15th Sunday after Pentecost 17.9.06 Avoiding the death of mortal sin
Queen Blanche of Castile told her son, the future St. Louis IX of France (13th century), that she would rather see him dead at her feet than that he would commit one mortal sin.
A strange thing for a mother to say? Perhaps there are not many mothers who would be capable of making the same statement.
Yet it makes perfect sense, once we look at it in the light of truth.
Physical death is not such a disaster if the person dies in a state of grace. It becomes just a passageway to eternal life.
But mortal sin is the end of everything; it kills the life of the soul, the very centre of the person, and leads to eternal death.
Queen Blanche just saw this more clearly than most people do; so matter of factly passed this on to her son.
Today people put everything on physical health. If a baby is to be born, they will say: I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl as long as it’s healthy.
Ever new regulations come out about physical safety, as more and more signs appear telling us where the exits are, where the assembly points are.
But where are the signs to say: Do not commit a mortal sin. Do not offend the living God. Do not destroy your soul.
When Our Lord restored the son of the widow to life, He was relieving that woman’s grief, but also giving us a symbol of His power over life and death.
He does not normally raise dead people back to life, not to this earthly life at least, but does often raise people back to life spiritually.
Every time He forgives sin He is raising back to life. We should rejoice in sin forgiven even more than we would rejoice if someone came back from the grave.
But we should also learn from the lesson, that sin is a deadly thing, to be avoided in future.
So let us say with Queen Blanche that it is better to die than to sin.
We can understand this as a concept, but how can it be so real to us that we would actually think this way?
We need help with our motivation. It is one thing to know the commandments and understand what they mean.
But to have such a revulsion for sin that we would rather die instead: this is something more.
For this we need the grace of God, to give us that extra motivation.
Here also the saints can help us. They could see clearly the personal dimension of sin, that it was not just breaking a rule, but actually wounding Christ in His crucified body, and also doing great damage to one’s own soul.
Imagine you are a bystander on the way to Calvary and Our Lord stumbles at your feet. Would you strike Him another blow, jeer at Him? Of course not. You would want to comfort Him.
Well, when faced with a chance to do good or evil, if we choose evil we are striking Him one more time, one more lash or nail for His flesh.
Think of it in such personal terms. Our sin is wounding another person, namely Jesus Christ - and we become less inclined to commit that sin.
Think of harming your own body, and you recoil from that. Well, if you sin you are doing worse.
We just need to be able to see this, to feel it. It is the truth but it is obscured from us because we are too much body and not enough spirit.
May the Lord Himself give us the grace to perceive what is really happening when we sin, and so help us stay alive in the soul. May Mary, in her Seven Sorrows, give us her vision of sin and holiness and we will never stray again.
