By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo
When you were a kid did you not cheat (during games, schoolwork, etc.)? Dr. Peter Kreeft would say, “Not to admit cheating during your childhood is equivalent to saying infants don’t cry”. Especially when playing childhood games, we would rather be bad winners than good losers. We don’t want to lose, so we cheat. What’s worse is that when we see others cheat, we are furious because we don’t want the thing that we do, be done to us. We are impatient with the sins of others but too patient with ours. Aside from that when confronted with our wrongdoing we refuse to admit it, even at times when we were caught red-handed. Our very passion in refusing to admit our sin speaks a lot about us. It unveils us to the world of how strong our pride (disordered self-love) is. And in doing so we are actually confessing ourselves to the world who we really are.
We are not only good at sinning, but we are also good at self-deception or of fooling ourselves that we are sinless. If you ask prisoners in rehabilitation centers if they are guilty of their crimes, everyone there will say they are innocent. It’s the greatest self-denial. The book of St. Augustine entitled “Confessions” is the remedy to our self-deception. There, St. Augustine talks about his sinfulness and conversion. Reading the Confessions is a good rehearsal for death, judgment, Purgatory, Hell and Heaven. All five of these are made up of light and of truth. Hell is truth, known too late. The same thing that blesses the blessed in Heaven damns the damned in Hell. Truth unconfessed tortures, truth confessed makes us blessed.
Sinners are afraid of the truth and saints welcome it. To be intimate with God is to be scrutinized by Him, be known by Him. Sinners don’t want this. But whether they like it or not God knows their heart. That’s what Hell is God’s truth shining on their evil deeds. That’s also why truth sets us free. Truth sets us free from error especially moral error or sin. When you get to know the truth of the rules in doing math, it sets you free from making errors in solving math problems and it leads you to the correct solution. The same applies to the rules of life or otherwise known as the Ten Commandments. In heaven, no one commits sin not because they don’t have the freedom to sin, but the foolishness of sin is very clear to the saints living there. It’s as clear as 2 + 2. Heaven is the fullness of truth. Here on Earth sin is made obscure by our pride or selfishness and by the devil. The remedy is to make sin and its consequences obvious by acquiring wisdom. Wisdom is that x-ray vision that sees through sin and its ugliness. Wisdom is acquired by regular reading of Scripture, studying the Catechism of the Church, attending religious seminars, retreats, recollections, and joining spiritual groups.
But often times it’s not the head but the heart that is the problem. Even when people are shown the truth, they still would not align with it. Frank Turek is a religious speaker who goes around the U.S. giving talks to crowds in universities and tries to convert atheists by giving them natural proofs of God’s existence, the authenticity of Scripture, and proofs of the Resurrection of Christ. According to him, he would often make a confrontational question to atheists asking them: “If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? Most Atheists would answer no. They don’t want Christianity to be true. They don’t want that there is a God because they want to be their own god. Because the real God gets in the way of their lifestyle especially God’s morality. It tells you that we are not really on a truth quest but on a happiness quest. And many of us are willing to change the truth to whatever makes us happy.
The truth has come into the world in the person of Christ, who Himself said “I am the truth” (John 14:6) but people still want to believe their own truth. “The light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.” (John 3:19)
