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U p F r o n t
Dust
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 10, Number 9
 September 1999 
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Dust. You don't see as it settles, but if you let it accumulate, suddenly there's a fine grit covering the furniture, and you're chasing fist-sized dust bunnies around the corners of your room.
Sin is like spiritual dust. Little venial acts pile up unnoticed until, laboring in the grime, we find ourselves irritable or lacking in charity. If we dump the dirt pile of a mortal sin in the middle of our soul, most of us scramble to confession pretty quickly to ask the supreme steam cleaner in to fix things. But the small offenses sometimes lie undisturbed for too long. Here's an idea: Every time you clean your house, go to confession. (If you're cleaning less than once a month or so, maybe you should be subscribing to another magazine, like Better Homes and Gardens. )
As the saints' lives attest, the less you sin, the more unbearable it becomes when you do. When I was younger, the sinful vagaries of my life didn't concern me much. I went long periods between confessions. "After all, I'm not really hurting anyone," I thought. Talk about tempting fate: For a time in my twenties, my sole means of transportation was a motorcycle. Now I look back in eternal gratefulness that, when I was hit by a car-as inevitably I was-and my bike totaled, I wasn't also totaled with those unconfessed dirt piles on my soul.
"Victimless crime" is a cruel lie of our age. Sin victimizes the sinner and so victimizes everyone with whom he has contact. John Donne (1572-1631) said it most famously:
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; . . .
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
More to the point, Paul says, "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ" (1 Cor. 12:26-27). The Catechism puts it this way: "In this solidarity of men, living or dead, which is founded on the communion of saints, the least of our acts done in charity redounds to the profit of all. Every sin harms this communion" (CCC 953).
In engaging in apologetical work, it is important to be free of spiritual grime. When we find ourselves frustrated by our intellectual opponents, when we are tempted to respond uncharitably in our efforts to defend our faith, it's time to stop. Some housecleaning may be in order.
Editors of magazines are by necessity readers of them as well. As a reader, I have missed my monthly dose of Karl Keating's writing. I am not alone in this. Fortunately, there is much to be said for popular demand: Starting next month, this space will once more carry his byline.
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