Unfortunately, the word “sin” in our vocabulary implies culpability or personal fault. In fact, the precise meaning of original sin is that we are not personallyculpable for it, but it was somehow passed on to us and all people share in it. The supposed “doctrine” of original sin was actually meant to be a consolation; because if we know our own self as a mixed blessing, and that each of us is filled with contradictions and is a mystery to self, then we won’t pretend that we can totally eliminate or even hide all that we consider unworthy or inferior within. This provides a program for human humility.
.. It seems all God wants are useable instruments who will carry the mystery, the weight of glory and the burden of sin simultaneously, who can bear the darkness and the light, who can hold the paradox of incarnation—flesh and spirit, human and divine, joy and suffering—at the same time, just as Jesus did.
Jesus himself says, “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18), implying all else is merely a partial good. Such a text gives humans an honest, wonderful, but non ego-inflating agenda. There is no appeal to the ego here, only to our deep, deep need and desire for union—with our own selves and with God. And, remember, union is a very different goal than private perfection.
Richard Rohr Meditation: Being Your True Self
“Sin” primarily describes a state of living outside of union, when the part poses as the Whole. It’s the loss of any experience of who you are in God, of what many call your soul.
The full biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. In this it is quite similar to ancient Hinduism and later Buddhism and Sufi Islam. The spiritual journey is about realization, not perfection. You cannot get there, you can only be there. But for some reason, that foundational Being-in-God is too hard to believe, too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it because it affirms more about God than it does about us. The ego does not like that.
.. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love, and then I will—almost naturally—be moral. To continue the Copernican metaphor, now the sun is central and we draw our energy from its light.
.. Before conversion, we view sin as any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.
.. In that sense, only the false self can and will sin. The false self only lies because it somehow is a lie. The True Self is consciousness itself. The false self lives in unconsciousness, and we do evil only when we are unconscious. Jesus naturally forgave those who were killing him, because they literally “do not know what they are doing”
Richard Rohr Meditation: Sin: The Delusional State That We Are Separate and Alone
What most people call “sin” is more the symptom of sin, not the delusional state itself! It is this common state of believed or chosen autonomy from God and others that must be addressed. Our primary and self-destructive illusion is that we are separate and alone. This is the true basis, motivation, and loneliness that leads to all “sin.”
Richard Rohr Meditation: The Illusion of Our False Self
Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion:
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes.
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world