At the risk of stating the obvious, Christianity’s starting assumption is that we are all sinners until we are saved by Christ. While it certainly cannot be denied that man commits wrongs on a daily basis, I believe that regarding ourselves as essentially sinful can be just as harmful to spiritual growth as it can be useful. For me personally, it is much more helpful to adopt the alternative starting assumption of Hinduism and Buddhism: that we are born asleep in ignorance. While being saved is the goal of Christianity, awakening is the goal of the Eastern traditions.
Since most cultures, including Christian ones, believe that babies are born innocent and fresh, coming into this world without any sins of their own, the Christian idea that we are born in sin really implies that each new baby is born polluted by the sins of his parents and ancestors. It is as if these ancestral sins are like toxins of alcohol or recreational drugs, imparted to the fetus through the mother’s bloodstream. This notion, which seems to implicate the baby in the sins of others, does not ring as true to me as the idea that we are born asleep, or that we gradually fall into a metaphoric sleep, as we learn to separate ourselves from our mothers and our immediate surroundings, developing the hard shell of our individual egos. I believe that life’s spiritual purpose is to wake from this sleepfulness, and if we commit sins along the way it is only because we remain at least partly asleep in ignorance.
On the other hand, to regard oneself as sinful can be extremely cathartic for people who have lived very hard lives, people who have struggled against drug addiction or physical abuse or racism, or who have committed violent crimes. For people who live in misery, psychically tormented by their feelings of guilt, anger or fear, their dawning perception that they have sinned can become a transformational force leading them toward the redemption offered by Jesus and a Christian God. Strong emotion is one of the principal motivators leading people to God. The experience of shared emotion in the community offered by church, the sense of belonging imparted by the minister’s invocation, the choir’s affirmation and the congregation’s active participation, can offer powerful psychic relief – an emotional high. Nowhere have I seen the spiritual value of this emotional relief, this dissolving of the individual in the spiritual community, portrayed more convincingly and eloquently than in James Baldwin’s wonderful novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
Still, for lucky people like me, who have been blessed by suffering only the most minor of emotional traumas, God seems more easily or compellingly approached in the quiet of contemplation, rather than in the grip of strong, transformational emotion. I desire to awaken spiritually as fervently as some people want to be forgiven for their sins. Still, it is easy to be ecumenical about these formulations, simply by expressing the notion that to be saved is to wake up, and to awaken is to be saved.
Bird of Spirit 