Thoughts on conscience, iii

I think there is yet another fundamental area to consider in this discussion. It lies in our beliefs about salvation and heaven, our resulting attitude toward them and, really, our basic relationship with God. On the surface, some of these might seem unrelated or tangential, but I believe these primary issues underlie every moral decision we make. And like every other gift of God, they can be misapplied in two opposite extremes.

As a child, I somehow absorbed the popular premise that heaven is a reward for those who live a sufficiently good life. When we die, we’ll approach those pearly gates, and Saint Peter will be standing there, with his keys and The Book of Life in front of him. If I've lived rightly, my name will be written there. If not, well, not even God will help me anymore. It will just be too late. So, doggone it, I'd better make sure that the scales of my life (don't ask me how this Supreme Court image got mixed up in there!) balance out in the right direction. And if we screw up along the way, well, "God's gonna getcha for that!" The resulting inquiry of my conscience becomes, as the rich young man asked, "What must I do to be saved," or conversely, "What is okay for me to do without imperiling my soul?" As long as this remains our approach to morality, we're going to continue to think of (and use) our conscience in ineffective ways, as a means of self-justification. At the same time, we may make an effort to ensure we accumulate enough good works to tip the scales in our favor.

At the opposite extreme is the popular Protestant perspective that salvation is something that happens to us in the instant in which we accept our need for Jesus’ sacrifice and put our faith in him. The potential pitfall is that I misinterpret the freedom from sin that Christ has won for me as license to do as I wish. Someone who accepts Christ sincerely will likely respond in ways that avoid the potential traps of this sort of thinking, but reading St. Paul's letters indicates that this has been a problem since the first century.

The traditionally Catholic teaching on salvation is very different from both of these. Salvation is God's gift to us, and while we don't believe it is a one-time event that occurs at our baptism or in some other conversion experience, it is nonetheless a matter of grace, which we can never, under any circumstances, earn or deserve. Rather, God works in our lives through His gifts of faith and works, to continually transform us and deliver us into His eternal kingdom. In His grace, He allows us to participate in the process of accepting these gifts and seeing them at work in our lives, as well as to be vessels through which He communicates and delivers His gift of salvation to the world.

With this attitude, conscience stops primarily having the role of asking, “What is okay?” or even (too often), “How much can I get away with?” and instead asks things like, “How can I respond to the boundless love which God has lavished upon me, despite my unworthiness?” and, “How can I best participate in the process of becoming - and helping those around me become - the person that God envisions me/them to be?”

For the record, I’m not fully there yet, but then, I don’t imagine anyone is.

This is coming together for me, I think. More . . .