Sin

I was raised in one of the many 1970s-era Catholic homes in which Catholicism was fiercely clung to as a source of ethnic identity, but proudly dissented from in actual practice. My parents were not only white ethnics who’d emerged from the working class, but were professional liberal intellectuals as well. I had a very confused notion of what constituted a sin until rather recently in my adult life. As I suspect many young Catholics do, I lived a life that was in violation of many of the Ten Commandments, but I didn’t think that restricted me from receiving Communion. At one point, I was a cantor, and in spite of being in serious sin and by that time also having mostly rejected the Catholic faith, I still received in full sight of the public. Somehow I thought it would help me, would heal me, would bring me closer to God, but I didn’t grasp the simple fact that I needed to confess my sins first. In spite of his open dissent from the Church, my father had the good sense not to receive Communion during a time when he was, by his own admission, in a state of mortal sin; even though my catechesis was spotty, I might have learned in this case from his example.

The odd thing is that as a child I had a strong consciousness of the reality and the weight of my own sinfulness. This feeling persisted into adulthood, but by that time it had become annoying and, according to my friends and therapists, neurotic, so I tried to shake it by delving deeper into the temporal pleasure of sin. I was thinking homeopathically, that like cured like, so sin would be the antidote for sin. I thought I was special and specially gifted and privileged, that living life to the fullest meant claiming every experience that was gratifying to the senses and the ego. In spite of my current penitence, it’s still hard to lose the feeling of special privilege by which I became my own authority on what was sinful for me. It’s a miracle that God drew back such an incredibly disobedient soul to Himself. I am suffering now, but I have heard that a hundred years of suffering on earth are better than one hour in purgatory.