
Attachment to Sin

Think of the title
of this article: “Lingering Shadows” ...
It is an apparent
impossibility. How can shadows remain after the object of which they
are the mere shadows is gone? When you have stood under a late afternoon
sun, your shadow long in the west — have ever you moved and seen your
shadow remain where once you stood and now stand no more? The only way
to make what is impossible otherwise possible is to take a photograph
of the shadow alone as you stand before it. You can then keep the photograph
of what had been and is no more, and return to the moment that was,
and like the shadow, is no more. The analogy is clear.
Attachment to Sin
We have left
the person, place, or thing —the occasion of sin — in which we once
stood and have no intention of returning … but for all our efforts a
shadow remains even as we ourselves have gone. The shadow lingers despite
all the years and the fierce and even faithful resolution that never
would the sun find us there again. We are there no more, but inexplicably
the shadow still falls over our hearts. It mocks us, either filling
us with melancholy desire, or imbuing us with unremitting guilt. If
it has been sinful love, then likely it will dog you all your days.
The sin is no more. The person is long gone. We soberly
recognize that the occasion can never be recaptured even should the
person remain. So much has changed! We have grown older even as our
illusions have not. The landscape has changed even as it has remained
immutable in our memory.
And even could it be again, it would not be the same again.
We know this. After all, we have fled it, and those once desperate pangs
seize us no longer. Or do they
...?
This is the Predicament of What is Called
Attachment to Sin
The concept
of “attachment to sin”, however, is so ... clinical, remote, even austere.
In dealing with the human heart, it appears heartless. We have — and
so often with great difficulty and immeasurable pain — left the sin,
have we not? We have fled Egypt. And even now ... even now, after these
many years, we are gaunt and even crippled by the effort. There is no
calculus sufficient to the cost, but we have fled nonetheless, urged
on by grace. Despite the prompting of our hearts to look back at the
lissome and distant smoke rising from the flesh-pots of Egypt that we
have left for a freedom that we have not yet found, we set our faces
like flint against an unrelenting wind that would turn them back ...
that calls us to remembrance. Still we wander in the desert, the Jordan
an open dream before us, the Red Sea a closed memory behind us.
Resolutely we press on. There are yet a host of sins to
come that we must drive out before us, but none prove so strong as the
enemy we fled.
No Canaanite or king of Midian has the might of our own
personal Pharaoh — who would call us back to slavery and servitude.
We fled him but we did not defeat him. His chariots pursued us to no
avail, and it was not by our power that they were splintered and still
litter the banks of our dreams. The Midianites had chariots of steel,
yes — and we left them strewn in the desert behind us! But Pharaoh had
fire! Alike he kindled the fleshpots without, and the deep craving within!
Grimly we watched towers burn in Midian before us, but with what longing
do we still look upon the burning fleshpots of Egypt behind us!
This is our Plight in our Attachment to
Sin
Spiritually,
it is perhaps the most desperate, the most unrelenting, and in the end,
the most deadly warfare of all. The victory is conclusive, but paradoxically
the defeat is indecisive. The enemy has fled, but somehow his shadow
remains. He has been subdued but not vanquished, defeated, but not put
utterly to death. He is, in short, forever and irrevocably a threat:
unleash him and he will contend with us to the death. It is true that
he is no longer present, but it is equally true that by fault or misfortune
he may find his way to us yet. As long as he lives his shadow falls
over us, and nothing short of his death will free us from him.
Sin survives the sword. All your violence against the sin
within will avail you nothing. Your flight from sin will not outrun
its shadow. The root lies deeply within ... and it lives, and if allowed
will spring to life again. The very soil itself must be subject to the
furnace of holy love that leaves no seed of malice or sin dormant within,
nor even its husk a scandal without.
You will never be free of the seed of death — which is
sin — that lingers within you, as long as you cultivate remembrance
of sin ... the very soil itself in which alone it takes root,
thrives, and in the end throttles ...
It is not enough that we have left sin — the occasion,
the intention, the act itself ... it is not enough and it will not suffice.
Unless our attachment to sin, our desire for what is sinful,
is sundered to the last sinew, however tightly we bind it, it keeps
us, in turn, captive. It is the
proverbial wolf we hold by the ears, afraid to keep hold of it and afraid
to let it go.
Relinquishing sin, especially that deeply personal sin
(that deadly affront to God) that is unique to you in all history,
must be a consciously total act. It is total war and one of you
will die: the sin, together with your attachment to it, or you yourself
… who will die to God because you refused to die to sin. I say “unique
in all history” because you are unique in all history. The time period,
the place in time, the time in the place, and all the people who were
affected by your sin and all the lives that they in turn touched and
changed as a result of your sin — to say nothing of the person with
whom you have sinned, or who brought you to sin, or who became the occasion
of your sin, and against whom also you have sinned.
The web of sin is so taut — like a violin
string tuned to the point of breaking, that who touches it at either
end causes it to reverberate through the whole, leaving no fiber within
it unmoved; its discordance affecting all, its dissonance touching every
ear. Aware of our peril we nevertheless play upon it … until it snaps
and recoils upon us with a lash like a springing viper. We are wounded
by our sin and it has wreaked havoc on all around us.
False Consolation
Do not seek
consolation in the thought that many have sinned as you have, and attempt
to excuse yourself by recourse to your human frailty and that inherent
susceptibility to sin that we haplessly inherited from our First Parents
in the Garden — rather, fear that it has the power to ensnare so many
— from the most clever to the least, from the wise to the foolish, from
the mighty to the most impoverished! All alike have fallen … but not
all alike have risen. God will give you the grace to resist sin, but
you must accept it, seize it, hold firmly to it. You must wage the war.
He will give you the armor, but you must strap it upon yourself; He
will give you the weapons but you must wield them: Faith, Hope and Charity.
Chastity, Obedience, Truthfulness.
Humilty, Humilty, Humilty
Understand
this: your foes are three and each of them unrelenting: The World, the
Flesh, and the Devil — Satan, that father of lies (“There is no devil.
You are too enlightened, too progressive; too intellectual, too learned
to acknowledge so ancient an enemy. ‘I am a myth’”, he persuades
you — and this, too, is a lie!” But he was a liar and a murderer from
the beginning — and he seeks your immortal soul to bring that imago
Dei, that image of God, that unutterably beautiful creation by God,
to final despair, to endless torment and to utter ruin; to that frightful
reality called the Second Death beyond which there is no rising to hope;
to the reek of that charnel house that is the fume and fire of Hell
… his everlasting abode.
But understand this more: nothing and no one can withstand
God and He Alone is your strength, He Alone your defender. “If God is
with me, who can be against me?” And as though such help were lacking,
there is more: the very Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, your Angel Guardian,
the Holy Angels and the Company of Martyrs who intercede for you in
your weakness and peril.
And understand this equally well: You cannot let
go of sin, “a little.” It is the commitment to the total
repudiation of sin. As long as a thread remains to sustain it, sin
will perch upon it.
Remember, that if you have not slain the wolf, you cannot
hold him by one ear.
It is Lent —the acceptable time. Accept it.
Geoffrey K. Mondello
Editor
Boston Catholic Journal
Comments? Write us:
editor@boston-catholic-journal.com
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Totally Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes virtutem, et servasti verbum
Meum, nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have but little power, and
yet you have kept My word, and have not denied My Name.”
(Apocalypse
3.8)
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