Daybreaks: Daily Reflections for Lent & Easter
by Ron Rolheiser, OMI

“My dwelling shall be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people”.

(EZEKIEL 37:27)

“Are we ultimately saints or sinners? What’s the deepest inside us, goodness or selfishness? Or, are we dualists with two innate principles inside us, one good and one evil, in a perpetual duel with each other?   

Certainly, at the level of experience, we feel a conflict. There’s a saint inside us who want to mirror the greatness of life, even as there is someone else inside us who want to walk a seedier path. I like the honesty of Henri Nouwen when he describes this conflict in his own life: ‘I want to be great saint,’ he once confessed, ‘but I don’t want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience.’ It’s because of this tension inside us that we find it so hard to make clear moral choices. We want the right things, but we also want many of the wrong things. Every choice is a renunciation, and so the struggle between saint and sinner inside us often manifests itself precisely in our inability to make hard choices. 

That’s part of the mystery of human freedom. The saint and sinner inside us are not separate entities. Rather the saint in us, the big soul, is not only our true self, it’s our only self. The sinner in us, the pretty soul, is not a separate person or moral force doing perpetual battle with the saint. It’s simply the wounded part of the saint, that part of the saint that’s been cursed and never properly blessed” (45).