Are You a Good Person?
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 basically good people.
Sometimes people will say that even though they do things that are totally against God’s plan and God’s instructions, they still believe in God, still want to be with God in Heaven, and that they still have a fundamental orientation towards 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 con artist 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
Choosing a different god to serve
Every gravely evil act, when freely and knowingly chosen, establishes a new false god at the center of our lives.
Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and money,” meaning that there’s only room in the human heart for one most important thing.
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 towards God through Jesus Christ in one act of conversion, so too can we choose to orient our lives away from God and towards an eternity of dissatisfaction by one mortal sin.
This is why our individual behaviors actually matter when it comes to our character and to our eternal destiny.
Three
It 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 afterward 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, like choosing a different lover, and that’s exactly what mortal sin is.
Four
What are you going to choose to worship?
David Foster Wallace, in a famous college commencement address, told his audience of college graduates that they had to make a choice of what was going to be their 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 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.”
Wallace also said in the same speech that if you choose to worship the wrong thing, it will eat you alive.
When people leave a life of drugs or promiscuity or greed 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 destroys your life.
The first commandment tells us what to worship: God, the one and only God. Worshipping Him is life and truth and salvation. Worshipping anything else, making anything else the most important thing, that’s what we mean by sin and death and damnation.
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.
Well, then, what makes a sin grave? Grave matter or grave sin means breaking one of the Ten Commandments: skipping Mass on Sunday breaks the 3rd Commandment; abortion and euthanasia are against the 5th; Lust, viewing pornographic images, masturbation, sex outside of Marriage, contracepted sex, homosexual acts, sterilization for contraceptive purposes, invitro-fertilization, artificial insemination, and divorce are all grave acts against the 6th Commandment; Stealing goes against the 7th; lying against the 8th.
Jesus takes grave sin seriously because grave sin is idolatry, it’s choosing a false god, it’s bowing down before an idol that will eat you alive.
If you have committed a grave sin, if you have preferred the creature to the Creator, run to confession. Ask God to reestablish His supremacy in your life. Ask Him for the grace to never be unfaithful to Him again.