People without sin
TODAY, practically everyone who attends the Mass receives Holy Communion. This could mean that most of the people attending the Mass are in the state of grace, or they receive Holy Communion even if they know they are not worthy of it. If this has become a habit, they might soon lose their sense of sin, and would no longer be ashamed of such a pretense.
Sin was once a powerful word that lacerated our consciences. In the medieval times, ordinary people would rush to confession to ease their guilt after succumbing to temptation, while kings and emperors would perform their penance in public as a proof of sincere contrition.
Nowadays, many people consider sin as a quaint, cultural relic that causes unnecessary guilt, regret, or shame. So they delete it in their consciousness and in their vocabulary. They have learned to numb themselves of sin’s after-effects — through rationalization, forgetfulness, and the countless distractions which are offered free by the mass media, social networking, the Internet, and smartphones.
We can trace the demise of sin to the waning of our religious consciousness, a phenomenon that has gripped Europe since the 1800s. Philip Yancey cites the case of the Netherlands, thus:
“Dutch Christians told me that a century ago, 98 percent of Dutch people attended church regularly; within two generations the percentage fell below 20 percent. Today it’s under 10 percent. Almost half the church buildings in Holland have been destroyed or converted into restaurants, art galleries, or condominiums. In the church where I attended a prayer service, there were only ten of us who sat under the high Gothic arches, my wife and I are the only ones younger than 70.” Religiosity rises or wanes depending on a people’s image of God. In wealthy, secularized countries, the practice of religion has declined because they regard God like they see the North Pole — it exists but it’s not relevant in their life. People in these countries feel that they have everything, so they don’t need God for anything.
In our country where many people find it difficult to live beyond the level of mere survival, our need for God remains strong, and so is our religiosity. But while we pride ourselves of this, we lounge comfortably in our split-level world where we pay homage to God through our devotions and rituals, while living in a moral universe where God is conveniently absent and silent.
Silent, because we fear a God who speaks. He might remind us of our sins, and the punishment we deserve. Absent, because having been habituated to senseless violence, calamities, wars, and epidemics in which God does not intervene, we have surrendered our fates to government leaders, the market manipulators, the gods and goddesses of show business, the powerful and omniscient media moguls and practitioners, and the self-proclaimed cultural elite who tell us what to believe, how to think, and how to live.
Like the people in secularized countries, we are gradually dismantling the framework of our religious beliefs. We have become deaf to God’s voice in our consciences, and have allowed the cultural despisers of religion to ceaselessly hammer into our heads that sin is just a mistake, an oversight, a bad decision for which we would not be held accountable.
Since nature hates a vacuum, we are replacing such a framework with something else — a religion that offers no transcendent norm for right or wrong, As Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in Brothers Karamazov: “When there is no God, everything is permitted.” But in a world where anything goes, it will not be long before everything is gone.