Avidya (sin)

Because of our fixations on particular programs for happiness, we treat survival/security, affection/esteem, and power/control symbols as absolutes, that is, as substitutes for God.

The abundant life is divine union which includes the capacity to use all things as stepping stones to God rather than as ends in themselves.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love

Avidya or ignorance in yoga philosophy is presented to us as the primary obstacle on the spiritual path.  It is a specific form of ignorance, our forgetting of our connection to God, the divine source of life. All the other obstacles including the pushing away of pain, grasping for pleasures, and fear of loss and death are manifested from this forgetting. In the contemplative Christian tradition, this is also how sin is defined.  While many Christian’s are taught and come to believe that sin is a moral failing, in the oldest Christian writing, in the teachings of Jesus, sin is not a matter of morality or following the right rules but a form of avidya, the forgetting of our connection to God, something bigger than our small selves and the source of our beingness in this world.

When we forget our connectedness with the divine, we come to believe that we are the architects of our aliveness, our lives, as if we are responsible for the next breath that we take. The parts of ourselves that are most wounded and immature cling to the fantasy that we are the source of love and light.  Our ignorance is like thinking that wells are the source of the water when in fact they are only the containers through which water flows.  When we become afraid, clinging to power and control over our circumstances and others, we become closed off to the flow of life, love, and tenderness through which we can learn to allow more light and healing into the world.  

In the strange spiritual way, that we forget our intimacy with God is how we were made by God.  In her speaking about her recent book on Genesis, Marilyn Robinson said that the freedom that God has given us to sin demonstrates God’s love for us. Perhaps we can understand this Koan through a parent child relationship.  By allowing our children to make their own choices and mistakes in life, to give them the freedom to be and express themselves as they are moved to do even if this will mean their separation and separateness from us is the greatest act of love. By allowing us to experience ourselves as separate from what we are connected to, God gives us the gift of longing for divinity along with the struggle to find it.  The struggle to find our connection to God is what helps us to grow in strength, courage, and faith.  Most importantly we learn what mercy is.  Mercy is beyond forgiving a harm done to us and reached when we no longer see the harm as a harm but as blessed stepping stone toward God (perhaps the topic for another blog!).

Sin is not about how good we are following prescriptions, morals, or rules but closing our hearts to the divine flow of love through us, the source of our belovedness beyond whatever it is we produce or achieve even on the spiritual path.  It is in knowing this love from God that we become loving not the other way around. It will come to us like waves lapping on the shore in a rhythm of receiving and departing so our hearts might vibrate for the longing of it.