Week Seven - Daily Schedule

Theme: Discovering God's forgiving and renewing love in my life's experience.

Grace/Desire: With God's continual love and protection embracing me, I ask to know better the power of sin in the world and in my life.

Prayer materials for this week:

  1. The Sin of the Angels. Jesus said, "I watched Satan fall like lightening from heaven." Luke 10:18
  2. The Sin of Adam and Eve. "Death came through one man ... All die in Adam." 1 Corinthians 15:21
  3. The Sin of One Person. "You fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul." Luke 12:20
  4. Consider Fleming's Exercise on the Three Sins as a repetition of the above three days.
  5. Consider that I am a loved sinner. Both words, "loved sinner," are essential for understanding the reality of God's love for me.
    Luke 7: 36-50 "So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, hence, she has shown great love."
  6. A Meditation on Hell. "Come, you whom my Father has blessed ... Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." Matthew 25:34, 41
  7. Repetition. Revisit the black holes and the volcanoes.

Background material for this week: Read "How I See Sin Today". by Joseph Tetlow, S.J.

Prayer

Almighty and all-merciful God,
I see with my own eyes the shame and wretchedness
we humans practice on ourselves and on one another.
I feel afraid that one force
could cause so much havoc and destruction.
But I ask to know that force in all its power and complexity.
I ask to feel in human affairs and all through my own life world
how subtly and virulently sin flourishes.
Grant me courage, most holy God,
to see sin in all its ugliness.

Review of the Week
For further reflection and consideration
A Reminder
Additional Scripture for prayer and reflection

Review of the Week

Am I sufficiently aware of the reality of sin and evil in the world? Do I recognize the social dimensions of sin? What are the ways I use to ignore or excuse sin? What patterns and dynamics in my life can reflect the blindness and foolishness of sin? Do I prevent myself from seeing, hearing, or touching human need?

For Further Reflection and Consideration

"'Colloquy' is a term that describes the intimate conversation between God the Father and me, Christ and me, or perhaps Mary or one of the saints and me. This conversation happens on the occasion of my putting myself as totally as I can into the setting of the prayer. I will find that I speak or listen as God's Spirit moves me - sometimes accusing myself as sinner, sometimes letting myself be carried as a child, at other times expressing myself as lover or friend, and so on. The colloquy does not take place at any particular time within the period of prayer; it happens as I am moved to respond within the setting of the exercise."

A Reminder

  1. The practice of looking back over your day before you go to bed gets more useful as these days go on.
  2. While you are praying over humankind's sin, you need to use your head. That is, at this point I need to think, figure things out, ponder, consider. Too much emotion is like smoke without either fire or heat.
  3. What I want during this week: I want to feel the power of sin in my human nature and to be confused that I have sinned and not suffered so much for it.

Additional Scripture for Prayer and Reflection

  1. 2 Peter 2:4 When the angels sinned, God imprisoned them.
  2. Romans 3:9-18 An account of how humankind now lives.
  3. Romans 5:6-11 Jesus died for us in our sin; we can trust Him.
  4. Galatians 5:16-26 How we are torn between the Spirit and sin.
  5. Psalm 51

How I See Sin Today - Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World

Sin: How We See It Today

The serious disciple correctly names sins and sinful attitudes only after overcoming three obstacles thrown up by postmodern culture.

  • The first obstacle. Our society has interpreted as social or political or economic malfunctions many actions and attitudes that a serious disciple recognizes as sin. Thus, when poverty-stricken parents totally neglect their children, they are exonerated of moral guilt because they are caught in a socioeconomic trap. College students' promiscuity gets reduced to a statistic that too many think expresses no values.
  • The second obstacle. Our society has made religion a private affair, expecting all of us to discover our own truths and moral imperatives from within ourselves. We do not recognize that the truth links us together and error divides us. We do not recognize that each individual's interior behavior contributes to the righteousness or to the sinfulness of our life world. Sin has become a matter between me and God.
  • The third obstacle. Our society has trivialized grave wrongdoing by changing its name. We name grave evils by a nice name, which makes it all right to do them. A woman "exercises her power over her own body" when she deliberately aborts the child in her womb. Blatant lying becomes "politics" or "an advertising gambit." In this way, we can gaze undisturbed on the most serious sins and feel that "Everybody does it," or "It's just the way our culture is."

Note these things about coming to a sound sense of sin in the world and in my self:

  • Every sane person can see the results of sin. They are all around us: Children starve and old people live neglected. The super-rich live meaningless lives and are envied for it. Governments spew poisons over jungles and over the faces of whole towns. Men and women live wretched lives in ghettos, haunted by prostitution and murder.
  • But sin itself is a mystery. We cannot name it accurately ourselves. We need the Spirit of God to teach us.
  • For many decades, we thought of sin as breaking a rule or a law. We overemphasized that side of sin. Now, we think of sin as rupturing the proper relationship between my self and my God, and even between myself and those whom God gives me to love. Finally, we have come to understand that sin means a rupturing of my relationship to my own self - acting inauthentically and abusing myself.
  • We are keenly aware of the brokenness in each human person. Our deep sufferings rise from our infancy and our childhood. We are plagued by attitudes and hang-ups that we took into ourselves before we had the use of reason. As a consequence, we tend to try to change sin into non-sin. We make it superego, or the tapes that run in my head, or neuroticisms. We need to recognize two things: We who are neurotic or compelled remain free at the very deepest level to take responsibility for ourselves even while that freedom may be diminished or hard to use in some circumstances. And all of us who can gaze courageously at the disorder of human knowing and acting know that psychology's insights can help us appreciate the horror of sin - in adult children of alcoholics, for instance, or in the brokenness of sexually abused adolescents.
  • We have come to recognize that we sin all along, and that we will live as sinful people until the day we die. This makes us sympathize with St. Paul's cry that he was a wretched man. This reality is the abiding sorrow in human existence. It need not make us lead sad lives. We live with sorrow instead of living shallow lives; we live with joy even as we know sorrow. The reason we can achieve this lies in Christ's victory, and God's glory visible in our faith and trust.
  • God the Lord will not let us come to truly appreciate how sinful we are until we have let God teach us how deeply and faithfully God loves us.
  • Once, Christians distinguished between only serious and venial sins. We are coming to understand that we do better to distinguish between not only very slight sins and sins that cut us off from God, but also some sins that are in between. So we think of venial, serious, and deadly sins. We easily name the two extremes: We commit a venial sin when we let ourselves show real anger at a computer. We commit a deadly sin when we choose to live totally without God or the fellowship of the Church. The in-between we find harder to name: We commit a serious sin when we take a lot of alcohol at a party and then put our family into a car and drive it out onto a busy expressway.
  • In some significant measure, we do not attend enough to our serious sins. A deliberate lie to a loving spouse. Neglecting to help the poor, ever. Slothfully refusing to learn more about our beliefs so that we can grow in faith. Spreading ugly rumors about another person's private life. We do not recognize that these are serious matters, not the way a cancerous liver is serious, but the way an arthritic knee is serious, or a stomach ulcer, or 20/40 vision. These serious matters need correcting, and if we take the physical ones to doctors, to whom ought we take the spiritual ones?

Sin of the Angels - Taken from Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World

  1. I come into God's presence and offer myself to Him.
  2. Then, I compose myself in my real world. I am one of many human persons. I hear about many wars, about dictators who make for tunes dealing in drugs. I read about murders every day, in my own city. I breathe air that people have filled with harmful and noxious chemicals. I eat foods that clog my arteries, tax my digestive system, and alter my consciousness. Perhaps I learned to smoke before we knew it harms us. Perhaps I have gotten used to some drugs. I help pay for weapons systems that are so deadly that they make impossible the security we intend them to achieve and threaten the entire earth. I am sold on things by advertising that skirts the truth. My culture is sated with pleasure, and it makes life choices simply because of pleasure. When the media do not tell me outright lies, they deceive by error and false worldviews. Even if I wanted a more equitable distribution of healthy water and nourishing foods, I know that millions die of diseases while I can drink water from any tap and eat cuisines from all over the earth.
    So I continue listing wrongs and evils until I get a deep sense of how my life world really goes on. This is my real world, however secure and safe I may feel in my own situation. Without being lugubrious or silly, I see my life world and myself in it - for what they truly are.
  3. And now I ask of God what I yearn for: I ask God to let me feel shame at my thought less sins and my deliberate sins; I want to feel confounded by the truth that others suffer such dire things because of human sinfulness, and I have suffered so little, although I know I have sinned and do sin.

Now about the angels ...

  1. First, I recall that Jesus said He had seen Satan plunging down from heaven like lightning (Luke 10:18).
  2. Then I think about this. Do I believe that God creates intelligent beings other than humans? Do all intelligent beings have to have bodies? St. Thomas says that because angels have enormously powerful intelligences, they know things amazingly swiftly and make up their minds with their whole being. Once an angel decides for or against serving God, that angel's whole self has moved to enact the decision. What do I think about this? Suppose one vastly powerful being managed all the forces of our galaxy - and that being determined to take things into its own hands instead of keeping the laws God had set. What kind of destruction would that be? Suppose once I made up my mind and chose, that would be the end of it, and that same kind of destruction would wrack my whole self.
  3. Then I see how I feel about the times I have chosen to do what I wanted instead of what I knew was right. How can it be that the angels are now soaked in hatred, and I can still change?

At the end, I turn to Jesus Christ, hanging on His cross, and I talk with Him. I ask how can it be that the Lord and Creator should have come from the infinite reaches of eternity to this death here on earth, so that He could die for our sins. And then I reflect upon myself, and ask:

What have I done for Christ?
What am I doing for Christ?
What ought I do for Christ?
And I talk with Him like a friend. I end with the Our Father.

Sin of Adam and Eve - Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World

  1. I come into God's presence and offer myself to Him.
  2. Then, I compose myself in my real world. I am one of many human persons. I hear about many wars, about dictators who make for tunes dealing in drugs. I read about murders every day in my own city. I breathe air that people have filled with harmful and noxious chemicals. I eat foods that clog my arteries, tax my digestive system, and alter my consciousness. Perhaps I learned to smoke before we knew it harms us. Perhaps I have gotten used to some drugs. I help pay for weapons systems that are so deadly that they make impossible the security we intend them to achieve, and threaten the entire earth. I am sold on things by advertising that skirts the truth. Even if I wanted a more equitable distribution of healthy water and nourishing foods, I know that millions die of diseases while I can drink water from any tap and eat cuisines from all over the earth. So I continue: This is my real world, however secure and safe I may feel in my own situation. Without being lugubrious or silly, I see my life world and myself in it - for what they truly are. And now 1 ask of God what I yearn for: I ask God to let me feel shame at my thought less sins and my deliberate sins; I want to feel confounded by the truth that others suffer such dire things because of sins, and I have suffered so little, although I know I have sinned and do sin.

Now, about Adam and Eve:

  1. I recall what St. Paul said to the Romans: "Well then, sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race be cause everyone has sinned" (Rom. 5:12).
  2. Then I think about this. Even though I may believe that God brought humankind onto the face of the earth through evolution, I have to believe that at some point in time and on some spot on the globe, the earliest humans came into life. They grew intellectually aware of right and wrong, and some among them - the Church has always believed it was the very first - chose to do evil. They abused what was given them. They chose to use what was for bidden by their own consciences. They decided willfully to make their own value system instead of letting the Spirit of God instruct them. From that sin came others, more and more. From that sin came death. So, from this earliest sin came flooding down all the misery, wretchedness, evildoing, and death-dealing in the world today.
  3. What they did - some ordinary human action - can it have been so enormously, overwhelmingly worse than what I have done, and perhaps do? Yet, what comes from my sin? Why does God deal so differently with me? So I consider how I feel about all this.

Finally, I make my colloquy with Jesus crucified. How did You, Jesus, come to this? And the questions form in me:

What have I done for Christ?
What am I doing for Christ?
What ought I do for Christ?
I talk this over with Him. I end with the Our Father.

Sin of One Person - Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World

  1. I come into God's presence and offer myself to Him.
  2. Then, I compose myself in my real world. I consider how I live surrounded by violence and anger, in a deteriorating environment steeped in self-deception, untruth, and error, and under genuine threat of nuclear holocaust. I have to make my way through all this.
  3. And now I ask of God what I yearn for: I ask God to let me feel shame at my thought less sins and my deliberate sins; I want to feel confounded by the truth that others suffer such dire things because of sins, and I have suffered so little, although I know I have sinned and do sin.

Now, think about a person who died in alienation from God.

  1. I recall that Jesus said in one of His stories that a rich man, "Dives," had despised his wretched neighbor and ended up in a place divided by a great chasm from the bosom of Abraham, forever thirsty (Luke 16:19-31).
  2. I think about this. Jesus Himself said very clearly that some people were on the way to living forever apart from God. The Church has consistently taught that some deeds and some ways of life lead to self-destruction, to a life after life that can only be called totally wretched. If a person has really loved only himself or herself, and wanted only that - he or she may get it, forever, and live deeply alone and without love except self-love.
  3. I remember that some dictators in this century have murdered vast numbers of people, because of their lust for personal power over others. Where are they now? I remember that some rich people spend their entire lives amassing money, while doing nothing for the poor and suffering right under their noses. What happened to them when they died? Other people spent their whole brief life relentlessly enjoying themselves in sensuality, really recklessly hurting and harming others, whom they simply use for their own pleasure. What happens to them when they die? Where are they now?
  4. I imagine a young man in Iraq, gradually growing callous as he fires at insurgents. He actually kills some people. He gets a taste for this deadly occupation. He figures he cannot tell who are the enemy and who are not, so it doesn't much matter. One day, he faces an old man and some children, and kills them quite wantonly and deliberately. Then he is killed. What kind of life did he lead? Where is he now?
  5. Then I think about myself. Have I pursued some thing, destroying myself as I did it? Why haven't my stupidities caused the wretchedness that others' have caused? Do I want to risk ending up all alone, forever alone, loving no one but myself?

Then I make my colloquy with Jesus on His cross, letting the three questions rise in me:

What have I done for Christ?
What am I doing for Christ?
What ought I do for Christ?
End with the Lord's Prayer.

Exercise on Three Sins - David L. Fleming, S.J., Draw Me into Your Friendship

This is a meditation about the reality of sin and its effects.
In this prayer I will need to spend time thinking through the matter.

Preparation

  1. First Consider
    I always take a moment to call to mind the attitude of reverence with which I approach this privileged time with God. I recollect everything up to this moment of my day - my thoughts and words, what I have done and what has happened to me - and ask that God may take and receive all of this is praised in service.
  2. Grace
    There is an importance in my speaking out my desire for God's grace according to the subject matter and my own dispositions during the retreat. Perhaps expressing what I truly want from God may also act as a preparation of my inner being for openness to God's entrance into particular area of my life. In this exercise, the grace that desire is the gift of feeling of dismay, confusion and even horror before God as I consider the effects of even one sin as compared to my own sinful life. Taking a cue from my feelings, I may find it helpful to imagine myself as bound, helpless, and alienated as I enter into this exercise dealing with sin.
  3. Note
    Whereas the grace I want and desire changes in accord with gifts already received, God's own stirrings, and the subject matter of the prayer, the preparatory prayer never changes. This prayer, which marks the beginning of each formal prayer, not only reinforces the continuing petition for God's gift of reverence in me, but also calls to mind how I must continue to beg that my total day is by grace more and more integrated and centered in God alone.

Part One the Angels will rebel against God

It remains a part of our Christian heritage to understand that the first rejection of God's love in creation is found among God's special messengers, the Angels. Theologically and spiritually, the sin of the Angels exemplified at the radical choice of self before God, which is the essence of sin, and the terrifying but necessary consequence of rejecting the very source of all life and love. Pure spirits a decisive knowledge and totalizing love, the Angels somehow were presented with the choice, which God continues to give to each person so lovingly made - whether we freely choose to respond to the love, and life forever which God offers us. Some Angels chose to reject God's free offering of love and a sharing in divine life forever. Immediately by closing themselves off from God, they changed from a life of grace to a death-hatred of God and found themselves in their own choice of hell.

I mull over this sin in my mind, letting its decisiveness strike deep into my heart, and then I look to my many rejections of God's love.

Part Two the sin of Adam and Eve

In the biblical account of how sin entered into our world from the time of the first human beings, we again get a picture of a very simple but direct rejection of God's love. Adam and Eve want to be as God is, and so they are described as eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. Both tried to escape the responsibility of choice which each one has made by trying to shift the blame to someone or something else. The effect of this one sin is not only the loss of God's special sharing of divine life for all humankind, but also the continuing flow of evil perpetrated by people upon other people and even the various kinds of destruction inflicted by them upon God's world. We can follow one small slice of this sad human story as we read the book of Genesis.

I consider the effect of his first sin of man and woman for themselves and for all their posterity. I let the destructiveness of evil become fully present to my attention. If one sin can wreak such havoc, what about my own sinfulness?

Part Three the person who goes to hell

There is the possibility of the person making a definitive "no" as a response to God's love and ratifying that "no" even in death. By the "no" response given to God, a person has chosen self and therefore closed off all the love and life offerings which have their source only in God. By centering solely on itself, one has condemned oneself to the death of hell for all eternity.

How can I measure the number of "no's" which I have spoken to God up to this time of my life? What can I say to God about myself?

Colloquy

I put myself before Jesus Christ our Lord, present before him on the cross. I talk to him about he how creates because he loves and then he is born one like us out of love, still NT himself as to pass from eternal life to death here in time, even death on a cross. By his response of love for God his father, he dies for my sins.

I looked to myself and ask - just letting the questions penetrate mind being:

  • In the past, what response have I made to Christ?
  • How do I respond to Christ now?
  • What response should I make to Christ?

As I look upon Jesus as he hangs upon the cross, I ponder whatever God may bring to my attention. I close with the Lord's prayer.

Meditation on Hell - Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World

  1. I come into God's presence and offer myself to Him.
  2. Then, I compose myself in my real world. I consider how I live surrounded by conflict, violence and anger, in a deteriorating environment steeped in self-deception, untruth, and error, marred by terrorism and war.I have to make my way through all this.
  3. And now I ask of God what I yearn for: I ask God to let me feel the bone-deep sense of loss and pain that a person suffers who has lost love forever, so if I ever face a test, I will cling to God's love tenaciously.

Then I consider Hell.

  1. First, read Luke 16:19-31, Lazarus and the Rich Man.
  2. Then think about what Hell means.
    • First, alienation. We have inside ourselves an orientation toward others, and toward the Other, God. In Hell, we are orientated towards only ourself.
    • Second, loneliness. I miss others, but I cannot say who those others are.
    • Third, frustration. My whole self is meant to be an "alleluia" spoken in praise and thanksgiving; in Hell, I can only snarl, frustrated of being my true self.
    • Fourth, absurdity. God wrote into myself those values - loyalty, fidelity, truth telling, honesty, service to others - that, being kept, would make me happy; but during my life, I chose other values that I demanded would make me happy - perhaps the values of pleasure, having power over others, feeling totally secure, spending money, and so on. Now, I know that the values I chose are absurd, without root in my own true self. I live absurd - now forever and ever.
  4. Then wonder what it would be like as a place. What are the sounds and sights of a place where people live totally for themselves? What does the atmosphere feel like, where everyone lives lonely, selfish, and frustrated?
  5. For a while, imagine yourself in that condition. What kind of bitter anger would I feel at myself? Would I regret doing the things that got me here? Could I ever forgive myself?

Finally, I turn to Jesus Christ and say something like this:

Lord Jesus Christ, You have kept me from death after death, from the final loneliness. You have not let any creature send me down into death and into the pit. Oh, Lord, You have saved me and cherished me, even when I was mindless of You, maybe even when I really did not care about You. I can hardly believe such love; I can not understand it. Please, Lord, let me fear more than anything else that I might lose You and Your love. Let me name that loss Hell. You, Lord, keep me out of there. Amen.