The pastoral dimensions of sin

For your prayers this Easter Eve

I was asked recently what I thought was at the core of pastoral care. An unexpected answer rose to my jet lagged lips: Sin.

What, not love, you say? Well yes, of course. Love is our guide, but there are many snares and dangers on the way.

Sin is an unfashionable word, I know, except perhaps as a marketer’s knowing wink: branding for a nightclub or chocolate bar, the suggestion of something naught but nice, a bit of harmless indulgence. Used seriously, it raises hackles, or at least eyebrows. And indeed I thought of retracting it. But I didn’t. I wanted to see where it would lead.

The root of our many of our most difficult problems is sin. Not necessarily our sin, or even the sin of our fathers, though often enough it is the fruit of one or both. It may, at risk of giving Rousseau his due, be the fruit of social sins, though even those are ultimately the sins of individual. people making choices, within the limited parameters they can. And those limited parameters are, again, r the bonds and chains of earlier sins made by particular people.

A large part of the pastoral task - if we’re going to get any further than wiping noses and saying “there, there” - is the discernment of sin. Or, more precisely, helping people to discern the sins that belong to them from the sins committed against them. Without the discernment of one’s own sins, repentance is impossible. Without the discernment of others’ sins, forgiveness is impossible. A failure to discern the former leads to pride, the latter to wrath. A failure to distinguish the latter from the former and to take others’ sins as one’s own leads to crippling guilt. None of this makes for a happy life.

But what of our problems which have no obvious link to sin, the seemingly random afflictions that nature so cruelly imparts? The critical sickness of a child is the oftest-cited case. One may at this point resort to forensics, and point out that much sickness is at less accelerated by human neglect of the environment or of the poor, and that a sinful failure of distribution of medical care also plays its part. Such diagnoses might prompt action to alleviate those conditions for others, though they are unlikely to be the best immediate pastoral response to a person in pain or mourning. It is something for later healing, long after the wounds have been sutured.

Such cases aside, one is still left with those cases where there is nowhere left to point the finger except at God, and where the only option seems to be “respectfully to return the ticket.” To this I see no answer that will satisfy pastoral needs: at least, no answer in words. But I do see an answer which should form Christian pastors’ hearts and inform their actions as they care for those in such need. It is not the answer of a greater good, an inscrutable will, or ice-cream for all tomorrow after the gruel of today. It is the answer of Holy Saturday.

Death, suffering, pain: these are not what we were made for. Even these evils are the wages of Adam’s sin. But the new Adam entered his suffering, broke the gates of hell, snapped the chains of sin, took him by the hand and lifted him to the fullness of life. God is with us, in the hospital, among the raining bombs, in the blinded bedroom of the depressed.

As an answer in words, it is not enough. But it something the Church at its best reveals better by doing than by saying. The sister in the orphanage, the chaplain on the ward, the Reader who conducts a funeral,  the lay prison visitor, the bishop who flies hundreds of miles to support a priest in need: their deeds speak Christ louder than any of my sermons.

So perhaps there is something to sin as the key to pastoral care - with an important caveat. I was introduced to the work of Fr Romanides last year, and while his constant anti-Western invective is tiresome (when he said Dante wasn’t worth reading, I closed the book and went back to the Comedy for a while), with one insight I heartily agree: sin is a sickness and the Church is a hospital.  When the hospital is turned into a law court and starts trying illness as crime, the horrors of the Grand Inquisitor follow close behind.

Our Lord will come as judge, but first He came as Healer. He has given His Church the Holy Scriptures to guide us in discerning the symptoms, and the sacraments of Baptism, the Eucharist and Reconciliation - more commonly known as Confession - as the surgical tools for the healing of the sickness of sin which infects this good world. Those of us to whom He has entrusted them will ultimately have to answer for how well we have used them, how diligent we have been in diagnosing the symptoms. For sin is our enticement to love. In this, at least, o happy fault.

Christ is risen. Alleluia! May His blessed Mother and all the saints pray for us.

And of your mercy, dear readers, on this holiest of nights, I ask you to pray for one young Augustine, for his recovery from leukaemia, and for all those caring for him now. Jesu mercy, Mary pray.