French philosopher Leon Bloy once stated: “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint!” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is not a statement of piety but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life would be better if we understood that. We’ve always associated sin with badness more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad. Adam and Eve’s sin was one of disobedience. But afterward, they tried to hide and cover themselves with clothes and excuses, and that is what ultimately put them outside the garden of joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin: to try to cover and excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us. The problem with sin is not that it makes us bad or puts us outside God’s love; it’s that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience, is not an abstract thing. To the exact degree that we sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness and become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or praising anyone. Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded,” our capacity to experience joy, as we can see from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. When the rich young man in the gospels walks away from Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship, it doesn’t say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. A couple of years ago, a group of young priests would come together to support each other in their resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a more honest, transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly way. So, each week, they met and, with searing honesty, confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other. This made them better priests, but what surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable. The action of actively and deliberately addressing sin freed them to embrace the joy and happiness of life that God desires for us all to have.