On character, boringness and sin

A friend recently made a trip to Rome, where he and his family attended mass at the Vatican, and were fortunate enough to be present when the Pope gave his address. After reading the transcript of the address, some lines lingered on in my mind, I have pasted some extracts here:

"... The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbors the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival Who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we have cast Him aside; in brief, that only in this way can we fully achieve our freedom.

"The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

"He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

"Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom: only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.

"We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God's will. For God's will is not a law for the human being imposed from the outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.

"... [in our minds] we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life: [we have a lurking suspicion that] the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin, and to want to do things on one's own is part of being truly human; [we have a lurking suspicion] that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; [we have a lurking suspicion] that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.

"In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being."

"We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary."

(The complete homily can be viewed online on many websites, such as "My People")

The words above give us a reassurance that its still OK to do what your conscience thinks is morally right, to stick to what you think you would do in the absence of peer pressure. For, like they say, the cosncience is also like a kid - that kid speaks out only when you listen to it; and the more you start ignoring it, the muter it grows, till one fine day you realise you have lost it. No one is given a strong character but there still seems to be hope that we can make it stronger, by listening to the whispers of our conscience when we are at a moral crossroad..