Cherry-picking sin

Recently my facebook news feed seems to have been filling up with little red equals signs, mostly among my those of my cousins who fall into one of the following two groups: in their 40s or American. (I could do a nice little Venn diagram.) This morning one of them, who descibes herself as 'Catholic....sort of?', shared the Atheist Quote of the Day:

Homosexuality is not a sin. Atheism is not a sin. Belonging to the wrong religion is not a sin. You know why? Because sin is an imaginary disease invented to sell you an imaginary cure.

                                                                                                                  John Allen

A quick google tells me there are rather a lot of people called John Allen. I don't know which one of these he is or how exactly he arrived at his conclusions. Leaving aside the fact that a self-proclaimed Catholic (even if only self-proclaiming as 'sort of') is displaying support for same-sex marriage and showing appreciation for the Atheist Quote of the Day page, leaving aside the rejection of God and the downright relativism in the first half of said quote, the part which interests me particularly is the bit about sin being an imaginary disease and its complementary imaginary cure.

I recently blogged about the loss of the sense of sin, which Pius XII identified as the sin of the century, speaking in the USA in 1946. I and my fellow catechist also recently had a complaint from the parent of one of the members of our confirmation group. The underlying issue was that we had spoken regularly about sin and apparently we were supposed to be 'affirming' the young people and not 'making them feel bad about themselves'. Yes, we have talked about sin. Yes, we have talked about the devil. Yes, we have strongly encouraged them to go to confession. (No, we have not greatly succeeded in this and if anyone has any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.) But I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that when we have talked about sin, we have always, invariably, talked about the love and mercy of God who is always waiting for us to come back to him.

John Allen is right about one thing: without the disease there is no need for a cure. Take away sin and God is worse than imaginary: he is irrelevant and unecesssary. Take away sin and the immeasurable gift of reconciliation is tossed aside as meaningless. (Of course it works both ways: take away God, take away the absolute and we immediately begin to drown in a mire of relativism without the compass of right and wrong.) If I do not recognise my own sinfulness and brokenness, I have no need of God, no need of reconciliation. Without recognising this I cannot recognise the immense love which God lavishes on me, God who made me for love and out of an overabundance of love, and who holds me in being at every moment. As the Exsultet proclaims:

Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour when Christ rose from the underworld!

Sin is not an imaginary disease, it is a reality which each one of us allows into the world because while we may like to count ourselves as 'OK' or 'better' on the basis that we are not murderers, there are no good sins. It is the root of injustice, poverty, famine, persecution, war, suffering... There are many ways of coming to know God, and I do not think that recognising evil can teach us the existence of abosulte good, but the knowledge of sin and our own sinfulness can help us to know how very much God loves us. 

No-blame culture and the loss of the sense of sin

When I was last working in a hospital (probably this would be a good point at which to say that I am a pharmacist) I was informed that we operated under a 'no-blame culture'. The idea was that if mistakes were made then it was important to be honest about them so that steps could be taken to reduce the causes of error. The rationale is obvious: a dispensing error can have serious consequences, but if you are afraid that you (or one of your colleagues) might lose your job (or be sued) over it you are unlikely to report near-misses.

 

To a certain extent, this makes sense. By encouraging reporting of near-misses you can look at the systems involved and take steps to reduce errors. The pharmacy I worked in was, like most hospital pharmacies, badly laid-out (usually because clinical pharmacy services have expanded rapidly in the last 20 to 25 years and most hospitals are older than that) and extremely busy. We provided pharmacy services to the equivalent of 3 hospitals and effectively needed to employ one person full time just to answer the phone for non-clinical enquiries (not helped when the town council once made a typo in some communication and we started getting all their phone enquiries as well!). Errors are bound to creep in with a turnover of this size, and it is important that systems do not faciliate them. By reporting near-misses you can take steps such as keeping all your high-risk (to the patient) medicines such as methotrexate and warfarin on a separate shelf; separate out the 6 types of Sinemet tablets and the 5 variations on Epilim instead of sticking to strict alphabetical order; check, double-check and triple check everything, and stick massive posters in your fridge so that everyone is careful to quadruple check the insulin. Manufacturers usually help by making the packs different colours (although it must be confessed that some of them appear to be more concerned with brand identity than patient safety). So far, so good.

 

But a no-blame culture can only go so far. Sometimes an individual is at fault. It is easy to mix up your Sinemet, true, but it is easier still if you are talking whilst checking, thinking about something else, have already been shouted at by a consultant that morning, rely on your memory when you aren't really sure, or were out the night before. A chief pharmacist I know once went a delivered an official reprimand to a cupboard (in another department) because whoever had filled in the incident form had stated that the error was 'the fault of the cupboard for being untidy'.

 

Pope Pius XII said that the 'sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin'. We are all too ready to blame systems, or cupboards, or the fact that we weren't concentrating on the consultant who shouted at us, or the workload. No-blame culture may help improve patient safety, but it doesn't address the need to take responsibility for our actions. Often, when a patient is waiting to go home, it is 'pharmacy' who is blamed for the fact that they can't leave yet. Leaving aside the many occasions when actually the doctor hasn't written the discharge prescription yet, and the times when the medicines have been dispensed and delivered to the ward and carefully locked in a the medicines cupboard, if 'pharmacy' as a whole is to blame, then whose fault is it? The chief pharmacist? The ward pharmacist? The ward technician? The dispensary manager? The pharmacy rececptionist? The administrator who approved too much annual leave at once?

 

Following the Francis report there have been complaints that no-one at Stafford hospital lost their job. This situation is not quite the same as a dispensing error which is a genuine mistake, because a long-term, widespread cover-up of abuse is not a mistake. But in both cases, somebody must be responsible; there is a perpetrator (or more than one). Whether or not that person should be sued, or sacked, or strung up is another issue. The point is that we all need to recognise that we aren't perfect, we make mistakes, we choose badly, sometimes deliberately; we need to look at ourselves and admit that some circumstances are not beyond our control. And we need to start doing this on the small scale because some of us have jobs where errors are a matter of life and death. Some of us don't, but stop and think about the last time you broke a plate and whether or not you said 'the plate broke' or the 'the plate got broken' rather than 'I dropped it'. The truth will set you free: trust me, I'm a pharmacist.

It's not my fault!

I was somewhat bemused to read yesterday morning that there is a gene for binge drinking. Further inspection suggests that this gene predisposes some people to experience a stronger physiological response than others when drinking alcohol.

Personally, I would say that binge drinking has more to do with sin, freedom and the perennial search for happiness than genetics. Obviously binge drinking can't make us happy, any more than sleeping around can (and there does seem to be a strong correlation between the two). But whether they know God or not, everyone has a hunger for him, a longing for the infinite, and without knowledge of God this leads us to look for happiness in many places where it isn't to be found. Furthermore, I would say that not finding this happiness, not being able to satiate this desire we have (because for so many people they haven't chosen to reject God, it's just that faith has never been suggested to them as an option) we end up trying to fill up our lives with <i>anything</i> that might make us feel something, be it sex, drugs or rock n roll. Of course this self-destructive behaviour leads us into a downward spiral of increasing unhappiness: only in God and his loving Plan can we find happiness. He has made us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him, to paraphrase St Augustine.

I am not some sort of neo-luddite who wishes to exclude science and technology from every facet of life. If people have genetic tendencies towards certain behaviours or illnesses then of course identifying that and seeking solutions can be a good thing. But the increasing tendency to identify genes is part of both the "loss of the sense of sin" bemoaned by Pope Pius XII (once we blamed "the system", now we blame our genes) and also constant reduction of the human person to the merely biological. Yes, I have a body, but I am not my body. Neither am I my DNA. And while we continue to place all our hopes on genetics we will never find the answer to those situations which many would agree are a problem.