Hate the Sin, Love the Zeal

I was walking home from my Vision "interview" with Lenny to potentially return for a second tour of duty as a mentor when my friend Maria beckoned from across the quad. I walked with her toward the door to Zahm and asked where she was headed. She was going to mass in the basilica and invited me come along. I had enough work to do to stay back. However, embracing the increasingly strong ethos of senior year, work was backburner-ed, and I continued on with her to the basilica.

Believe it or not, it was my first non-major-occasion 5:15 daily mass in the basilica. It's a different vibe than the 10pm dorm mass, but I enjoyed celebrating the mass like this. One of the biggest moments for me was the homily.

I had the usual in-and-out attention span during the readings, getting the jist--Paul's words and Mary & Martha in Luke's Gospel. I wanted to hone in on the homily, not just for the obvious reasons, but because I enjoy hearing different people preach, especially if I've never heard them before.

I don't remember the whole thing, but over 24 hours later, the message on Paul's selection from Galatians endures within me. Paul talks about his conversion from zealous enforcer of Rome's persecution to preacher of the word, and the presider for our mass honed in on zeal--how unusual for a Holy Cross to talk about zeal!

He talked about, in rather plain terms, Paul's zeal for his civil duties enduring through his conversion and continuing to underpin his mission for Christ. In answering the call from Christ, Paul left behind his political duties and his job but retained the passion that backed it up. The same zeal that drove Paul's malicious enforcement of Roman oppression also motivated his fervent missionary work.

It's not so simple as just changing the tasks that result from the passion. Somewhat of a transformation of attitude had to occur to refilter the zeal through a new heart, through Paul's new faith in the Risen Lord who revealed Himself to Paul. However, somehow, it remains the same zeal.

The analogy that immediately came to mind for me was Augustine's exhortation to us, often boiled down to "hate the sin, love the sinner" (for full text, check out an old post). In this case, it'd be something like "hate the acts, love the zeal"--not quite as catchy but a similar sentiment.

Augustine calls us to admonish the sinful acts of a person but continue loving that person; in this way, to quote myself, once they repent and grow in love, the sin vanishes and only the person, completely deserving of love having been made by God in His image, remains. I kind of thought in this way for zeal--we can hate the wrongful acts of a zealous person, but love the zeal?

Not quite, I guess. But we can more gently hope for the zeal to endure through conversion, in a way resembling the transformation of Paul. We can pray and hope that our own and others' convictions and passions in justifying things that may be questionable can permeate all our motivations to underpin our righteous actions as well.

We can hope for zealous passion to brew within us always, so that as we continue to form a Christian conscience and discern right action, our zeal can grow stronger as we do God's will, do right more frequently and more profoundly.