MOMENTS OF HONESTY

A Dominican friar on his deathbed wanted to renew his baptismal promises. When asked, 'Do you renounce Satan?' 'I most certainly do,' the old friar replied decidedly. Fr. Timothy Radcliffe tells the story of a dying parishioner in London who answered even more decidedly: 'I do, the old bastard!'

When was the last time you had a good conversation about sin? That most socially incorrect subject comes up this Sunday in both the first reading and the Gospel. Isaiah confesses that he is 'a man of unclean lips,' and hears the angel tell him 'your sin is purged.' The Gospel finds Peter on his knees before Jesus and pleading, 'Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.' And Paul, in the second reading, proclaims his unworthiness to be an apostle.

All three of them encountered something of the divine: Isaiah in the Jerusalem temple, Paul on the road to Damascus, and Peter after the miraculous catch of fish. Christian writers tell us that the more conscious and sensitive we become about God, the less holy we appear to be in our own eyes. The saints, people like John XXIII and Mother Teresa, experienced themselves more as sinners than saints. Dorothy Day's contemporaries say that she would be shocked to think that people wanted to put her on the road to sainthood.

Isaiah, Peter and Paul were astonished and filled with wonder at their brush with the divine. They each received a call to invest their lives in something they felt was a worthwhile venture. Not knowing the personal price that would be exacted, they were ready to gamble everything. The call woke them up to their real needs and put them on the road to becoming who they were always meant to be. 'The wiseing years revealed their inner depths,' as Irish poet Alice Taylor would put it.

All three offered the same response to the call: I am unclean, unfit, sinful. That may be the criterion God is looking for. All three responses are touching in their openness and honesty. God doesn't look for sinless people. We are not just human beings but human becomings. Isaiah, Peter and Paul, like all of us in baptism, were called to evolve, change and mature by following Christ the quintessential human.

It all begins with the acknowledgment of our own sinfulness. Etty Hilesum, a young Jewish woman, heard the voice of Christ while waiting to be sent to her death in Auschwitz. In her shocking memoirs of that hell-hole she observed the demonic all around her. 'I no longer believe we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves, rooting out the sin within our own hearts' - An Interrupted Life p.285.

Are we listening? Is our sixth sense open to the voice of God - in scripture, in church, in one another and in our conscience? The Risen Christ is in our midst calling us to deeper and wider humanity and to that compassion which William Spohn calls 'the optic nerve of Christian vision' - Go And Do Likewise p.87. Compassion has a way of subverting the self-centeredness that cloaks our sinfulness.

PASTOR EMERITUS