June 2004 Archives

I just ate a muffin. A blue-berry muffin. A blue-berry muffin with cinnamon glaze. A four-day-old blueberry muffin with cinnamon glaze. And it was moldy! I don't notice at first, though. In fact, I was nearly done eating it when, to my shock and dismay, I discovered the mold, blithely covering the piece of muffin on my fork, only inches away from my mouth.

In a fit of repulsion, I haplessly spit out the piece that was still in my mouth, rushed to the bathroom, and proceeded to irrigate my mouth with large amounts of water. What if I got sick? Would I need to pump my stomach? Or would the anti-mildew bathroom cleaner do the trick, if I swirled it around a little bit?

There's a lesson in this, of course. Nothing happens by accident, right?

I think sin is like eating a moldy muffin. After all, there's always something good about sin, just like there was about the muffin. If there weren't, why would we do it in the first place? But there's something bad mixed in with the good, and that's where the sin resides. Muffins are well and good, and it's a reasonable thing to eat them now and then. But moldy muffins--herein lies the disorder. The reasonableness of eating the muffin was transformed into unreasonableness because the muffin was moldy. Why is it unreasonable? Because eating a moldy muffin is bad for your health! At least, it can't be good for you, even if it doesn't do much permanent harm. One could say, then, that it is wrong to eat a moldy muffin precisely because it is bad for you. Hence the converse is not true. That is, it's bad for you not because it is wrong--as if it were simply the breaking of some arbitrary rule--but because it is unreasonable and harmful.

This is how I see sin, then. The ten commandments, for example, aren't just arbitrary rules; rather, they correspond to our human nature and to what comprises healthy relationships--with God and with other people. If I steal, for example, it is like eating the moldy muffin. There's something good about stealing, after all: the actual thing which I acquire by stealing! But the bad which is mixed in with this good is like the mold on the muffin: the thing which I acquire belongs to someone else, and he or she hasn't given me permission to take it! This introduces disorder into the relationship, as well as disorder into the heart of the person who steals. Ultimately, then, it is harmful.

And just like I instinctively wanted to wash out my mouth after I ate the moldy muffin, sin makes us feel the need to repair the damage we've done. This feeling is usually felt as "guilt"--but unless the guilt is followed by some real action that repairs the damage, the guilt is useless. One needs to recognize how the action is disordered, how it harms oneself and one's relationships, and then decide to try to avoid that action in the future. This is what I would call conversion of heart. I've certainly learned my lesson about eating moldy muffins, and I'm whole-heartedly converting to eating fresh, non-moldy muffins from now on! And I'm going to try to avoid the same mistake in the future: look before you bite!

Let's back up a moment. About a week and a half ago I was in Rome, as you know. I still had much travel ahead of me, but barely enough time for it--there's never enough time, right? My solution: time travel.

It didn't work out quite the way I had imagined, though. After a seven-hour layover in Philadelphia, where I ate some kind of egg and cheese bagel sandwhich, I finally made it to Houston. It was easy to tell I was there because the ambient temperature had risen by about 20 degrees. I stayed the night with a friend--who will be ordained a Catholic priest in Corpus Christi on July 10th, actually--then headed back to the airport to fly out of Houston. That was a quick stay. Well, I did manage to go to Mass downtown at Annunciation parish, I think it was, and drive a little through the new renovations in east Houston. My next destination? Albuquerque!

I flew to Dallas first to change planes, then was delayed. Of course. Meanwhile I'm reading a book, Under the Torrent of His Love: Therese of Lisieux, a Spiritual Genius, by Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, a Carmelite priest and lifelong devotee of Therese. Written before she was declared by Pope John Paul II as a "Doctor of the Church," the book is a spellbinding synthesis of Therese's "Little Way." I can let the book speak for itself by quoting a short passage from the Introduction:

To our sophisticated and bored civilization, which has lost the sense of the infinite and suffers from this, God has sent a child who, with the charm and luminous purity of her simplicity, brings us once more the eternal message of his love, namely, that he has created us out of love, that his love is still vibrant and all the more eager because of our desertion, and that he is waiting for us to love him and to let ourselves be loved by him like very small children . . . At each turning point in history the Holy Spirit places a guide; to each civilization as it arises he provides a master to shed his light . . . It is always risky to prophesy. But is it prophesying, or is it simply an expression of my thought and conviction--based on the work already accomplished, the vastness of the field in which she exerts her influence, which is the entire world, and the power and purity of the light she casts about her--when I affirm that Therese will be, in fact already is, one of the great spiritual teachers of the Church, one of the most effective spiritual guides of all times?

I did finally make it to Albuquerque. My friend, Jimmy, picked me up at the airport. I greeted him with buona sera and found it difficult to speak English after that. In fact, it took me about 20 minutes to untie my tongue; meanwhile, he responded with snippets of Spanish and Italian. I think I was just a little out of my gourd, considering my body was still on Roman time, where it was around three o'clock in the morning. After arriving at his house, going back out for dinner, then returning once again, we managed to stay up talking 'till three o'clock in the morning, Albuquerque time.

This is what I'm talking about: time travel! Have you ever heard of the Intercessors of the Lamb? Neither had I, until Saturday night. On the first Saturday of the month, Jimmy and his wife host a prayer group at their home--they pray the Rosary together and have a cookout! Among their friends is a Spirit-filled young woman, Megan, who introduced me to the Intercessors and their charism, which is centered around contemplative prayer, intercession, and spiritual warfare. Very interesting, I thought to myself, this is one more piece in the puzzle that I have slowly been assembling for the past six months. Well actually, the origin of this puzzle lies much further back, but the proximate origin began at the beginning of this year, when I was in Mexico. But that's another story.

This concludes my first three days back in the States. For the sake of brevity, utility, and sanity, I will continue the story of my time travels in future posts, until we reach the present moment. We've still got three states and six more cities to go!

So I'm here in Plano, Texas. Since I arrived back from Rome on June 18th, I've been in four states and eight cities, and I still have a few more weeks 'till I report to my "permanent" assignment for the summer. To allay the confusion somewhat, and just to have some fun, I have decided to publish a journal of sorts. Hence, this new blog.

A blog, of course, is short for "web log," and I think it will be a convenient way to keep in touch with whoever is interested in keeping in touch with me. How does that sound?

So welcome to my new blog. Let's pray that I keep it updated!