Readiness

I was listening to one of my new favorite podcasts the other day and someone called in with an objection that I, personally, found very strange: he said he wanted to become Catholic, but was concerned because he knew that after he joined, he would not be able to stop sinning, even with the best of intentions.

And I thought, “…duh? That’s WHY I joined the Church!”

Number one, that’s why there is a very, very well-known process for getting rid of your sins in Catholicism, and it’s even at the level of a sacrament! You know why we have this? It’s because the Church KNOWS that you won’t be able to permanently forgo all sin. Churches that believe that all your sins are taken care of at the magic moment you “got saved” don’t have formal processes for being able to continually rid you of sin on a steady basis after you join.

Number two, how many people say, “I’m dreadfully ill, but I’m not going to the hospital until I recover,” Or, “I’m desperately out-of-shape, but I won’t go to the gym until I get more fit.” The whole POINT of these institutions is fix to what’s wrong with people: you’re sick, you’re out-of-shape, you’re a pathetic pile of sinful inclinations. That’s WHY you go to the hospital, visit the gym, join the Catholic Church: it’s BECAUSE there’s something wrong with you, and that’s where you go to get it fixed.

Number three, this made me realize another difference between Catholicism and the Protestantism in which I was raised: due to the “getting saved once for all” theology of Protestantism, our churches WEREN’T for people who knew they were sinners and needed help to stop being sinners. If someone came up and said “I am trapped in sin and need help; can I join your church”, ultimately, the answer would be “no.” That is, to actually join the church, one had to at least claim that one was ALREADY saved, that one had already passed through the mystical portal from damnation into salvation. There was an understanding that even saved people still sinned, but the church itself was a place that collected people who were already saved, not a means to make its members that way. If you approach a Catholic and say “I’m trapped in sin and need help,” we’ll say, “Perfect! We have just the sacraments for that!” It’s a profound difference in ecclesiology: Catholics see the Church as the very MEANS of our salvation, the fountain through which God’s grace is poured into our lives. Certain Protestants see the church as a collection of people who have already received the fullness of God’s grace, who basically hang out together and do good things.

Catholics still see the Church as a collection of the “saved,” but you get saved BY entering the Church and receiving the sacraments, not as something you do on your own, then go pick out a congregation to fellowship with.

When asked why he became Catholic, G.K Chesterton famously said, “To get rid of my sins.” I lived as a Protestant for years, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing in Protestantism that was able to remove the ever-increasing load of sins from my back. Every honest person knows that, unlike in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian keeps re-building his load. My Protestantism basically said, “That’s okay, God will let you into heaven anyway!” But I couldn’t keep going every day with that load incrementally growing larger and larger after my baptism without SOMETHING to get rid of it. I was sad, and upset about my sins, and would beg God to forgive me, but how could I know? Guilt feelings were too subjective to be a good indication. Plus, if it turned out I wasn’t one of the elect and had been deceived in my belief that I had ever been saved in the first place, when no matter WHAT I did, those sins weren’t going anywhere. And that was about the point that I abandoned Christianity for Deism, to escape the sense that my separation from God was growing every day and there was nothing I could do about it.

In our denomination, baptism was not a sacrament, but merely a sign of a pre-existing fact. I had no concept that baptism was effective in any way, but in retrospect I see that it DID have an effect; I had just never connected my new-found communion with God with the fact that I had been recently baptized.

And I believe that other people, without knowing why, sense the change as well. We once knew a man who had been baptized over a dozen times. His explanation was that every time was a kind of “re-dedication” to God, or a sign of his greater growth in the spiritual life. Since he saw his original baptism as no more than a sign, it seemed logical to him to keep expressing the sign every time he felt he had made progress in his relationship with God.

But now I wonder how much of that was him trying to re-create the original sacrament, when the grace of God flowed into his soul, his sins were wiped away, and the Trinity came to live within him. As time passed and he experienced further sin, and his relationship with God suffered wounds (which is what happens to us all), his religious tradition offered him no method for removing the new sins, and repairing the relationship. But he had an intuitive sense that SOMETHING had changed upon his “first” baptism, and he kept returning to it, in the subconscious hope that the effect would be the same. He was yearning for the sacrament of reconciliation, which also removes sin, but was unaware that God had provided it to address the very issues he was seeking to solve.

For my money, the BEST thing about Catholicism is that it actually gives you the means to deal with your inevitable, continuing sins. It doesn’t just tell you, “Oh, they were all taken care of that time you said the Sinner’s Prayer, and all that guilt is Satan trying to deceive you. Just try harder next time.”

God could have set up the sacramental economy is any number of ways; He COULD have given us grace that would end all our sins at the initial moment of salvation. But He didn’t. Human beings are embodied in time, and we grow and develop physically, mentally, and spiritually in ways that mean we encounter new challenges and situations every day. We can’t be forgiven for future sins, because we don’t know to ask forgiveness for them until after we’ve committed them. God knows, but that isn’t information He gives to us in advance. He has willed that we continue through life in a normal way, making mistakes, falling, then choosing to get back up again and ask for His forgiveness and help. And He makes that forgiveness and help available, but not in a way that defies common sense and our experience of time.