The Only Real Sin

"Such is the [Resurrectional] faith of the Church, affirmed and made evident by her countless Saints.  Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the 'new life' which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us?  All this because of our weakness, because of the impossibility for us to live constantly by 'faith, hope, and love' on that level to which Christ raised us when he said: 'Seek ye, first of all, the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.'  We simply forget all this so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations and because we forget, we fail.  And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes 'old' again petty, dark and ultimately meaningless--a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We manage to forget even death and then, all of a sudden, in the midst of our 'enjoying life' it comes to us:  horrible, inescapable, senseless.  We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various 'sins,' yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us.  Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity."

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann
Great Lent:  Journey to Pascha