Spiritual mummification

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God did not make death. 

Two types of death.  Spiritual death is worse than physical death.

Sin creates this spiritual death, even when it is not serious sin it can be deadly.  For if we do not try to overcome little faults, then we will fall little by little, into greater ones.

Acedia – spiritual sloth.  “a sickness of the soul that is expressed in boredom, distaste for prayer, slackening or abandoning of penitential practices, neglecting the heart, and indifference towards the sacraments.” (Cardinal Sarah. God or Nothing p237)

No such thing as vacation from your vocation – and all of us have daily prayer and Sunday Mass as part of our vocation.  We may find days to relax during this summer, but it should never be at the cost of our relationship with God.

I experienced a parallel of this during my pilgrimage.  It was hard.  There was serious resistance.

the biggest threat of all gradually takes shape: “the gray pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is wearing down and degenerating into small-mindedness”.[63] A tomb psychology thus develops and slowly transforms Christians into mummies in a museum. Disillusioned with reality, with the Church and with themselves, they experience a constant temptation to cling to a faint melancholy, lacking in hope, which seizes the heart like “the most precious of the devil’s potions”.[64] Called to radiate light and communicate life, in the end they are caught up in things that generate only darkness and inner weariness, and slowly consume all zeal for the apostolate. For all this, I repeat: Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the joy of evangelization!

Book: The Noonday Devil. (Formed.org)

Joy and Evangelization are the cures to this spiritual death.  Get to know Christ again, particularly by living your faith.

In the sacraments, Christ reaches us and heals us and brings us back to life. Confession.

Let us allow ourselves to be met by Christ once more, to be renewed by Him, and to joyfully respond to His Love by the way we love our neighbor.  Amen.

The Effects of Sin and the Divine work of Restoration / Salvation

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386 Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile. To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity's rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history.

396 God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating "of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."²⁷⁶ The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"²⁷⁷ symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.

When we sin, We prefer ourselves to God, choose ourselves over and against God.  We make ourselves to be “God.”

The Effects of Sin and the Divine work of Restoration / Salvation

1.     Separation from God

2.     Separation from Others

3.     Loss of True Freedom

From an ancient homily on Holy Saturday

‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.