A mystic take on the concept of SIN

I’ve been thinking lately about SIN – that old favorite device that pits the virtuous against the rest of us.

Growing up in the evangelical church, I was terrified of Sin – there was an overwhelming sense that there was nothing I could do to stop it – that it was always right there waiting to pounce on me.  That no matter what I did, how much I tried to be a good person – there was always a sin following me around.  We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of god afterall.

The more steeped in the church I became the more subtle the sins I noticed in myself were.  Did I have a judgemental thought?  Did I find this person a little toooo attractice?  Did I consider saying a swear word (even though I definitely did it – the thought was certainly enough to count as a sin!)

FUCK

There was sin everywhere.  It was very hard to avoid, and I felt all this exposure to Sin was going to doom me in some abstract way I didn’t fully understand.  I knew it was all forgiven (THANKS JC), but still – as a 13 year old trying to be the best christian girl possible, it was an oppressive amount of conscious and subconscious sin tracking.

It’s enough to really nudge anyone latent anxiety disorder into full bloom mode.

From early on in the evangelical church we also get really good at noticing the SIN in others.  Some groups were monolithic sinners (hey LGBTQ friends!), but also basically anyone everywhere all the time was guilty as well.

And so now as an adult with some basic understanding of psychology – I can see this process in hindsight of projecting our own sin onto others, because it’s too hard to look at in ourselves.  How easy it is, with just a few degrees of swivel, to turn the whole thing into an analysis of the virtuousness of other people, so we don’t have to look at all the ways we’re falling short.

Looking at SIN with Mystic Goggles

This leads into the now, which I will kick off with this lovely biblical passage:

Isaiah 59:2 New International Version (NIV)

² But your iniquities have separated
    you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
    so that he will not hear.

 

My heretical synthesis and reinterpretation of my childhood faith is this – that GOD is analogous to what they call in Zen the source.  Jesus is analogous to the Buddha – or the incarnated wisdom of the path towards relief of suffering.  The messenger.

As I sit in meditation, source is there, far away like a distant photograph – and I feel a subtle tug pulling me in.  There’s a longing for unification, and strong desire to “get there”.  But in between me as I am, and the me that’s spiritually enlightened and co-existing with source in this beautiful place of no suffering – there’s a million little landmines I have to clear.

All these weights are keeping me here, away from god – whether that’s my anxieties about my day, my planning for the future, my anger, fear, sadness, disgust.  Whatever it is, the presence of these things in awareness obscures the face of god and keeps me small and separate.

Craving and aversion keep us from spiritual advancement, from the nondual reality that holds our relief from suffering, and which exists in a state of unification with the source.

I interpret the Crucifixion to be a powerful ritual act that worked metaphorically on multiple levels – the base level being a deep spiritual empowerment of humanity.  A heavenly “Go get ’em!” from god.  In dying for the forgiveness of our sins – Jesus opened the door to the possibility of rising above our suffering.  We shouldn’t just throw up our hands and helplessly wallow in the misery of the world and loop around in our own suffering forever – but we SHOULD do our own work to free ourselves – because we CAN!  Not only should we – but as Jesus’ final miracle demonstrated – we are obligated to sacrifice our puny little human selves wracked with our own mental anguishes, prejudices, resentments, competitions, anger etc – at the cross in order to create heaven on earth.

Nope, not heavy at all.

So what if sin has nothing to do with virtuousness?  What if the relationship between sin and virtue is just a biblical political construct meant to reinforce the power of a specific group of people at the expense of others?  What if despite a plethora of bible passages that elude to the connection between sin and virtue, that’s not actually the true message of sin?  That maybe (just maybe?) political forces and prejudices shaped the bible in a myriad ways we don’t fully understand.  What if just maybe… the original mystical message of sin is still lying dormant in the text beneath all the rest of it.

We don’t need to throw all the wisdom around sin out because it’s been politically hijacked and corrupted – we just need to detach it from all of that (I know, this is quite the feat) – and re contextualize it for what it is –

Wisdom around how our thinking, craving, averse mind creates our own suffering – our separation from god.  How those bad mental habits keep us small and powerless.  Wisdom about how we create our own misery, and our very own perfectly-tailored-to-us hell.  Our looping brains keep us from heaven – where we may finally rest in unification with god, free from suffering.  The ascent from the hell of our own fear, anger, and delusion up into heaven, where were experience the liberation of our suffering, is emblematic of many spiritual paths.

That’s the journey we’re all on – and the dawning of self-awareness into what thought patterns and bad mental habits we have sticking around keeping us small and suffering – is what sin is all about for me these days.

So here are few of my favorite bible verses on sin, which I find much more wisdom and much less judgement when looking at them through this lens.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Romans 3:23-24

Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.

Psalm 51:1-2