. Francis' personal flaws. Back then, people didn't scrutinize
spiritual leaders as we do today. But we can learn from the lives of a few more
recent saints. It turns out that Mother Teresa had a temper. Gandhi, the great
proponent of non-violence, beat his wife until he had a tearful moment of
repentance when he realized he wasn't living up to his own values. And going
back to Bill Wilson, he was sober for the rest of his life, but he was a heavy
smoker, experimented with LSD, and some say he had an affair. Bottom line, when
we talk about people as godly or even saintly, we're not saying they're perfect
but rather that their light outshines their darkness. Both are part of the wholeness of their human condition.
And here lies the key in understanding Paul's word
of enslavement to righteousness, or to God. Grace is a gift. But we have to
take responsibility for that gift, for we are still human. We are still
fallible. We can't let the gift sit outside our door. It will get eaten away by
the weather. We have to make use of it, even if we stumble and fail some more
along the way.
And the astounding thing about grace is that if we
don't use it, we betray ourselves. Grace permeates us to the core of our
beings. Some even say it comes from the core of our beings, from an inner truth
deeper than our individual consciousness. St. Francis couldn't have gone back
to being a rich young warrior. Bill Wilson couldn't have gone back to drinking.
They would have betrayed their own, deepest selves.
It is in this sense that we are enslaved to grace
once we have tasted it: we are bound to it with the chains of spiritual fulfillment.
Just like sin took us from our homeland of primordial communion, grace takes us
from the wasteland we have come to call our home. It brings us to new life in
shackles and commands us to toil for it without regard for reward. The reward
will come: but if we expect it or even demand it, we are back to sinning. We
can build a new house, but we can't force ourselves to feel at home in it. The
most important rewards in life are beyond our control.
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