As I Sin

I'm currently reading through As I Lay Dying by Richard John Neuhaus. It's a thin little volume in which he reflects upon a time in his life when he almost died.

Cancer was a part of that experience, and his reflections on it have made me stop and think:

"...it is not really an invader; it is something internal to myself. It is a part of myself that went madly wild. What had happened in not the result of weakness or decline, but of an explosion of healthiness---cancer is a healthiness that is radically disordered, that is disengaged from the rest of the body, and therefore deadly in its vibrant aliveness."

You see, I've often heard sin compared to cancer. While I thought it perhaps a fitting analogy, I never gave it much thought. It seemed just another way of saying that sin was bad.

End of story.

But when I think of sin like cancer cells, it makes sense. Sin takes what we have--the good in us--and radically distorts it. Changes it. Takes what is at base life-giving energy and turns it to destructive directions.

It mistunes our hearts. Takes love and twists it into hate. Takes a healthy passion and makes it dangerous lust. Turns our love of God's creation into an excuse for materialism. It's tricky.

Sin is a cancer. It takes what was pure and ruins it. Has from the beginning.

And perhaps because it's so deeply connected to other good things inside of us it may be all the more difficult to see.