The Horror of Sin

By Fred Vilbig


Look around at creation. The beauty and purity of a gentle snowfall. The color and activity of birds. The subtle and ever changing colors of sunrises and sunsets. The beautiful flowers of springtime. The explosion of colors in the fall.

If you look up in the sky, you see even more wonders. The ever shifting shapes and structures of the clouds with their likenesses to castles, butterflies, and dragons. On a clear night out in the country you can see hundreds of individual stars. If you’re looking at the Milky Way, you are actually looking at billions of stars. And we can only see a small fraction of all the stars in the sky.

All of creation shows a pattern, a rhythm, almost like a dance. The stars follow an annual procession through the skies punctuated by an occasional shooting star. The planets follow their own separate dance. Even at the microscopic level we can see beautiful patterns that escape our normal vision.

In all of creation there seems to be an order, a beauty, almost a purpose. And deep in our hearts, we feel that this is how things ought to be.

But take another look around.


We see sickness, hunger, and war. We see innocent women and children senselessly injured, tortured, or killed. We see diseases changing, evolving into menaces that kill large populations. We see mothers and fathers (or many times only the mothers) struggling desperately to care for their children. We see children getting sick and dying; young men and women dying and leaving children as orphans. We see loneliness and isolation, and people being treated as objects to be used, abused, and discarded. We see a suffering world.

In the 3rd Chapter of Genesis, we see that pain and suffering came into the world because of sin. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in Paradise. After Original Sin, they were expelled into a world where Eve was condemned to bear children in pain, and Adam was forced to labor for their food. As the story proceeds into the 4th Chapter with the killing of Able by Cain, we see that jealousy and hatred have entered into the world.

Many of the saints reported strong reactions against sin, even physical sensations. St. Catherine of Siena was repulsed by the smell of mortal sin. Other saints have reported extremely strong reactions against sin in one way or another, running from sinful situations in horror of the prospect of sin.

Me, not so much. I have an intellectual understanding of sin, but I don’t really feel it. I am a profound rationalizer. “Surely that isn’t such a really bad sin.” “How could God get angry with a little thing like that?”

In reality, any sin, even those little ones, separate us from God. God created our world to be beautiful, orderly, and with a purpose. Sin pushes us away from God and towards chaos. Unlike the saints, I don’t directly experience the reality of sin. But by reflecting on the suffering in the world, I hope to get a sense of the horror of sin. And once I see the horror of sin, I hope to truly repent of my sins since that is the beginning of the Kingdom of God. “Repent, and believe the good news!”