The High Cost of Distraction

Michiel Peeters - “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed…” Dear friends, since the word “sin” often is used when one smokes a cigarette or eats a pizza, we need to make clear what sinning truly means: to sin, means, to treat something or someone badly; and badly, or wrongly, means: not according to its destiny.

Fr Giussani thus explained the concept of sin to children. First, he bought a beautiful flower. He showed it to them, he let them smell and admire it. Subsequently, he threw it on the floor and trampled on it. What happened then? The children got very angry and started to beat him—and they were right! To sin is to damage or destroy a given beauty.

Another time, this same priest rode with his bike through a side street of Milan, where in the evening young couples used to come together. When they saw the priest—it was in the fifties of the last century—all stopped with the kissing and hugging they were doing. Then the priest said: “If you’re doing nothing wrong, please continue!” Then they laughed, and he rode on. But after a few moments he stopped and turned back, asking the couples: “What you are doing, what does it have to do with the stars?” Which is a great definition of morality: morality is the relationship between what you are doing and the stars, between your action and your destiny.

To be aware of your action and your destiny, is a sacrifice. But without this sacrifice, if we don’t treat persons and things having in mind their destiny, sooner or later they will protest, they will take, as it were, “revenge” (as St Thomas says). As our own hearts protest when we don’t heed them. When we don’t treat ourselves according to our infinite need, our heart makes us feel uneasy, empty, frustrated. It is the sign that we aren’t treating ourselves well, not according to our deepest needs. This is the first and most common sin: that we treat ourselves badly, that means, not according to our nature, to our infinite destiny. That we

never ask ourselves: what do I really want? It’s the sin of distraction. Distraction from what? From ourselves, from our destiny, from what we are made for; and thus we suffocate in the detail we are occupied with (and this suffocation, in its turn, is a great “dashboard light,” that maybe we are missing something!).

Also the detail that occupies us—our study, friends, family, job—will protest, somehow, for when we don’t use our hearts, we’ll treat them badly, too. What can save us from our distraction, which is so common and impedes us to live life to the full, “to enter life,” as Jesus says in the Gospel? In my experience: a company that always calls us back. And not first of all with words, but because people in it show a different way of living: more free, more oneself.

This is what Christ claims to be: a companionship that saves us from “going to hell,” from resigning to a frustrated and desperate form of “life.” Christ’s company saves us. How? By revealing to us what we are, how we are made; by permitting us to walk, to build, instead of wandering about; and by lifting us up, every single time we fall. Who of us doesn’t have the experience of living again, of breathing again, when Christ forgave him? Or when the company permits him to live something that sheds light on his life? So is following Christ’s company the road to “enter life”—wounded, maybe maimed—but life.

 20240929 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time B (Mk 9:38-43, 45, 47-48)  - Tilburg University

The author has not revised the text and its translation.

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