Sin and Grace

Sin and grace are related. In a certain sense the only way we really understand salvation, grace, and freedom, is by understanding their opposites. That's why the great saints are, invariably, converted sinners.

When you finally have to eat and taste your own hard-heartedness, your own emptiness, selfishness and all the rest, then you open up to grace. That is the pattern in all our lives. That's why it was such a grace in my hermitage year when I was able, at last - even as a male and a German - to weep over my sins and to feel tremendous sadness at my own silliness and stupidity.

I think all of us have to confront ourselves as poor people in that way. And that's why many of our greatest moments of grace follow upon, sometimes, our greatest sins. We are hard-hearted and closed-minded for years, then comes the moment of vulnerability and mercy. We break down and break through.

Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction (CD)

It's interesting that Rohr mentions finding this grace of penitence - for that's what it surely is - in his hermitage year. This connects so clearly with the experience of Peter Owen-Jones in his borrowed desert cave, and with what Henri Nouwen calls "the garden for our hearts."

I know that for myself, Rohr's words ring so clear and true when he speaks of confronting our own poverty in solitude. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," said Jesus in the Beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And this is paradox: I know of few less heavenly things than looking at my own sinfulness; yet there is truly heaven in being exactly who I am before God. The Jesus Prayer is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." And he does!

Sometimes I think that if we are called to this way of prayer and penitence there is no greater gift than solitude, and no work more important for us to learn than to find solitude in our own lives, among those we find ourselves in community with. For some of us, this may mean, as it did for Brother Ramon, or for Father Lazarus, who guided Peter Owen-Jones, seeking the love and support of our community to live the hermit life in geographical isolation. For others - and this lies at the heart of the Franciscan Third Order charism as most people seem to receive it - it means carving out times of solitude within the life of marriage, work, and day-to-day service in our own parishes. But one way or another, we must find that well-watered garden of solitude, or we will dry up and blow away on the world's winds.