Typical comments range from "There's too much emphasis about sin", "my sins put Jesus on the Cross", "I'm unworthy", "I'm a sinner" to "it's all negative".

This guilt-based old religion mentality, ties us into a God who is tough as old boots and glares down from above noting our every wrong move.

Such held over views from childhood, disrupts us from responding to a God who lavishly loves us to bits, each other and ourselves.

Can you imagine that!

The reality

Sin is real. Grace is real.

The Hebrew understanding of sin translates into khata, which means a failure to fulfil to be truly human. To ‘miss the mark' in living and loving as God's image and likeness as fully human alive men and women.

Sin is about immaturity. The consequences of sin in its various levels of seriousness causes injury to another and to our natural world.

To sin therefore, is that behaviour where we have disrespected relationships, failed to act justly and trashed the environment.

So to dismiss sin, or replace the word altogether with "wrong choices", is to ignore an innate truth of our human condition.

St Paul "gets it"

St Paul gradually realises, as we all do at some point, that we are contradictory figures.

We do live in tension between what is truth or untruth, what is healthy or unhealthy or what is life giving or life draining. He names this an inward struggle.

He says "I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.

"When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me". (Romans 7:19-20)

Yet St Paul isn't on his own. I can identify with what he says - and reckon some of you can to.

Hard to believe that Paul, once named Saul, was a predator killer of Christians. Yet only owning his sin could he come to recognise that his behaviour originated from the Fall.

In the beginning

This Genesis story attempts to offer an explanation in how sin entered the world impacting on our beingness as women and men.

How Eve and Adam were in the very beginning living in right relationships with each other, comfortable in full view of God and in the garden called Eden.

All was blissfully heavenly.

Then antipathy entered breaking the friendship and leaving us all vulnerable to the inclination of sin.

But evil wasn't going to have the last say. God's plan of recovery restored this friendship when Jesus became the willing reconciliatory sacrifice.

It was sin that was destroyed by the cross. Grace never entered the world because grace always was.

Life and liberty

Back to St Paul. He so rightly says in Galatians 2:20. I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with life of Christ lives in me.

Easter changed absolutely everything. The Cross becoming a symbol of liberty enabling us to become our baptismal selves and not victims to this ancestral sin.

That's St Paul's point: - that God is good and not jealous as the serpent claims.

That is why we don't have to be joyless or slaves to our false selves.

As Pope Francis suggests, we don't have to look like we've come back from a funeral or live lives that seem like Lent without Easter (Evangelii Gaudium 6,10) and he is right.

It's often when we come to that place of self-truth, in recognising where we ‘missed the mark' do we encounter simultaneously God's giftedness in Jesus.

Can we name what hampers us from being truly human as women and men of God and being created solely to be God's own image? Can we name those occasions where we have ‘come up short' in our ‘being' the Glory of God.

Becoming our true selves

Pentecost Sunday holds the power to burst with life in our lives. To get excited about who we are.

"We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being." said Pope Francis in article 8 in Evangelii Gaudium.

The Redemption becomes the relationship to continually become a new creation converting over and over and over again to become our whole person.

That we don't have to choose sin. We can say no when critically pulling another down to boost ourselves up. We can so no to blaming another for our mistakes.

We don't have to lose our rag at another. We don't have to kill off those of little account. We can stop and attend to a need we see in front of us.

By integrating sin, by owning our ‘stuff' we are simultaneously claiming God's investment in us - God's intense hope and trust in us to be God's image.

You have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-11)

And that's worth getting excited about.

• Copy supplied
• Sue Seconi (pictured) is a writer and a parishioner from the Catholic Parish of Whanganui - te Parihi katorika ki Whanganui.

The belief that holiness comes by observing particular laws "leads us to a rigid religiosity, a rigidity that eliminates that freedom of the Spirit which Christ's redemption gives us. Beware of this rigidity that they propose," he said Sept. 1 to those gathered in the Paul VI audience hall at the Vatican.

God's saving grace is received through faith in the Gospel message of Christ's death and resurrection, and God invites people to rejoice in the righteousness received through that faith in Christ, he said.

Read More

In a tradition that started 20 years ago, the Shore Edge Methodist Church have donated presents to those on probation "as an ultimate offer of redemption". Read more

Author Karen Ullo is one storyteller willing to brave this fantastical land, embracing both its highs (fairies) and lows (vampires in search of salvation and the next kill).

Months ago I read Ullo's first novel, Jennifer the Damned (Wiseblood Books, 2015), as someone little interested in stories about teenagers, vampires, teenage vampires, bloodlust, or gore. Verdict?

I loved it. Jennifer the Damned is the work of a mature and skilled writer with a thoroughly Catholic imagination; God is present at every twist and turn.

Ullo is a graduate of Louisiana State University and the University of Southern California, where she earned an MFA in screenwriting. She blogs for the Catholic literary magazine Dappled Things and serves as the print magazine's managing editor.

Recently, Ullo was a panelist at the University of Notre Dame's Trying to Say God conference, where she discussed the topic of women in writing.

She also presented, "Horror: the Genre of the Sacred," at this year's Catholic Writers Guild online conference.

Ullo recently released her second novel, Cinder Allia, in which she turns the Cinderella story upside down—Cinderella's Prince Charming dies before they've even met.

She recreates it as another fairy tale, but this time one of political intrigue, espionage, and (of course) romance and magic.

On the occasion of Cinder Allia's publication, we sat down to discuss fiction writing, fairy tales, and Catholic literature.

Rhonda Ortiz, for CWR: Let's begin with a short introduction. Who you are, where you're from, a brief account of what you've written?

Karen Ullo: I'm pretty much your average suburban housewife. I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with my husband and two sons, ages nine and six.

I go to a lot of YMCA basketball games and Cub Scout meetings, and I work as the music director at the same Catholic parish where I was baptized and grew up.

So far, I've written two novels, Jennifer the Damned, which was published in 2015 by Wiseblood Books, and Cinder Allia, which just came out on July 6 of this year.

I've also been writing for Dappled Things literary journal on their blog for about four years, and I just became the managing editor of the journal. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report interview by Rhonda Ortiz, who is the author of Scripture for the Scrupulous, a biweekly newsletter of meditations.
• Image: Amazon

And then…? Well, a few weeks of lilies and extra "Alleluias!" and then back to business as usual. (E.g., First Confessions and Communions in May, a spate of weddings in June, etc.)

It seems that Holy Week is a lot of work for a few, an inconvenience for a few more ("How many times do I have to drag the kids to church this week?!?"), and an annual irrelevance for many, if not most Catholics. But does it have to be that way?

Here's the key problem with Holy Week as described above: People who halfheartedly believe that they're sinners try to stir up sorrow for an atoning death they're not quite convinced they need, so that a few days later they can try to stir up joy for the benefits of a resurrection they don't quite understand or believe in.

So understood, it's not very convincing theater, and even less is it worthy worship.

Why do we put up with it? Why does the Church ask us to put on this act year after year? That's asking the wrong question. Better: What is divine mercy and providence offering us in Holy Week?

And how can we be good stewards of what could be the last Holy Week we will ever see? (Remember that not one future moment is guaranteed to anyone.)

We're created in the image and likeness of God. Our souls, which we surrendered to the dominion of Satan by our sin, are worth fighting for.

Jesus, Son of God and son of Mary, ransomed our souls with his own blood. If you were given one week before your death to contemplate that truly shocking fact—how would you spend it? Continue reading

• Father Robert McTeigue, SJ, is a member of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus.

All that self-abnegation stuff can be another product of the annoying ego, the I, me, my aspect of my primal instinct for survival. If I'm focussing intently on myself in this negative way, I'm not thanking God for creating me. Nor am I expressing gratitude for the harder lessons in life.

Instead, I can get into low self-esteem and project that on others. In an inverse way, my me first instinct can prevent me from directly experiencing God's love.

Certainly the ego needs to be managed, but we should never allow it to divide us. In a battle of self against self, who ends up the loser?

As children, we were socialised at an early age. Some things were good, attached to "Yes." Other things were bad and connected to "No." Remember that? As we grew in experience and could evaluate situations for ourselves, the black and white values of infancy, became multi-coloured and some choices needed careful discernment.

Every now and then we made the wrong choice. We wounded ourselves and maybe someone else. We felt regret, sought forgiveness. Then came the valuable resurrection experience. We realised we'd learned more from that mistake, than we'd learned from several right choices.

So how does this fit with our desire to grow in faith? Maybe we can describe it with a parable.

Our lives are like lovely patchwork quilts, a variety of shapes and shades stitched together with faith. There are patches vibrant with colour, some fabrics smooth and silky, some strong, some delicate, others that are dark or rough in texture. Together they make wholeness.

If I look at my quilt of life, it is the dull and rough patches that are the most interesting, because they have been the greatest teachers. They have enabled me to bring new fabrics to the quilt. I think this is called redemption.

But surely, if I try to unpick and remove a patch I don't like, all I will do is leave a hole, damaging the entire pattern of patches.

So I say thanks to God for the awkward patches and integrate them with my gratitude. This, I think, is called reconciliation.

We are both the quilt and the quilt maker. And what is the purpose of the patchwork quilt? If we extend the metaphor, we see it wrapping our precious little soul that has been brought into incarnation. I like to think that as the quilt grows, so does the soul.

That is a satisfying image, but what do we do about that annoying ego? Any attention we give the me first instinct, be it positive or negative, will only feed it.

Perhaps the answer is quite simple. We just laugh at it.

Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

"The ‘koinonia-communio' of the Spirit of the Father and the incarnate Son is, as it were, the Council's master key, as the principle of communion and mission. The key opens our access to the mystery of the Church, the universal sacrament of salvation, in all its dimensions: Trinitarian, Christological, anthropological, ecumenical, and pastoral." — Marc Cardinal Ouellet, "Communio": Address, May 21, 2013, Sydney, Australia.

Over the years, priests are often reminded of Christ's admonition that "you have not chosen Me, I have chosen you." I was ordained on June 7th fifty years ago in San Francisco. In retrospect, one might question the Lord's prudence about whom He chooses. But, if we remember that He also chose Judas and a few other sour apples along the way, we need not become too vain. The world is full of folks who purport to be scandalized by sinful priests or by a vice filled Catholic laity. Such reactions just mean that these critics have never read the New Testament. While it condemns sin at every turn, especially scandal, the Gospels gives us no indication that, with the appearance of Christ in the world, His followers will subsequently be perfect.

Rather, Christ came into the world with the clear realization that most of us would need to be forgiven many times ("yea, seventy times seven" Matthew 18:22) before it is all over. Christ did not dwell amongst us to eradicate sin's possibility and hence our freedom. He came to provide a way in which, should we sin, we could be forgiven, but only if we choose to avail ourselves of the means He set down, not those we concoct for ourselves. The Church, with its priests and sacraments, exists in the world so that such a redemptive purpose might be carried out in the concrete context of everyday life, wherein most of our sins are committed. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: One World Tribe