The Eighth Deadly Sin?

Posted: 01 Oct 2013 07:57 AM PDT "To commit a crime is to kill the soul, but to despair is to fall into hell." - St. Isidore of Seville So far, I have covered a lot of ground in surveying the spiritual battlefield and the seven deadly sins that populate it.  In doing so, we have encountered the flashflood nature of lust, the maggots of envy that worm their way into the conscience, and the burning fires of wrath.  But there is another juggernaut that has not been touched, that dwarfs the other sins because it is their culmination, their ultimate end.  All these sins, in any conscience that is alive and aware, lead to it.  This is the sin of despair. Despair, to a soul caught in its hands, is a behemoth, a monolith that seems to be insurmountable, impasseable, unconquerable.  Soren Kierkegaard, the great Christian existentialist who delved deeply into the world of despair, describes it as "the sickness unto death,"1 the final giving up even on the false hopes offered by taking one's own death into their own hands.  St. Augustine, in his years before his conversion, described it aptly: "My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death."2 Where other sins eat away at the soul and burn it alive, despair crushes.  The weight of despair can seem insurmountable, so much so that it culminates in a final distrust in the Divine Mercy of God.  Despair tells God Himself, "No, you cannot save me.  'My wound is desperate so as to refuse to be healed.' (Jer 15:18)  There is no hope for me.  You may have died for others, but not for me." If the sin of despair is common, it is because we live in an age of despair, albeit veiled - the greatest philosophers of the previous century led us into the grand nothingness of despair's abode, and these ideas have permeated daily life.  We our told to make our own meaning in life, forge our own existence, and yet left to wonder why we should begin at all.  Albert Camus taught us that the best we can do is struggle against the meaninglessness of life, and this very struggle is what gives life meaning.  This amounts to no more than a slap in the face - why struggle at all when there is no point, no foundation for a point, no meaning?  Because, he says, it is the struggle that makes it worth it.  We are simply to struggle anyway.  In true Camus fashion, there is no answer more absurd. Of course, the philosophy of Camus is but one example.  But the myriad of distractions of the modern world are indicators of a deep despair that has permeated culture since the "death of God" was proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche.  This despair has become a feigned indifference, coating the modern environment with a dull drone of monotonous living occasionally spiced up with some new distraction offered to the wandering mind.  Unlike the atheists who explored the ramifications of the death of God, we now simply accept it and move on into the empty grey horizon of a future whose only meaning is the one we give it - "at length the life of misguided mortals becomes a Hell on earth."3 (Lucretius) Despair, of course, kills even the drive to give one's life meaning.  It causes the soul to shrink away from the love of God as though it alone were too evil, too fallen away, too far gone to be saved.  Despair rejects love with a kind of violence, though it turns this violence inward and wreaks havoc upon the soul.  It is, in effect, the ultimate sin - the sin of rejecting the Holy Spirit, of rejecting forgiveness because it bloats the ego of the person into thinking that they, and they alone, are beyond the pale.  For despair blocks the love of Christ in one's life, and is a kind of passive rejection of God. As our Lord told St. Catherine of Siena, "This is that sin which is never forgiven, now or ever: the refusal, the scorning of my mercy."4 As Christians, we know this is not true, nor is it ever true.  The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the one that is not repented of.  In Christ, there is always hope - we see this so wonderfully in the message of Divine Mercy promulgated by St. Faustina, where our Lord tells her "My daughter, write that the greater the misery of a soul, the greater its right to My mercy."5  Just as sin enters by the will6 (St. Pio of Pietrelcina), "only an individual lets grief enter himself."7 (Plutarch)  Despair enters because we let it enter, and our surrender to it on the spiritual battlefield is often because we are so terrified of fighting it.  Despair puffs itself up to be much bigger than it is, and even those who live in relative comfort and have happy lives with few problems can find themselves in the throes of existential agony.  The cure for despair is hope in Christ, in His Mercy and His Love.  One must never reject His sacrifice on the Cross as though it were not meant for the soul caught in despair, but instead make an act of hope.  "As an act of faith made in the midst of darkness and doubts is more meritorious, so it is with the act of hope uttered in desolation and abandonment."8(Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary-Magdalen) It is important to remember that despair blocks the love of Christ in one's life, and is a kind of passive rejection of God.  We must instead "abandon ourselves into the arms of [God's] divine goodness,"9 (St. Alphonsus de Liguori), trusting even more in the Divine Mercy of Jesus.  In times of darkness, we must offer up our interior desolation to God, uniting our sufferings with His. "All you who suffer, be comforted, for your pain is no longer a result of sin, but a participation in love and in the suffering of Gethsemane.  All you who sorrow and weep, rejoice, for your grief is not unto death; in the sorrow of Christ it is reserved for the resurrection."10  (Matthew the Poor) For your retirement and other housing needs, please visit http://www.gregmelep.com