Introduction: Little Sins Mean a Lot

"Perhaps that is why you should be the one to write it," came the response. 

I knew that he was right.  Who better to identify and enumerate the small and varied ways in which we sabotage our lives — body, mind, and spirit — than someone who is so self-evidently wallowing in them like a baby elephant in a mud puddle? 

The book was meant for me to write because I am intimately aware of the fact that while the big sins we commit in our brokenness can often, and dramatically, impact not only our lives but the lives of others, it's the "little sins" that leave us so mired and weighed down with self-recrimination that our ambitions and our best instincts become thwarted by our own disgust with ourselves.  We don't wait for anyone else to make a big "L" out of their thumb and forefinger and smack it to their foreheads to tell us we are 'Losers." We can internalize it all by ourselves, because when we are ensnared by the little sins we end up, on some level, hating ourselves.  And that affects everything we do, and everyone around us, all the time.

Well, good luck trying to love your neighbor as yourself when you are really sick and tired of you.  At best, and with God's grace you can manage to do something good despite yourself, but more often than not, the loving thing you try to do for someone else will end up enmeshed within your familiar web of little sins: 

• Perhaps you'll feel so good about what you've done that you'll decide you should reward yourself in the worst way possible, by indulging "just a little" in behavior you know you should not do.
  
  
• Perhaps your ego will expect everlasting gratitude and loyalty from the person you have ostensibly "served."
  
  
• Perhaps you will decide you could have done better, and bring out the implements of your daily self-flagellation.
  
  
• Perhaps, because you have done a good turn for someone, you will feel entitled to talk about them to others.

Ew.  Yes, little sins make me hate myself, and not in the good way the saints and the teaching nuns of my youth meant, when they talked about "hating the self for love of Christ and love of others," but in the bad way that makes me feel useless and unlovable and in need of a whole-life makeover.  When I feel like that, it is more difficult to go to prayer, more difficult to believe in a God of infinite mercy who is longing for me to long for him.

I mean, what kind of God would want to hang out with a Big-L "loser" like me?

The daily grind of our little sins first wears us down, then wears us out, and too often our faith is lost in the process.

The sins we think of as "big" — like murder, theft, and violence — are often sins of a moment or an impulse; if we are mostly sane, we can admit to them and regret them, and our desire never to repeat them can be a rational and obtainable resolution.  After all, we will not go to confession each month and admit to killing someone, or beating on someone, which would not be what anyone would consider a "common" sort of confession.  But the "littler" sins of being angry enough to bellow at another in intemperate rage,  or to imagine taking a wrench and wailing on them (forgive me, I drive in New York, and these thoughts take hold . . .) are things you might bring up in the confessional month after month.  For years.

It's just a common little sin, yes?  We've even chuckled about it in the confessional, my priest and I: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  I am guilty of being Irish at other people." But as much as we may wave it off and say, "That's just how I am," the "little sin" of daily anger or impatience is a component of wrath, and Christ Jesus warned us about that:

"You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, 'You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, 'Raqa,' will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, 'You fool,' will be liable to fiery Gehenna." (Mt 5:21-22, NAB)

"You fool" is pretty mild.  "Raqa" is a little tougher; it says to someone, "You're useless." Neither of those expressions are as bad as what I can mutter under my breath at people as I drive on the Long Island Expressway, committing murder in my heart, mile by mile, and almost never remembering to confess it, because "that's just how I am" — as though living with a pilot-light of rage, easily flared and ready for mass slaughter within one's heart, is a normal or healthy thing.

In fact, it is neither normal nor healthy; it is only common — a common little "gateway sin" that connects directly to a deadly one, and is differentiated only by a single word: "intention."

Intention, of course, is what distinguishes a crime punishable-for-life from one that can get you back home.  If I run you over with my car, my actual "intention" would determine how a district attorney would charge me.  "Did I mean to hit him with my car?  No, I was being inattentive and reckless, and I regret that" is one answer, and it would likely get me prison-with-parole, but "Yes,  I wanted to run him over; the sonofabitch was wearing a Red Sox jacket!" will get me a life sentence.  In a court of law, one's intention, either way, can seal your fate for the rest of your life.  And that's efficient.

Our everyday lives of faith are efficient too.  In the first scenario, even with repentance and confession, I might experience  a bit of temporal cleansing in purgatory for my unintentional slaughter; but in the second, without repentance, I am going to hell: for me, that probably means an eternity at Fenway Park, with Big Papi always on deck.

Either outcome would have begun with my indulgence of an unintentional "little sin" that inclined me toward the dreadful sin of wrath.  I have developed a very bad habit.

The habit of sin is what is formed by permitting these "little sins," and the reason they "mean a lot" is because once they become ingrained within us, they shape who we are: mentally, spiritually, and even physically.  My size, for instance, is my sin.  A too thin or too large person can sometimes fault chemistry for their size (or for at least a part of it), but all too often a fatty like me is hauling around the evidence of gluttony — a "little sin" of a habitually self-indulgent, or self-medicating, bent that might otherwise manifest as alcoholism, were I fond of being drunk, or as a pill-addiction, were I inclined toward benumbed loopiness.

Absent a naturally fast metabolism, a hipless and sinewy female's shape might similarly (though less obviously) be evidence of a gluttony that is as fully fixated on food as I am, coupled with the sin of pride.  Someone who watches every morsel he consumes and works out "religiously" might be a paragon of discipline in one respect, but he might also be sacrificing to the idol of the body, through the sin of self-pride.

Wait a second! We've just run through three "little sins" — impatient anger, over-indulgences, and a mania for looking great, and within them we've casually named three of the seven deadly sins: wrath, gluttony, and pride.  Am I saying that these smallish faults are actually deadly?

Well, yes.  All of our little sins are components — or by-products, if you like — of the capital ones.  That's why they mean a lot, even if you are "basically a good person."

I mean, I'm basically a good person, and I'm sure you are too, basically.  What does that actually mean, though?

I'll never forget the first time I heard the phrase, "That doesn't make me a bad person!" A friend had invited a group of us together for supper and had so mangled a not-difficult recipe that we ended up sending out for pizza.  He owned up to his error and joked, "But that doesn't make me a bad person."

I laughed at the time but later found myself thinking over those words quite a lot.  No, destroying dinner does not make one a bad person, but we say that about ourselves all the time; we've become comfortable with the phrase as a means of self-absolution.  "Yeah, okay, I wanted to go medieval on the old lady who never used her blinker and then almost came to a full stop before making a right turn, but that doesn't make me a bad person."

Well, relative to what?  Or to whom?  Since the sexual and social revolutions, our Judeo-Christian notions of morality — of good and bad, and right and wrong — have been absorbing a broth of rationalism, and the resultant mush we've been eating for nearly 40 years has us regularly burping out, "But I'm a nice/good person," a phrase suggesting that as long as we are not robbing banks, beating our children, blowing up bridges, or kicking puppies, we are doing all right and ought not be held accountable for much, and certainly not judged — even by ourselves — because we're "good."

The thing is, you and I might only be sort of good.  We don't beat the children and kick the dog.  We don't blow up bridges.  We don't take what is not ours or plan elaborate schemes for murder.  Most of us are meeting minimum standards of good citizenship (which is not the same as good personhood), and we're cognizant enough of those standards to soften the blow when we know we've done wrong:

• "Yeah, I got wasted and hooked up with someone last night, but I'm basically a good person."
  
  
• "Yeah, I lied to get out of doing that thing, so he was stuck doing it alone, but that doesn't mean I'm a bad person."
  
  
• "Yeah, maybe I could afford to be more generous to my family, or to my church, than I am, but as long as I'm a good person. . . ."

Thus do we convince ourselves, and each other, that we are "fine."

Except that we're not "fine" — we will eventually be judged, and if we are honest with ourselves we know that by clinging to our claim of "basic" goodness, we are damning ourselves with the faintest of praise, and relying on very adolescent, insufficiently formed consciences to guide us.

That doesn't mean we don't want to be good.  Obviously we do, which is why we say it, and say it.  But what does "goodness" mean?

Those of us who believe we are created by a loving God know that, yes, we are "good." God's creation is permeated with goodness, and some of our Christian mystics, like St. Thérèse Couderc and Thomas Merton, have been permitted to see the light of goodness that suffuses all things.  Beyond that innate goodness, though, for which we can take no credit, what exactly entitles us to say, "But I'm a good person . . ."?

Am I, really?  Are you?  I'm inclined to say, "No, not really," and as a witness I will call upon Jesus of Nazareth, who once said, "Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone" (Mk 10:18, RSV).

If we were naturally good, we would not have needed God to go to the trouble of spelling out to Moses that, no, we can't just abandon our parents when they get old and feeble; we can't just take what we want; we can't kill whom we please and have indi criminate sex all day long. As obvious as those prohibitions sound to us now, we needed to be told not to do those things — because otherwise we would.

So, we're not "basically good," but Jesus tells us how we can become good, and it boils down to two things: Love God with your whole heart and spirit, and then love the person who is before you at any given moment.  The first is seed for the second; if you're really doing the first, the second comes naturally.  It is the foundation upon which our authentic goodness is built.

But if we are going to try to become truly good persons, we need to identify and then detach from the faults and sins that we so readily give into, and thus keep us always playing defense.

What we're going to do in this book is identify 13 "little sins" — twelve would have been more biblical, but I couldn't stop myself — that are surprisingly more important to our spiritual and material well-being, and more detrimental to our "basic goodness" than we realize.  We will name the sin, flesh it out with the reality of our own experiences, and then take a look at what Scripture, the saints, and (sometimes) the Catechism of the Catholic Church have to say about it.  Finally, to close each chapter, we will look for some practical solutions — ways and means by which we can begin to break out of the small habitual sins that keep us stuck defending our minimal goodness.  And then we'll pray together toward that end.

When I voiced my first objection to taking on this book, it was because I immediately recognized that no one needed it more than I.  I anticipate a terrifying bit of self-discovery for me, as I write it.  Hopefully, it won't be quite so scary for you to read.

As we begin this journey, though, in your charity, please offer up a small prayer for me.

— Elizabeth Scalia
Feast of the Annunciation, 2015