MORAL
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most before I want to. I am not firmly and emphatically and pennanently this kind of persan. Rather I am tentatively and hesitantly and nervously this .kind of persan. What is more, when 1 take these actions of mind and when I use them to try to express who I am as a persan, when 1 try to be myself through the things that I do, I find that I 'do not always succeed. Sorne people will say that the actions men perform are sacraments of their personhood. And that is true, somewhat. The way I behave in a symbol, a sign of my selfhood. And rather likĂŠ the sacraments of the church, the deeds that I do are signs that tend to make me myself more and more. They tend to effect what they signify. But my experience also is that my actions, more often than 1 would like to admit, contradict the persan that I am. As near as I can tell, 1 have chosen to be a good persan, somehow caring for my fellowman, searching for fidelity and honesty, truthfulness and love. And yet in a strange, contrary, frustrating way, many, many of my actions do not exhibit those virtues at ali. If we can speak again of that onion we are talking about, a lot of the things that I do do not come from the very center. They do not emerge, surge forth, from the pers<m that 1 am. Rather they come from sorne of those more superficial layers. They come from an outer layer of myself. And they contradict me. The Church has had a very traditional and ancient tenn for this fatal tlaw, this dis-integration, separation with myself: original sin. Original sin is nothing more or less than the fact of my inability to completely take hold of ,myself, my inability to be myself, the burden that I fee! in myself of becoming slowly, only with great lobor,.only with many failures. Original sin. So we finally get to the word sin. People ask so often, "why doesn't anyone talk of sin anymore?" Well, I shall. In fact for the remainder of this article I would like to focus on sin and focus on its opposite: virtue. For to talk of sin and talk of virtue is to talk about this man that we have been trying to understand. It is to talk about you and me. What is sin? Sin is sim ply the fact of alienation. The fact of alienation from .God, from my neighbor and, most paradoxically, from myself. It is that no that we werc talking about. That refusai to be who 1 am, to be in the world that 1