To be not ABSTRACT …

We live in a world of incredible suffering. Suffering so incredible that we must of necessity, remain largely asleep to it. For obviously, none of us could bear to be fully awake to all that it means. Only beings of the Angelic hierarchies can perhaps begin to bear the state of the world …

And at the same time, I see - however superficially - that every minute of every day, I contribute to the suffering of the world. And for this I pray to be forgiven, for ‘what I have done and what I have failed to do …’

And this, it seems to me, indicates a dimension to sin not emphasised enough.

For the term ‘sin’ has become caught up with abstract ideas of abstract violations of abstract virtues. Or else it has assumed morbid overtones.

Yet I have no wish to speak of sin in terms of breaking abstract rules. Nor do I want to invoke notions that we are completely and utterly wretched (as John Calvin maintained in his doctrine of the so-called 'total depravity' of the human being).

No, that is not what I mean at all and I have not the least wish to affirm extreme Protestant doctrines of 'total depravity', where the GLORY of human nature, human love and human effort count for nothing … absolutely nothing.

At the same time, I wish to face the fact of what sin **really** means. I wish to face the fact, with greater honesty, that I am **hurting** all of life. That my very existence brings pain – day in, day out.

At the same time, I pray not to forget, that insofar as my human nature and human love is wedded to Our Lord (by whatever name, we choose to give the sacred heart of divine humanity) - so also are my human efforts, not without effectiveness or meaning … Not even the very least of my human gestures.

Twenty-five years ago perhaps, I ventured one evening into a pedestrian subway in Chelmsford, Essex.

A woman passed by and smiled at me. I have never forgotten that smile. I imagine now that it must have been filled with profound human warmth. (That is to say, suffused by a truly Christic feeling, again by whatever name we choose to call it).

And I wonder now, whatever this woman in Chelmsford has ‘done or failed to do’ in her life, however she has added to the suffering of the world, I wonder what will happen when she dies, as we all shall die …

Will she die and see the unforgettable memory that gesture of warmth created in the mind of a young stranger in Chelmsford, one evening in the early 1980’s?

Will the profound warmth that radiated through her smile that night, which in all likelihood, also radiated to countless others in her life, come back to her as something she added to the world, without ever realising how much she added …?

For though little do we *truly* realise it, but we are all going to die. We are going to die in a universe, where justice will prevail. And just as the suffering we cause others matters, so does all we do to alleviate suffering … Including the subtlest of our human gestures.

All we do to love, in other words. That is to say, every sincere smile in a darkened Essex underpass, every prayer, every kind word, every effort to make real the reality of the other, every effort to bear another’s pain and not to reflexively push it away, push it away into the darkness of unconsciousness …

Yes pain is difficult and how often do we push it away. But every effort to overcome non-love in our lives counts and will count, in this world and in the world to come. And thus of course, also every effort to address the religious, social, political and environmental crisis of the planet.

And when we really die, we will see, we will feel, how we added to the suffering of the world, and also how we acted to alleviate that suffering.