Transdanubian Interrogations

Amisia from Romania was only part of the congregation at Swanvale Halt for a little while, but she made a great impact, not being much like many other worshippers here. She came as carer for a regular member of the church and loyally brought her to church every Sunday so she could meet her friends, having been poorly and isolated for quite a while. Amisia herself was feeling her way forward after some hard times and so they did each other a lot of good.

Not unexpectedly Amisia was Romanian Orthodox by tradition. She told me that her brother had had a terminal cancer diagnosis and she had gone to pray at the tomb of the local saint, St Parascheva, and from that moment he began to improve and today is fine. Like many Europeans she found the concept of Anglicanism a little bewildering and had a lot of questions, not all of which were of a technical nature. Queries that begin ‘What does the Anglican Church believe about …’ are often quite hard to answer because there is not much that the Anglican Church does have definite beliefs about. As I like to quote, the Catechism of the Church of England has 21 pages and 60 clauses; its Roman Catholic counterpart (at least in the edition I have) weighs in at 675 and 2863 respectively …

One thing Amisia wanted to know about was sin. Here, you see, I ran up against the fact that the Anglican Catechism only mentions sin once, in the account of the assurance of ‘forgiveness of sins’ in baptism: nowhere does it say what sin is or what acts are sins. I found myself compelled to define what the Church of England’s general attitude to sin is, which seems to be that it exists and, very vaguely and indefinitely, can be defined as ‘that which goes against the will of God generally or for a specific person’, but, beyond that, mainly leaves believers to work out for themselves what their sins may be. I am certainly very, very reluctant to determine for people what their sins are and to tell them from the pulpit (or I would be if our church had one). I feel that this is the business of the Holy Spirit rather than ministers of the Gospel, and that I am only intended by the Lord to comment specifically if asked to do so. Even then I am loth to do so without having at least some idea why something might be sinful. In a modern and very individualistic world we have lost the sense that acts which apparently only concern the individual have an impact on the community because they affect how a person’s character grows, and exactly how that might happen involves quite a lot of guesswork. I have a great fear of sounding like the late Cardinal Siri, for instance, denouncing women wearing trousers because it ‘caused them to forget their natural function in childbearing’.

I prefer rather, and I think the Church of England prefers, to develop the believer’s conscience so that they can work these things out for themselves. Some sins are obvious in that they cause clear hurt and damage or involve the breaking of promises, but some aren’t. Now writing to the Corinthians the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul (see how Orthodox my phrases can turn!) says that Christians should not eat meat offered in the temples of pagan gods, not of course because there is anything wrong with the meat or that the pagan gods really exist, but to avoid wounding the conscience of a Christian who might still have residual pagan inclinations: in the company of such a person, to avoid any hint that they might be eating it because it’s been offered in a temple, they shouldn’t eat it. In fact, he says it twice: ‘if you sin against your brother in this way …’ Clearly it isn’t the consumption of the food which is sinful, it’s the thoughtless effect it has on the other person. Now cases of this kind, when innocent acts become sinful in particular contexts, could be infinitely multiplied, and any Church that sought to list them all would be a foolhardy institution indeed. Instead Christians need a Spirit-formed conscience to negotiate the way forward, to know what’s the right thing to do, and when to say sorry.

But the hazard with such tolerance is that we say the words of the General Confession in the Mass and let them wash over us, as impervious to the Holy Spirit as a stone is to water, like the lady who once said to me, years before I became a priest, ‘I don’t know why we have to confess our sins every week, sometimes I don’t have any!’ I told Amisia that Anglican priests aren't given lists of sins. 'Then how do we know what's a sin and what isn't?' she asked. It’s a quandary I still haven’t found a good way out of (though I can only comfort myself that the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul probably hadn’t, either).