In fact, have you done anything recently that you would classify as ‘sin’? Don’t worry, I’m not going all judgmental on you, I just wanna know. We don’t talk about sin much nowadays: even the Church is much more user-friendly and talks about ‘saying sorry’ instead. So what is sin? Do we even have a concept of sin any more? What would be the modern version of the Seven Deadly Sins? Terrorism? Mass-murder? Rape? Child-abuse? Drug-addiction or drink-driving? It all seems to end up sounding a bit tabloidy really. And do we even believe in such a thing as sin? Don’t we rather believe in a combination of genetics and upbringing as the causes of human action? Don’t we rather think that human beings operate in a tiny pool of limited choices; that we run on a set of tramlines laid down by our conditioning and backed up by 47 pairs of chromosomes?
Hmm. And yet – and yet, at the same time we talk as if people have a huge range of life-choices. No child’s career options are to be limited in any way: no matter what the conditions of your birth, no matter your gender, disability, race or creed, you can reach for whatever star you have set your eyes on. But hey, you couldn’t help killing all those people – you were driven to it by your early-childhood trauma. It was in your genes: it was in your stars.
It seems to me that things always go this way – that what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabout. So we have gained a lot of life-chances; the possibility of travel, of trying – oh, I don’t know, blindfolded water-skiing or parachute-jumping (I once did a jump for charity but it was on the back of an experienced jumper) or sailing the Atlantic or whatever – but we have lost… what have we lost?
Time. That’s what we have lost. We don’t have time. And what we really need is balance – because there’s a baby in that bath-water.
As for my own life, I have nothing else to report since I spent the whole weekend watching ‘Friends’. I was really, really tired…
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 