Old

I remember being a very little girl and thinking that it was utterly terrible to swear.

Judas Iscariot (James Tissot)

The other day I met with someone who I had not seen or spoken to in about a year.  There was not a distance between us because we did not want to connect with each other; rather we had just not had the opportunity to connect for a while and before we knew it a whole year had passed by.

When we did connect with each other, all was well and we enjoyed each other’s company well enough, but the space of time caused me to reflect.

You see, when we are younger, the distance of a year makes very little difference in our lives.  Between the ages of twenty and twenty-one there is rarely a huge change in the abilities that we have.  Sometimes we might become a little more confident or experienced in a thing, but mostly there is almost not perceptible change in us within the year.  This is not to say that we do not change – of course we do – it is to say that the change is in such a way that it is barely noticeable.

As we get older, the changes are more obvious.  A man in his late seventies may be very severely restricted in his movement from one year to the next.  Similarly, a baby can go from being unable to do anything to being able to crawl or walk or feed themselves within a year.

I have been thinking about how these gradual changes are barely noticeable over time, but that the older we get the more those sort of gradual changes seem to show up.  In a way this is like sin.

Very few people wake up one morning and commit mortal sins out of nothing.  Mostly, those mortal (or deadly) sins are the result of lots of little venial sins and occasions of sin that build up over time to result in a sort of complacency in relation to sin.

I remember being a very little girl and thinking that it was utterly terrible to swear.  I thought to myself that it would be a terrible thing to go to Hell because I could not control my tongue.  For a very very long time I never swore at all.  And then, I grew older.  I surrounded myself with adults who swore occasionally and the things that seemed so terrible at one stage were suddenly not so terrible to me anymore.

I grew old in the way that Judas Iscariot grew old.  You see, Judas did not sell Christ for thirty pieces of silver because he woke up one day and decided to betray someone he loved.  He sold Christ because for a long time he had been betraying Christ in little ways.  He had been stealing from the money purse for a long time.  And over time the small sins allowed Judas to become desensitised to the sin. 

And I have been thinking about that today as I have been thinking about how it were better for that man if he were never born.  For it seems to me that I am not much better than Judas.  And that is a terrible thing to realise…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.