Faith and Fear and Sin

In my mental meanderings about faith and trust I bumped into the familiar word, sins.  The Christian tradition has long prescribed faith in God as an antidote for sins, as a kind of behavioral cure-all.  What suddenly occurred to me, though, was that sins aren’t actually ‘things’.  They may be expressed as acts or behaviors, but that’s just what we see on the surface.  The root of these acts is sin, a condition or way of being in the world that goes beyond discrete behaviors.

If faith is the condition of trust in God and God’s benevolent intent toward us, then sin may be seen as the expression of fear, the condition of living without trust.  When, for whatever reason, I cannot trust that God is supporting and guiding my work or my relationships or even my time of leisure, I experience conditions ranging from mild anxiety to outright panic.  If I cannot manage those feelings, if I have found no recourse, nothing trustworthy in life, then I will act from that fear and anxiety.  And those acts will cause harm.  And that is sin. 

The harm may be slight – a thoughtless comment, a missed opportunity to reach out to a friend, a misunderstanding with one’s partner.  But these are still recognizably ‘sins’, either of commission or omission.  Vowing to ‘do better’ or ‘be better’ is generally unhelpful and ineffective – it is the underlying condition of anxiety that requires attention.  Where does that anxiety come from?  What does one fear?  I can speak from my own experience here, both generally and specifically.  In general I tend to be anxious about not being ‘good enough’ for whatever situation I’m in.  For example, I may believe that I’m not a very good teacher, or that I’m not qualified to be a librarian (both of which occupations I have performed for 20 years, with positive reviews), or that I’m an inadequate support to the members of my religious community.   Out of that anxiety may come class plans that are too tightly constructed to actually help students learn, or unkind comments to my library colleagues, or over-explanatory emails to my abbot, abbess, and colleagues in faith (or, conversely, extended silences).

I could (and have) focus on getting a little bit better at each of these discrete areas of life, but that approach doesn’t seem to produce much improvement.  Becoming aware of the underlying condition, though, that tendency to believe (in spite of evidence to the contrary) that I am never going to be good enough, can open up the possibility of a shift in consciousness.  If just a tiny drop of trust can enter into the inner swamp of fear it might begin to counteract the vile chemistry of anxiety at work.  Do more with trust – let down the guard a little bit, decide that OK is actually OK! – and the shift can become wider and more permanent.

It is said that ‘perfect love casts out fear,’ but I’m not persuaded that’s quite right.  (First of all, who among us has experienced ‘perfect love’?)  I don’t think it’s actually love that alleviates fear and anxiety, it’s trust.  It may take baby steps of progress, but learning to trust, and allowing that trust to grow into a full harvest of faith, can release a lifetime of sin and suffering.  At least, it’s worth a shot.