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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Sin and Sickness

Sin and Sickness

If we are Christians we have to believe that all sickness ends in health. The one and only exception would be spiritual sickness of a particular kind – namely, mortal sin unrepented at the moment of death.

Catholics in the past certainly exaggerated the ease with which one can commit a mortal sin. This was because of a too cut-and-dried theology which regarded human choices as being more deliberate and strictly rational than they usually are and was unaware of the pressures of subconscious activity.

The wholly rational man may be a figment created by the moral theologian. Again, the difficulty of repentance can also be exaggerated. The soul in a state of sin is a soul beleaguered by grace. And the point which I wish particularly to make is that one of the means of grace may be physical or mental sickness.

We have all of us at one time or another experienced the purifying effects of sickness. We have perhaps already yielded or all-but-yielded to some obvious temptation. Then came the sickness like a painful cloud surrounding the soul.

Perhaps in our suffering we made many acts of faith and love and contrition, bewildered and afraid, not sure even that we might not die, and accepted the pain from God’s hands with resignation. Then in convalescence we found that areas of potential betrayal had, as it were, been burnt out of our souls. We were both nearer to God and nearer to our neighbours. Thus our sickness ended in a greater health than we had possessed before the sickness began.

Sometimes a particular sickness may seem like a grotesque but real messenger sent to us especially to deter us from sin. I remember one occasion, when I was a very young man and very much attached to a girl. Both of us page 118 were unmarried. It was a case of serious, heavy-minded, melodramatic love, on my side at least; the kind of love referred to by the Greeks as the black storm that breaks the pine on the mountain top. Perhaps the pine is an image of the soul. At any rate, swayed by this storm, I had made up my mind to commit fornication. But the day before the rendezvous I woke up in the morning with a swollen lip.

It was not an ordinary swollen lip. It bulged out from my face like an orange. I visited a doctor who prescribed some penicillin ointment. The ointment was most effective. It healed a number of weeping sores and left me with a gigantic scab that extended down my chin. And when I looked at myself in the mirror with the greatest chagrin and disappointment I realised thatanyrendezvous wouldbe afiasco. One simply couldn’tbeginan unofficial honeymoon with a lip that looked like Mount Ngauruhoe after eruption.

So a minor ailment changed the course of my life, undoubtedly for the better. Without that blessed virus I might well now be a divorced husband of twenty years’ standing.

The virus taught me another thing. It showed me that a stage-managed ‘love’ which depended on the size and shape of one’s lip was not love at all, but a hybrid of fantasy and compulsion. I have not forgotten the lesson. It is one that any person of romantic temperament would do well to remember.

For the unbeliever a physical sickness that ends in death must seem, unless he has grown tired of living, an unmitigated calamity. But for us it is quite different. Death delivers us from all physical sickness. It is the beginning of the total cure. It is for most of the human race the door that leads into Purgatory where the effects of our spiritual ailments will be eliminated by the great and loving Physician, Christ Himself. Therefore we can truly say that for the honest believer all sickness ends in health.

We have, however, a tendency to a false bias. If any of us get the ’flu we take to our beds, moved by the lawful impulse of self-preservation, and wait with aspirin and fruit juice and thermometers for the affliction to take its course. We care for our bodies most prudently, though they are inevitably fated in the long run to fall apart and die.

But if we have a habit of lust or anger or covetousness we take a different course. We bandage the sour soul with false soothing promises and go about our business. This is a peculiar reversal of values. There is no final danger in physical ailments; they can cause us pain but they cannot destroy us. Death of the body cannot destroy us. But even the possibility of death of the soul is quite another matter that should send us like lightning to the Sacrament of Penance and to our private prayers. Perhaps we are unconsciously influenced by the wholly secular notion of safety that is the cornerstone of our determinedly secular civilisation.

Between light sickness and mortal sickness of the body there is a degree of sickness which is very heavy but not in itself mortal. This kind of sickness page 119 passes over us and through us as war does in a hitherto peaceful country. We are bound to feel in some ways outraged by it. There is the deep-seated pain which modern drugs cannot wholly remove. There is our own volley of apparently unanswered prayers discharged against the walls of Heaven. Some people begin to blame God when their sickness is not relieved by prayer. At this point a wrong approach can lead to real dangers of loss of trust in Divine Goodness.

This is particularly evident in cases where it is a relative or dearly loved friend who is sick. Let us suppose that two parents are praying for the recovery of a young child. They have called in the doctor. All possible human means have been used to secure recovery; but the child remains in danger of death. The parents begin to pray fervently.

What they are asking for is a good thing in itself. God wants them to pray about it; but with the necessary proviso: ‘Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.’ In nine cases out of ten the child may recover, through multiple causes which will include the Divine answer to the prayer of the parents.

In such cases God does not save the child for its own sake alone. In His eyes death is only a calamity if it is a death caused by sin or a death in a state of sin. When He looks at His creation He – unlike us – sees death and Resurrection to endless joy as a single happening. He may save the child in order to strengthen the faith of the parents, and because He loves to give us what we sincerely want, provided that what we want coincides with our ultimate good.

But in the tenth case God may not save the child; or it would be more exact to say that He saves the child by bringing it to Himself by death rather than by allowing it to have further experiences on earth. If the faith of the parents is clouded by this event – if they inwardly rebel and blame God for not yielding to their prayer – if they say, ‘Since our prayers are not answered, what is the use of praying?’ – what then has gone wrong?

In the first place it means that the parents regard death too much as the ultimate calamity, for themselves as well as for their child. This is an understandable and long-term illusion of the human race, springing from the fact that death is for us a dark ordeal without discernible results other than a corpse and a sense of grief.

But the whole point of the Faith is that we know that death has become deliverance, that death is swallowed up in Christ. It is not God’s failure but the failure of the parents to summon up the full power of their faith to meet this dark crisis which has led to an actual calamity of damaged trust.

It would indeed be a bold man who would go into a house of mourning and tell the mourners that they are at fault in their grief. The sense of a spiritual gap and coldness; the sense that the ways of God are strange; the sense even that all spiritual consolations have departed – these things are quite compatible with Christian trust and may indicate a deepened experience of page 120 religious truth. To be sad, even to the point of agony, is no betrayal of the Faith. It may be the way in which some of us enter the climate of the Passion.

Rebellion, however, is quite another matter. It is an indication that trust was never anything else but provisional; it depended on God giving us what we wanted, not on our conviction that what He gives us – whether joy or mourning, sickness or health, death or recovery is what we truly need. Life and death are in His hands. He gives us death because it is the right answer to our spiritual needs. Ultimately we have to learn to thank Him for death as we thank Him for life.

One cannot do more than speculate about how a given child, who died young, might have lived if it had been spared. But one thing is certain. It is we special cases – we, the minority of the earth’s population who grow old in our sins still trying to obey God and love one another, who are exposed to the rough weather oflife. Before we die perhaps we will havebecome glad todie.

It is no mere negativism to say that a child who dies before it has committed any serious fault is singularly blessed. It may even be possible – who can say for certain that it is otherwise, since only God knows not only what we are but what we will become? – that such a child has been spared the ultimate calamity of the loss of God. Between an early death and the possibility of an unrepentant deathbed who could for a moment hesitate to say which is the better?

There is certainly a sadness in seeing the young plant cut down before it has begun to produce flower and fruit. Yet even this is uncertain. The soul of a young child may be most pleasing to God. Our Lord Himself said that the angels of young children beheld continually the face of the Father in Heaven. And the prayers of such a child, taken early to Heaven, may be of enormous benefit for its parents on earth.

Between the child taken into everlasting joy and the parents rebelling against this happening there is a deep gulf and discrepancy. If the Blessed could be unhappy, the child would weep for its parents more bitterly than they could ever weep for it, because it had reached the land of peace and they were making its journey an occasion to hinder their ultimate reunion with it and with God.

It is entirely certain that we must die. Even the atheists agree with us on this one point of knowledge, though our interpretation of the event is radically different from theirs. And does it matter greatly whether we die at the age of ten or the age of ninety?

In some ways the deaths of the very old and the very young have a great deal in common, for the young are detached on account of their innocence from the net of worldly hope that strangles us, and the old are detached because they have done long penance and begun to see things as they are. The illusory difficulty is always the same – that we see death as the deepest evil, because it threatens our bodily and mental security, and sin as a lesser evil page 121 because ‘only’ the soul is involved. If we could reverse these values, we would frequently be able to see death not lightheartedly, but still as an occasion for a certain kind of deep and solemn joy.

We belong to God. In the long run we do not belong to anybody else. The wife does not belong to the husband; the child does not belong to the parents; the citizen does not belong to the State – not in the ultimate and eternal fashion in which we belong to the God who decided from eternity that we should exist, and formed our bones and flesh in our mother’s womb, and gave us health and sickness during our lives, and died on the Cross so that we should be able to enter Heaven, and permits us in our own dying – at the hour He alone chooses – to share in that holy Passion.

Bodily death is shown sometimes by artists as a tyrant terrorising the human race with a sickle and a show of bones. But it is sin, not death, which is the true tyrant; or rather, it is we who are cruel tyrants over ourselves, dragging our poor souls into sin when a compassion for self would be the saner and better course.

In his Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde described vividly the situation of men already in mortal sin who are led by perversity to commit further sins –

For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain
And drags it from its spotted shroud
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood
And makes it bleed in vain. . . .

Wilde recognised that the death of the soul is the death that is to be feared; and perhaps this recognition led him on his deathbed to take that leap in the dark into the arms of the Church of Sinners. The Devil’s propaganda only begins to be really successful when it leads us to fear what we shouldn’t welcome, and welcome, or at least tolerate, what we shouldn’t fear.

Setting aside the sanest of all the saints, our brother Francis, it is not customary for Christian men to sing the praises of bodily death. We are perhaps afraid that our neighbours will think we are lunatics or accuse us of a hatred of life. Yet there are reasons why we should regard bodily death not as a tyrant but a deliverer.

Death delivers us from the tyranny of our bodily habits. This may seem a small thing. But it is not so small if we consider how much time we spend fussing over our bodies. The bacon was too salty. The coffee was too sweet. That open door will stir up our sciatica. We must remember to switch on the electric blanket in time to get the bed really warm. The pills the doctor gave us have been useless for our indigestion. Does our hair actually look better long or short?

page 122

If we recorded it, we would probably find that ninety-nine per cent of conversation in the ordinary New Zealand household turns either directly or indirectly on the way in which we minister to our bodily needs and habits. It is not a happy conversation; nor is it particularly intelligent. It is just the groaning noise of the human creature going about his or her earthly existence. Though innocent in itself, it can unfortunately swallow up faith and hope and charity in a bog of trivial private obsessions.

By taking us away from our bodies, death will give us the chance perhaps to actually think and pray and communicate intelligently with others – I think of Purgatory as a highly communal place – for the first time since we were created.

Death delivers us from the tyranny of our environment. Here is an old man who has spent forty years scrubbing sand from brass plates in a foundry; and here is another, more affluent but no happier, who has been subjected for an equal time to the mental torment of having to invent the hideous inanities, both visual and auditory, which are necessary for commercial advertising. Each of them has managed to stay more or less insulated from his environment by subjecting himself to regular large doses of grog – beer in one instance, whisky in the other. They are each of them heavy occupational drinkers because they have jobs in which only a saint or a philosophical genius could see any personal meaning.

And there is no possible deliverance for either of them on earth, because their society is bigger and stronger than they are, and because they have been so conditioned to their particular jobs that no other way of existing seems to lie open to them. Their imaginations have been amputated; but death will relieve them at one stroke of their environmental prison-house and their false escape from it. Death will give both God and their own souls back to them.

Death delivers us from the tyranny of personal and possessive love. This may seem a hard saying. But without bodily death our instinct to possess those whom we love might well become absolute. A good husband and wife will do their best to look after each other. But even this ‘looking after’ may become like the myriads of small cords by which the Lilliputians pegged Gulliver to the ground. We unconsciously demand that those whom we love should be to us what we desire them to be, not their real selves, but a comforting fiction constructed by love to appease love.

What husband would confess to his wife that he was frequently tempted to despair? What wife would confess to her husband that her only true happiness was got by planting flowers? Love urges each to present to the other a calm and smiling image. And this absence of spiritual reality and freedom, this heart-killing cosiness, this pretence that all either can want is a well-made cup of tea, is indeed endured for the sake of true love; because true love makes us put out our eyes in the presence of the blind and limp in the company of page 123 the lame. It is very close to the mystery of the Passion.

Death delivers us from the tyranny of success and failure. One could see this truth very clearly in that extraordinary play by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. That poor man was crucified by his own fading hope of material success and the expectations which others had of him. Only death could shatter the glass case of illusion in which he was confined and, by frustrating his hopes, free him to be whatever he was in the sight of God.

The Christian world is full of failures accepted and redeemed by Christ. One could almost say that failure is the chief highway by which we come to the throne of God. It is those who think they are true successes who stand in mortal danger. Death delivers us to a Judgment infinitely more merciful than the judgment of the world.

Both sickness and death are agents of the Divine Mercy. What benefit would we have from living for ever in our deformed earthly condition, still aware of reality only in occasional glimpses, still plagued by sin? Granted the infinite Love of God, repentance is not difficult; and for the repentant sinner death should seem no more than a door.

The Christian promise is contained in these words: ‘It is appointed to people once to die, and after that the Resurrection. . . .’ They are words of enormous liberty and hope.

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