Episode Transcript  

One

Being a “Good Person” and doing Gravely Wicked Things

It’s a very popular assumption that we can go around doing gravely evil things, while still being a basically good person. Sometimes people will say that even though we do things that are totally against the Church’s teaching and God’s instructions, we can still have a fundamental option, or a fundamental orientation to God.

A more mainstream expression of this idea, the idea that we’re good people even though we do really bad things, comes in the form of Hollywood movies where people doing horrible things still have hearts of gold. There are movies where the main character is a prostitute with a heart of gold, or a contract killer with a heart of gold, or a swindler with a heart of gold.

But that’s not the way gravely evil actions work. Gravely evil actions corrupt our character. And gravely evil actions establish a false god in our lives and so turn us away from the true God.

Two

You Cannot Serve Two Masters

Every gravely evil act, when freely and knowingly chosen, establishes a new false god at the center of our lives. Jesus says it very clearly in the Sermon On the Mount, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24).

This means there’s only room in the human heart for one most important thing and when you commit a gravely evil act of greed, you are choosing money as your false god. When you commit a gravely evil act of lust, you are choosing sexual gratification as your false god. When you commit a gravely evil act of vanity, or anger, you are choosing self-importance as your false god.

Just as we can choose to orient our lives to God through Jesus Christ in one act of conversion, so we can choose to orient our lives away from God and towards an eternity of dissatisfaction by one mortal sin. Which is why our individual behaviors actually matter when it comes to our character and to our eternal destiny.

Three

Doesn’t have to be a conscious rejection of God

People may try to pretend that their gravely evil sin shouldn’t affect their relationship with God. They tell themselves, “I wasn’t consciously rejecting God, or blaspheming Him, or anything.” But of course, you can commit infidelity without consciously thinking about the person to whom you’re being unfaithful.

For instance, if a husband commits adultery, he’s not going to make things any better by explaining to his wife afterwards that he wasn’t even thinking about her. So too, you can reject God as God, you can violate the first commandment and destroy your relationship with the Lord of all, without thinking about Him.

All that’s required is that you choose a different master, a different god, and that’s exactly what mortal sin is.

Four

What are you going to choose to Worship

David Foster Wallace, in a famous commencement address, told his audience of college graduates that they had to make a choice: what was going to be there god? Here are his words, “in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship….If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you….Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

If you choose to worship the wrong thing, it will eat you alive. When people leave a life of drugs or promiscuity or avarice or raw ambition, they don’t say, “Yeah, I was a little misguided, but I always had a heart of gold.” They say, “I was lost, I was a disaster, I was totally broken, I was in terrible trouble.”

Because grave sin destroys your life. Idolatry destroys your life. Worshipping the wrong thing, making anything else the most important thing, destroys your life.

Five

Taking Mortal Sin Seriously

The Catholic Church doesn’t judge the state of other people’s souls. But it does take grave sin very seriously. It takes grave sin seriously because grave sin is idolatry, it’s a violation of the first commandment. It’s choosing a false god, it’s bowing down before an idol that will eat you alive.

What are the grave sins we are most tempted to excuse today? Sex outside marriage. Adultery. Pornography. Contraception. Contraceptive sterilization. Divorce understood as ending a valid marriage and remarriage without an annulment. Homosexual sexual activity. Deliberate drunkenness or drug use. Deliberately missing Sunday Mass. Gambling that seriously harms ourselves or our family. And deliberately watching things that draw us into grave sin.

If you committed grave sin and not confessed it, run to confession. Ask God to reestablish His supremacy in your life. Ask Him for the grace to never be unfaithful to Him again.

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