Article March 21, 1994 Issue

The good news about sin

It's a wonderful feeling to know that sin has no hold on you, that your true nature is good.

Mario Tosto

The way things were going in my life many years ago, I was convinced there was nothing I could do right. Making mistakes just seemed to come naturally to me. I was convinced I was a loser because I was a sinner. But something inside me kept rebelling at that concept. So although I was a pretty active sinner, I was at the same time a hopeful one—meaning, I always felt I would some day get things figured out and discover that I wasn't so bad after all.

My religious background drummed into me the notion that sin is some sort of indelible blot on your record, like a wound on your being that has left a permanent scar. You could accumulate these wounds and scars, and eventually you could be so covered with them that your whole identity would be obliterated. If that happened, you were considered so lost that there was no alternative but to suffer in the fires of a supposed afterlife hell.

Certainly, sin is totally wrong and must be abandoned. But the concept I was struggling with works to make you always feel like a loser, unable to escape sin. It can make you feel unworthy of love, or even life. Under the tyranny of this belief I kept alternating between compulsive scrupulousness and moral abandon. I was a lot like the prodigal son in the Bible, wasting my life with "riotous living" (see Luke 15:13).

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