Slavery to the Sin of Slavery
Slavery to the Sin of Slavery
Visited some graves, got to thinking about my own future spiritual legacy.
It’s been a long month-and-change packed with 99% good things, including a much-treasured reunion with the siblings. I’m on the road this week for a specialist doctor’s appointment, which if nothing else has serendipitously allowed me to upgrade from my old skates* which had begun falling apart — though prayers that the planned part of this trip also bear fruit are much appreciated.
On our last day together, my older sister and I drove down to the town where our grandfather is from. We got a glance at the farm he grew up on, and the home of one of the great aunts we knew the best; we were tempted to knock, but didn’t want to alarm whoever the current occupants are. So instead we stopped in at a cousin’s funeral home, but he was out of the office; then we got lost on the backroads but eventually found the country cemetery where our great-grandparents and some of our favorite great aunts and uncles are buried.
(Advantage of having a kid in the business, they have some really nice grave markers. I was impressed.)
My grandfather died when I was young, and the rest of our grandparents were from other parts of the country. As a result, my sister and I didn’t grow up immersed in the culture our grandfather was from, and in our visit we felt both discomfort and relief at the disconnect. Discomfort because there’s a whole segment of the extended family we barely know. Relief because this corner of the family is the one with the Confederates not at all in the attic, and we’re well aware of the entrenched racism that often comes with that legacy.
A lot has changed in the American South since my grandfather’s time, but my sister and I have both sampled enough of the vicious persistence of racism that we’re grateful to have been spared being raised with that aspect of the local culture. It’s something you don’t want to have to fight within yourself.
There’s nothing new or unique about xenophobia, and slavery was not a fresh invention when North America was being colonized by Europe. It is very common, nearly universal, for slavery to be rationalized by declaring that those who are enslaved are some kind of out-group: War captives, enemies, debtors, criminals, filthy foreigners, heathens . . . something that you tell yourself in order to explain why these people just don’t deserve the same freedom and rights as you do.
The fact of the black-white racial divide as we have known it in the United States seems fairly obviously descended from the need to rationalize the local slave system. If instead of a convenient market for slaves from Africa there had been a more tempting option elsewise, we’d have inherited some different set of biases.
Those biases have a way of sticking around. Generations after Emancipation, in a time when nobody alive today was ever personally involved in the practice of slavery, the racism persists. Why? Because people still alive today were raised with grandparents and great-grandparents who had done the thing. Many of us can point to family inheritances that at one time depended on slavery.
Between upbringing by those elders and a desire to not condemn your own family and your own heritage, there is a continual pull to cling to the old rationalizations for a long-dead sin.
And now for the message that comes from all this: You and I also have sins that we are so married to we cannot even fathom they are actually wrong.
These are sins we feel we cannot live without. We feel like we must have these sins, that there is no survival without them, and so when they come up in the Gospel, or surface in the Catechism, we shut our ears. It is unfathomable to us that the plain meaning of Scripture is in fact what it means.
That’s some bad stuff.
Even more chilling: To ignore the obvious, blatant, emphatic teaching of Jesus we have to buttress our consciences with a scaffolding of other sins.
I am quite happy not loving my enemies, so here’s one weird trick to tell myself that somehow someway I just don’t have to do that. I suck at turning the other cheek, so let me fixate on why punching back is the right thing to do. When Jesus said if you have two coats give one . . . here is my list of reasons that all the many, many coats in my closet are technically not “more than one.”
Your list may be similar to mine, or maybe the sins you feel you can’t live without are starkly different.
This is the even worse part: Not only are all these sins virtually invisible to me, but they are going to hurt people I love for generations.
Just like my grandfather inherited the sin of racism from people who loved him and wanted only the best for him, my children and grandchildren will pick up from me the rationalizations that I employ when I don’t want to admit that Jesus said what He actually said.
Yet more damage: People who are contemplating the Catholic faith or the Christian faith will look at me, and look at my spiritual descendants, and they will be able to see what I cannot see, and they will be turned away from the Gospel by my unfaithfulness to it.
I’d like you to come away encouraged from all this dark reality.
I’d like you to be encouraged that this is precisely why we have a Savior, because we need one.
I’d like you to be encouraged to rely more and more on the Holy Spirit to touch souls, because you know that you yourself can do nothing of your own power.
I’d like you to show up at your next confession eager to throw off some of the almost-invisible sins that are enslaving you right now, even though it terrifies you and honestly you have no idea how it could possibly work to live without those sins.
God knows all of this about you, and He loves you, and He wants to help you become good.
*There are many things to love about living in the quieter corners of the south, but ready availability of ice hockey shops is not one of them.
Been wrestling with some of these sins myself. It’s so hard! But the Lord has very clearly invited me to surrender. May we lay these sins at His feet and walk away from them once and for all.