Session 3 Summary
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In the first two sessions, we learned Path One to holiness, i.e., centering our lives in Jesus Christ. In this session, Fr. Barron talked about Path Two: knowing you are a sinner. The important distinction here is not between sinners and non-sinners, but between those sinners who will not acknowledge their sin and those who in the depth of their being know it.
Fr. Barron said that the saints are always more aware of their sin, not less. When you are driving at night, you may not realize that your car windshield is dirty. But in the morning, when you are driving east towards the sun, you see all the dirt on the windshield. “The soul is like a pane of glass,” said St. John the Cross, “and when the light of God shines on it, the imperfections of the glass are more apparent, not less.”
When we are closer to the Divine, we will be more aware of our sin – like Peter when he encountered Jesus for the first time. He felt to his knees and exclaimed, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Or Saul, galloping to Damascus, utterly convinced that he was doing God’s will – until the light of God flashed on him. The Light revealed how far he had strayed away from the true will of God. Similarly, when everything in our lives is going okay, it can be the sign that we are turning away from the Light. And like the light that blinded Saul, the grace of God – when it “hits” us – is not always pleasant.
How does sin look like? In its essence, sin is a state of inner tension, like when we place something other Christ in the center of our lives, and our lives become a cacophony (competing, disharmonious sounds). St. Augustine said that to be in sin is to be curvatus in se (caved in on oneself). When ego becomes the center of our lives, our souls becomes narrow and “stuck in place.”
"Midway in the journey of life, I found myself lost in the dark woods, having been astrayed from the straight way," so begins Dante's poem "Inferno." (Image source: Wikipedia.)
Dante’s poem “Inferno” (Hell) gave a great description of what sin feels like. In the story, Roman poet Virgil leads Dante down the inverted cone of hell. As they go down, hell becomes narrower and colder. People get frozen in place; their souls are stuck. They are isolated. At the bottom of hell is Satan, stuck waist deep in ice. He has wings, and they are flapping, but he cannot fly. His flapping wings just make the world around him colder. Satan cried from all the six eyes on his three faces.
Through the journey down to hell, Dante saw the effect of sin on himself – and on all of us. Sin locks us in place. The soul is meant for flight: flight into nature, to other human beings, and finally to God. But in sin we are stuck in our little kingdom of ego where we think we are the center of the universe, and the world revolves around our needs. We are curvatus in se.
Can we will ourselves out of sin? For this, we can learn from St. Paul. In Romans 7, he lamented, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” If St. Paul had a problem of mustering his will to do good after being a missionary for 25 years, clearly the “will of the mind” is not the solution to sin.
But we should not despair, for we have a Savior. We cannot set our conditions straight, but Christ can. As St. Paul wrote towards the end of Romans 7, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” – to which he answered himself, “Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ our Lord.” It is Christ who will remake us from within and save us from sin.