Sin Makes Things–and People–Fall Apart

Last updated on: March 17, 2015 at 12:55 am by Mark Shea

Sin Makes Things–and People–Fall Apart 2015-03-16T18:05:41-07:00 Mark Shea

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John Oliver on the surprisingly interesting question of infrastructure (NSFW language)…

…bears witness to the fact that part of the reason the Christian faith is true is that it testifies to the reality that we gain our lives by losing them. Multiple generations of civic-minded people denied themselves, did their boring duty, built our infrastructure and paid for it with taxes. Our generation, which is more interested in clutching our Mammon and running after what is sexy, is letting that boring stuff go to ruin. The result is almost certainly going to be several catastrophes before we learn to embrace the boredom and pay the bills to get it fixed. And if we don’t, generations yet unborn will curse us.

It’s a problem as old as last Sunday’s readings. Israel got the infrastructure of the temple and and Levitical sacrifices up and running and assumed it would all take care of itself while they partied. Indeed, they assumed the Temple was so sacrosanct that even God could not destroy it, no matter how they acted. Jeremiah was therefore sent to them to say:

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Stand in the gate of the LORD’S house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the LORD, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.’

“For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever.

“Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, says the LORD. Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. And now, because you have done all these things, says the LORD, and when I spoke to you persistently you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, therefore I will do to the house which is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim. (Je 7:1–15).

The end for that generation is what yesterday’s OT readings were about:

In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people
added infidelity to infidelity,
practicing all the abominations of the nations
and polluting the LORD’s temple
which he had consecrated in Jerusalem.

Early and often did the LORD, the God of their fathers,
send his messengers to them,
for he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place.
But they mocked the messengers of God,
despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets,
until the anger of the LORD against his people was so inflamed
that there was no remedy.
Their enemies burnt the house of God,
tore down the walls of Jerusalem,
set all its palaces afire,
and destroyed all its precious objects.
Those who escaped the sword were carried captive to Babylon,
where they became servants of the king of the Chaldeans and his sons
until the kingdom of the Persians came to power.
All this was to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah:
“Until the land has retrieved its lost sabbaths,
during all the time it lies waste it shall have rest
while seventy years are fulfilled.”

It is notable that the judgment described in the Old Testament is not something God does to Israel, but simply the fruition of what Israel does to itself. Sin, whether of the “if it’s not full of flash and immediate gratification, who cares?” variety or the “I will fantasize that I can eliminate responsibility for the common good and live for myself” variety, is like AIDS: it leaves nations prey to the fact that we live in a world of chaos and entropy. Refuse to live in virtue (aka “moral reality”) and you get what you ask for: chaos and destruction. This expresses itself in, among other things, crumbling infrastructures, family breakdown, and eventually tyranny (when the Strong Man who promises to save us all brings the New Order). As Chesterton points out, tyrannies arise out of tired democracies.

The irony, in this case, is that we have been warned of things like this in our own civic life. Here, for example, is somebody who pointed out our overwhelming dependence on infrastructure and the rightful function of the state in maintaining it in order to help maintain the common good:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.

Perfectly sensible–and hysterically and derisively rejected by the Noise Machine not because it is untrue, but entirely because of who was saying it. Yet indeed these remarks comport with the teaching of the Church back to Romans 13 and summed up in CCC 1927: “It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society.” The last line, in particular, is perfectly orthodox Catholic social teaching known as the doctrine of solidarity. It can be summed up as the impossibility of saying “Your end of the Titanic is sinking”. It can also be summed up as the fact that we we have a bounden duty, not merely a charitable libertarian preference, to provide for the common good. As Pope Benedict teaches in Caritas in Veritate:

“The reality of human solidarity, which is a benefit for us, also imposes a duty”. Many people today would claim that they owe nothing to anyone, except to themselves. They are concerned only with their rights [Mark here: The left tends to do this with sexual rights, the right with property rights], and they often have great difficulty in taking responsibility for their own and other people’s integral development. Hence it is important to call for a renewed reflection on how rights presuppose duties, if they are not to become mere licence. Nowadays we are witnessing a grave inconsistency. On the one hand, appeals are made to alleged rights, arbitrary and non-essential in nature, accompanied by the demand that they be recognized and promoted by public structures, while, on the other hand, elementary and basic rights remain unacknowledged and are violated in much of the world. A link has often been noted between claims to a “right to excess”, and even to transgression and vice, within affluent societies, and the lack of food, drinkable water, basic instruction and elementary health care in areas of the underdeveloped world and on the outskirts of large metropolitan centres. The link consists in this: individual rights, when detached from a framework of duties which grants them their full meaning, can run wild, leading to an escalation of demands which is effectively unlimited and indiscriminate. An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties. Duties set a limit on rights because they point to the anthropological and ethical framework of which rights are a part, in this way ensuring that they do not become licence. Duties thereby reinforce rights and call for their defence and promotion as a task to be undertaken in the service of the common good. Otherwise, if the only basis of human rights is to be found in the deliberations of an assembly of citizens, those rights can be changed at any time, and so the duty to respect and pursue them fades from the common consciousness. Governments and international bodies can then lose sight of the objectivity and “inviolability” of rights. When this happens, the authentic development of peoples is endangered. Such a way of thinking and acting compromises the authority of international bodies, especially in the eyes of those countries most in need of development. Indeed, the latter demand that the international community take up the duty of helping them to be “artisans of their own destiny”, that is, to take up duties of their own. The sharing of reciprocal duties is a more powerful incentive to action than the mere assertion of rights.

The fourth pillar of Catholic social teaching called solidarity is not the opposite of the third pillar called subsidiarity. Subsidiarity means “the people closest to the problem should generally handle it unless (as with things like roads or the use of violence to maintain order) it is necessary for somebody higher up the chain of command to take care of it.” This mitigates against things like road quality varying too widely depending on whether the street has rich and poor people living on it, as well as keeping Hatfields and McCoys from taking care of peacekeeping against each other. Subsidiarity is not Catholic code for “libertarianism”. Both subsidiarity and solidarity are contributory to the common good (second pillar) and the common good refers specifically to the common good of human beings whose dignity is rooted in the fact that they are in the image and likeness of God (first pillar). Selfishness is the sledge hammer whacking at all four pillars. Therefore, selfishness results not only in the breakdown of the social order, but in the breakdown of the individual made in the image of God–physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Pursued to its uttermost end, selfishness cuts a soul off from God and renders it incapable of stopping its own dissolution into what C.S. Lewis frighteningly describes as a “witless psychic sediment”.

God, meanwhile, never stops sending his grace. Even his judgments against sin are medicinal and always ordered toward our reclamation. So Paul tells us:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man—though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation. (Ro 5:1–11).

That’s the good news: God is not searching for opportunities to condemn us, but is bound and determined to save us on the flimsiest excuse. As John says:

God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Not that with sufficient applications of will power we can’t succeed in rejecting God’s incessant attempts to reach us with grace. But it takes some doing. Uncle Screwtape registers the complaint of hell about this fact:

He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore”. Ugh! I don’t think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least–sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working, Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

Bottom line: we are made to love God and one another. It is natural for us because God is the author of our nature. Sin, though normal, is never natural. It should be perpetually amazing to us that we keep falling into it. That it so rare for us to see how bizarre sin is only testifies to its amazing power to blind.

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