Disobedience, which is like that initial pain in my son’s mouth, becomes something more.
The other day, my second son came home from school and mentioned that another child had accidentally bumped his mouth and it had hurt very much.
For the next couple of days he complained a little of the pain and found it annoying to have anyone touch his left cheek or mouth.
Then, on the third day, he woke up with a face that was swollen and quite sore to touch. Clearly he had an infection in his mouth.
And after appropriate treatment, he was fine, but despite all of this, I have not been able to stop thinking about that infection and what it really means.
You see, that infection is like sin. Sin never really starts off as a huge thing. You have only to watch a two year old child gain some independence from their parent to see how sin grows. First the child learns the word “no”. And they use it to disobey – in much the same way as the very first children disobeyed the Will of God in the Garden of Eden by eating form the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. But this in itself is not a terrible sin. After all, for a two year old child, who is still learning their place in the world and has not real sense of self or conscious, this is in fact, no sin at all. But it is a good demonstration of how sin is created…
You see, it starts off with little things that in and of themselves, seem no problem at all. A little bit of disobedience is surely of no harm to anyone, I might reason to myself. But then, that disobedience, which is like that initial pain in my son’s mouth the day his cheek was knocked by the other child, becomes something more. It becomes a platform upon which things can be built. It is a rotten foundation so to speak.
After all, following disobedience on little things, we can learn to disobey on bigger ones. And then, when we disobey on bigger things, we learn to become desensitised to greater sins – sins like dishonesty become a small thing to hide the disobedience. And that is like the days following the initial injury to my son’s mouth. There is some pain – some irritation and disruption to the natural order established by God – but certainly not enough to cause me to change my ways or do things differently…
And then there is the next step. The established sins. You see a small disobedience becomes disobedience about bigger things – lust, murder (not only physical murder, but harming someone else with our words is a sort of murder), jealousy… And in these things, we are like my son, whjo woke up one morning swollen and clearly infected.
And to remedy this infection (for my son AND in sin) there is much intervention required. Medication – spiritually this is the Sacrament of Reconciliation). Discipline through fasting and abstinence to re-train our will to obey God’s Holy Will. And time… Time to get back to what we were born to be – and this is our lifetime, which is a constant realignment to manage the deficiencies and weaknesses of our character caused by sin…
And I have been thinking about that today, as I have been thinking about infection…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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