After Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, the country abandoned the lunar calendar altogether by 1910. So, though the rest of Asia welcomed this year of the tiger on Feb. 1, in Japan the tiger crept in on Jan. 1.

In addition to inaugurating a new zodiac sign each year on Jan. 1, the Japanese moved all the traditional customs of the lunar new year to January.

One of those customs is the sounding of temple bells as the new year enters. The bells are struck 108 times because in Buddhist teaching there are 108 earthly desires or temptations and each strike of the bell drives out one of them.

Buddhists clearly have much more creative imagination than Catholics.

Catholic kids generally admit to two sins: disobeying their parents and fighting with their siblings. I suppose an orphaned only child is either sinless or must invent one or two transgressions.

But adults do not seem to find much more than that wrong in their lives. Using the word "morality" or some variant or it around them elicits squirming and crossed legs.

Apart from sex-related matters, "sin" is often "churchy" — such as failing to say prayers or go to church.

Someone may admit to not being an ideal spouse or parent, but for the most part we limit our guilty consciences to individual private matters rather than social or communal ones.

Of course, the reason we limit our consciousness of sin to the private realm is that we place our faith there as well. There are Christians who are upset by the fact that there are other people at the liturgy when they go to be with Jesus.

They refuse to join the community in song, prayer or posture as they conduct their private tete-a-tete with their Lord. They forget, if they ever knew or cared, that the very word liturgy means "the activity of the people."

Christianity is always plural. It is a matter of "we and God," not "me and God." Even the One with the best right to pray "My Father" when teaching us to pray in his way said, "Pray then in this way: Our Father ..."

The most basic fact about all that exists is that it is all one gift of God

Even if we look at faith as a matter of the Church (the People of God, not the management), our individualism still makes us prone to view faith from the wrong angle.

Faith is not about me or even us. Faith is about God. My faith, our faith, the faith are responses to God and if we hope to understand them, we must begin our reflection with God.

If we do that, we take a different view of life, faith, sin and self.

In the first place, we realize that it is thanks to God that we live at all. But if I exist because God in some un-understandable way that we call love chooses to give me existence, then the same must be true of every other existing thing.

The most basic fact about all that exists is that it is all one gift of God. And if that be true of everything, then it is all the more true of our fellow human beings.

Other people, no matter who they are in earthly terms are, just as I, sons and daughters of God. Ultimately, we are not such because of a shared evolutionary history that really carries no implications, but because God has made us so.

We are one, and our relationship with God is one.

Abstracting myself from the rest in order to have a relationship with God whether in prayer or repentance is abstracting myself from the only kind of relationship I can actually have with God.

My only possible relationship with God is as a member of the family of which God is the life-giver.

When I reflect upon my sins and failings, I must take into account the entire family, not just the one member I see in the mirror.

That means that my examination of conscience must include my personal as well as communal involvement in political, economic and social sin.

Do I question myself about racism, bigotry, whether my political choices are really for the common good, failure to protect the environment, my response to the climate crisis, how I make my living, refusal to follow the guidance of experts in the present pandemic, and other such sins that affect or afflict my sisters and brothers, the other children of God?

Besides sins of commission (what I have done) there are sins of omission (what I have failed to do). Especially once we get past the "I disobeyed my parents" phase, they are probably our most common.

So, my Lenten reflection must look beyond myself to see if and how my sin affects others. A good tool for that is the traditional Works of Mercy.

If we approach our examination of conscience in that way, we may find that Buddhists are not all that different from us after all.

• William Grimm is a missioner and presbyter in Tokyo and is the publisher of the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News).
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

A lot of what they say is meant to inflame and enrage rather than enlighten and console. How should we react to that? Read more

We are going to see a rerun of the show" The Seven Deadly Sins."

"Not again!" Jesus sighs

We sit in comfortable seats near the back of the theatre but even from a distance, the players look tired, more dead than deadly.

They were shuffling aimlessly around the stage.

Jesus yawns. "Which one is yours?"

I know I have to put the players in some order, so go up to the stage.

Yes, they are indeed, a sorry lot.

Pride is half asleep. Anger wants to be somewhere else. Lust offers a hopeful smile, but I put it to the back of the group. Lust always looks ridiculous in public.

Finally, I pull out Gluttony, make it stand at the front of the stage, and I go back to my seat.

My friend Jesus is not impressed. "Where are the real sins?" he asks.

They're all there," I wave my hand at the stage.

He shakes his head. "These are small self-indulgence. Where ate the big players?"

Big players? I don't know what that means.

He says, "It's a plot as old as humanity. The little characters are put out on the stage while the big players work behind the scenes, unnoticed."

"What big players?" I ask.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes, I do."

"I will mention two. They are hard to recognize because they usually wear the garments of virtue.

"The first big player is competition."

"Competition," I repeat.

"That is the dominator. Competition wants to be better than others." Jesus pauses. "I had this player in my own team."

I remember that Jesus taught equality. I remind him, "You said that he who would be first must come last and be servant of all."

"That didn't stop the competition amongst my followers." He looks thoughtful.

"What's the other big player?"

"Judgmental thinking. If competition is the dominator, Judgmental thinking is the divider."

"Haven't they both got good aspects?" I ask.

"Don't get me wrong," he says. "The human instincts for competition and judgment are meant to be self-directed. Applied to self, they can help spiritual growth. But people project them on others and create all kinds of wars."

"You said a lot in the gospels about love and peace," I tell him.

"That hasn't made much difference, either," he says. "People make judgments about folk they have never met, and situations they've never been in."

This makes me wonder where Competition and Judgmental thinking lurk in the Theatre of my Life.

I'm sure they're hiding somewhere backstage.

Jesus continues.

"Those two are big players, but they are not the biggest. They work for the biggest player which can't be called a sin.

In fact, the biggest player is actually absence."

"Absence?" I find myself repeating what I don't understand.

"Yes," he says. The bggest player is Ignorance. Once we know that all of creation is an aspect of God's loving presence, the notion of separation is impossible."

The word "ignorance "becomes huge.

I think of Jesus on the cross saying, "Father forgive them. they know not what they do."

And I feel close to tears.

But Jesus is now smiling. He stands. "That's enough for today."

I indicate the seven characters still waiting on the stage. "What about these?"

"Tell then to go home and sleep.

They look exhausted."

Then his smile expands to a grin.

"And you might tell Gluttony that I warmly remember his occasional company at table."

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

The Atlantic's Robinson Meyer suggests that Hoffman's tongue-in-cheek comment from five years ago may contain more than a kernel of truth. Using Dante's Inferno as a guide, Meyer outlines how several social networks and Internet platforms tap into some of the darker aspects of our nature.

If you are unfamiliar with the seven deadly sins, their insidiousness is more than at first would seem. By way of review, the seven deadly sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Meyer justifiably includes two sub-categories, vanity and acedia.

These sins are more than their stereotypes. For example, when people think of gluttony, they often imagine someone who eats too much. But, gluttony is not just about gorging; it is about trying to find satisfaction in something that will never deliver. So the person perpetually consumes, whether it is food or shopping or something else, but is never truly satisfied. Meyer gives the example of Tantalus in the Inferno who is stuck in a pool where he can never quite reach the branches of fruit above him. Meyer says that gluttony is Instagram.

Ultimately, the seven deadly sins are various types of idolatry. Acedia is a special case. It is related to sloth, but is much deeper. It is related to ennui or a deep malaise regarding life. In terms of idolatry, it is being tired of worshiping whatever you have been worshiping, whether it was God or some other idol. It is the state of idol-shopping as a way to cure one's malaise. Known as the "noonday devil" in monastic circles, Meyer says the "the afternoon Internet" (e.g., Tumblr and deep You Tube) represent acedia.

His other categories: Tinder is lust. LinkedIn represents greed. Netflix is sloth. Twitter taps into wrath (and its twin, sullenness or bitterness). Pinterest evokes envy. Medium touches on pride. Facebook is vanity. Continue reading

• Heather Zeiger is a freelance science writer with advanced degrees in chemistry and bioethics. She writes on the intersection of science, culture, and technology.

My passport was my only remaining valid form of identification.

Rather than afflict it with new creases and sweat stains, I thought I'd obtain a state-approved photo ID, which would be good for six months.

It turned out that the agent had bigger plans for me. "Are you aware that your driver's license is suspended?" She asked.

I nodded. Standing before her in crotch-cradling lycra cycling shorts, a plastic helmet under my arm, I was very grimly aware of it.

My first act of settling in had been to buy a Trek road bike, the fastest vehicle I knew of whose licit operation required no official approval.

"To get it reinstated you'll have to pay a $500 abandoned vehicle fee."

How my beloved Geo Prizm came to be abandoned in the eyes of the law is a long story.

Let's just say it involved a light collision in the turning lane, a smashed-in driver's-side door, a high deductible, and a lot of poverty.

I was no longer quite so poor as I had been; paying the fine wasn't going to be fun, but it was possible.

The thought of scattering the black clouds from the record and getting my license back appealed to me.

With a gulp and a sigh, I lay my Visa on the counter and said, "Okay."

Without removing her eyes from her computer screen, the agent took it. Then she said, "Oh...wait.'

"What?"

"To get your license back, you'll have to go to traffic school."

Traffic school consisted of a one-day, eight-hour course held in the conference room of a Scottsdale motel. Mainly, the pupils watched videos - "Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler," starring Walt Disney's Goofy, being one.

As an alternative to paying a fine, it was far from a bad deal. I knew because I'd been through it twice before.

I agreed. The agent printed out some forms, which she instructed me to fill out and sign.

I did as she said, and she handed me back some other forms to keep.

Then she ran my card and had me sign the receipt.

I left the place with a temporary state-approved ID card and a sense of being one fairly small step from legitimacy.

But I had another record to clear up

During my year in Turkey, I had to work Saturdays and Sundays, and my work days lasted long into the evenings.

Traveling to the nearest church would have involved a seven-hour round trip and transportation costs in the neighborhood of $100.

With no confessor available, my sins, great and small, piled up.

On my first Saturday back in the Valley, I decided to get them absolved and receive Communion for the first time in 13 months.

The church had an open confessional, and the priest turned out to be one of the most benevolent-looking men I'd ever laid eyes on.

Actually, "benevolent" doesn't do him justice.

He was adorable. Well-padded around the middle, with dark brows arching over gently inquisitive eyes, he looked as though at any moment he might cry out, "Oh, bother" and thrust his paws into a jar of honey.

After breezing through what I considered the small stuff, I recounted the tongue-lashings I'd dealt out while in the grip of my awful temper.

Whenever I recalled these moments privately, or for the benefit of friends, I wilted with shame.

They seemed to me not only sinful but contemptible, evidence of a low and ill-formed character.

The priest gave no sign of holding such an opinion.

With no change in his cuddly affect, he offered a few general pieces of advice and absolved me.

"For your penance," he said. Continue reading