As Christians, we believe that we are all members of one living organism, the Body of Christ. In that reality, Fr. Rolheiser writes that our union with each other is more than metaphorical. It is real, as real as the physicality of a living body. We are not a corporation but a living body, a living organism, where all parts affect all other parts. Hence, just as in a live body, healthy enzymes help bring health to the whole body, and infected and cancerous cells threaten the health of the whole body, so too inside the Body of Christ. What we do in private is still inside the body. Consequently, when we do virtuous things, even in private, like a healthy enzyme, we help strengthen the immune system within the whole body. Conversely, when we are unfaithful, when we are selfish, and when we sin, no matter whether this is only done in private, like an infected or cancerous cell, we are helping break down the immune system in the body. Both healthy enzymes and harmful cancer cells work in secret below the surface. This has important implications for our private lives. Our private thoughts and actions, like healthy enzymes or infected cells, affect the health of the body, either strengthening or weakening its immune system. When we are faithful, we help bring health to the body; when we are unfaithful, we are an infected cell challenging the immune system within the body. Whether we are faithful or unfaithful in private affects others, and this is not something that is abstract or mystical. We know some things consciously and others unconsciously. We know certain things through observation and others intuitively. We know through our heads, our hearts, and our guts, and through all three of these faculties, sometimes (because inside of a body, all parts affect each other), we know something because we sense it as either a tension or comfort inside our soul. There are no private acts. Our private acts, like our public ones, are either bringing health or disease to the community. Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded,” and our capacity to experience joy, as we know both from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. Sin makes us sad precisely because it makes us sophisticated in a way that wounds the child inside of us. The opposite is also true. If you are here faithfully, you bring great blessings. If you are here unfaithfully, you bring great harm.