Father Greg Boyle considers how many of the evils we witness today reflect the consequences of our painful disconnection from the God of love:
In the face of senseless gun violence, political treachery and revenge, hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks, some people will just say, “Sin and evil are on display.” When we do this, we’ve given up. We’re not even trying. We declare that we will no longer be seeking solutions, because we believe that human beings are somehow stained from the start. Original sin doesn’t explain the terrible. Lots of things do. Original sin is not one of them. There is no sin gene in us. We’re born from love and always invited to love….
I asked a friend to talk to her daughter who had just graduated from a Jesuit [Catholic] university about how she and her peers saw sin. Her daughter said, “We don’t really use the word ‘sin’ or talk about it. Sin is an Old World map.” Now, I suppose some might lament that sin is not on the front burner. It’s actually not even on the back burner. It is nowhere near the stove. And, of course, if you tried to use an Old World map today to get you to, say, Iraq, it would drop you off at Mesopotamia.
We could lament that young folks might see sin this way. Or we could find the invitation in it. Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing? Scripture has it as “Then your light shall break like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed. The light shall rise for you in your gloom. The darkness shall become for you like midday” [Isaiah 58:10]. I endlessly tell gang members that the God of love doesn’t see sin. Our God sees son (and daughter). “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian of Norwich writes, “not a particle of being.” Then she says, “With all due respect to Mother Church … but this does not line up.” She couldn’t get sin to align with her God of love.
Boyle suggests a shift in emphasis when it comes to behavior:
The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest, since it’s an Old World map, and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy. We don’t want to end up in Mesopotamia. Yes, we want to do the next right thing, but what is the next right thing and who is able to choose it? Only the healthy person can. So we help each other, not to make better choices but to walk home to well-being and deeper growth in love.
Reference:
Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times (Avid Reader Press, 2024), 40–41, 49–50.
Image credit and inspiration: Balint Mendlik, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An arrow missing the center reminds us that sin is not our essence. We may be momentarily disconnected from our true aim, but still able to center the next shot.
Story from Our Community:
Reading Josué Perea’s story of musica divina made me cry. In my own journey, I have often found hip hop to be such a source of inspiration and connection to God. My presentation to the bishop for my place at theological college was entitled “Let them have hip hop,” talking about teenagers and faith. I discovered, as Josué did, that the established church isn’t always open to the idea of grace in unexpected places. But God is in all things, especially hearts that are searching.
—Julia B.
