Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

looking within. It’s something like the work the American poet Langston Hughes exhorted us to do in his timeless poem “Tired”: I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two— And see what worms are eating At the rind.[1]

At its core, sin is failure to love. It’s a power that “curves us inward.” In the words of North African bishop Saint Augustine, humanity is incurvatus in se, curved in on itself.[1]

If the greatest commandment given by Jesus is

rooted in love, the greatest sin—and perhaps all sin—must in some way be the rejection of this command.

To classify sin as failure to love is not to sentimentalize or soften it. It’s to frame the very essence of our lives with God and one another in the way Jesus did.

If love is the greatest good, sin must be the antithesis of it. Sin is not just a violation of a law; it’s the disruption of love.

Sin as a concept has been abused, used to control, and used to shelter and even justify indefensible hypocrisy by spiritual communities in our shared social life.

In our culture, sin has usually not been seen as a failure to love but almost exclusively as a violation of a law: God’s law.

When we expand our understanding, we can better assess our spiritual health. Perhaps we have not broken God’s law today, in a strictly defined legal sense. But have we failed to love?

When spiritual vitality is measured by sin-avoidance, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are following Jesus faithfully. But following Jesus is to be measured by love—love for God expressed in love for neighbor. This is the good, beautiful, and kind

In his book New Seeds of Contemplation, poet and theologian Thomas Merton observed the way we function as the devil’s disciples: The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them of the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied,” and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.[4] In other words, by becoming solely focused on abstaining from sin (defined very narrowly), we live by a crushing moralism that robs us from enjoying God and self-righteously places us above others.

his grace turns us inward for the sake of self-awareness, confession, and ultimately love. This process, in the paradoxical beauty of God’s way, ends with us growing in our outward love. Sin, however, turns us inward in such a way that we get stuck, horribly so. It causes us to desire an illusion—to center the world on our comfort, security, fear, desire, and personal perspective. It curves us inward, leaving little room for God or anyone else.

Sin is destructive because it causes us to live self-seeking lives over and against others. It is never personal, never private.

important: The person who resisted incurvatus in se was the Samaritan. In his compassion, advocacy, and generosity, he didn’t turn inward. He gave himself to love—love for God expressed in love for neighbor.

Desiring the fruit, rationalizing their situation, and ultimately eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a result of sin turning them inward. By the time they sank their teeth into the fruit, love had already been uprooted. And this turning inward has continued ever since.

Cain’s jealousy turned him inward, leaving him to conclude that only one person could be a success: him or his brother. That simple. The happy family’s collapse began with a fracture that happened inwardly, though soon it was to have bloody outward consequences.

jealousy is one of the most pervasive and destructive forces on the planet and more deeply ingrained in all of us than we usually have the courage to admit.

Here’s the thing about envy: We are often envious about only the things that matter most to us. Jealousy reveals the idols of our hearts.

it leads to you participating in the most damaging “game” out there: the zero-sum game. The zero-sum game is at the core of much of our social interactions. It would have us believe that for me to truly win, you need to unequivocally lose.

The problem with them building this city is they would rather stay within their homogeneous setting than have their lives intersect with others. Collectively and geographically, they turned inward. Rather than going in faith, they began to stay in pride.

How do we “uncurve” ourselves? To be uncurved is to be rooted in love, orienting our lives toward the good, beautiful, and kind lives God dreams for us, but the task sounds insurmountable. And it is insurmountable. For us.

whenever we talk about sin, it’s a good practice to immediately announce that it has been overcome by Christ. This is the good news!

we need the wisdom of Barbara Brown Taylor, who provocatively said that sin is our only hope. What she meant by this is that “when we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. Sin is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance.”[7]

To be born into this world means that we are all under a power that would have us live incurvatus in se: curved inward. But the problem we face is not located simply within our hearts. There is something else at work that we often fail to see but must begin to pay attention to.

In the biblical story, there are forces outside ourselves somehow wreaking havoc in our lives, seducing us away from the God of love. Those forces are known as—to use biblical terms—powers and principalities. They refer to the belief held by the writers of the Bible, including the prophet Daniel and the apostle Paul, that behind the actions of people and groups of people (including nations, churches, and institutions) there exist spiritual forces whose agenda runs counter to the way of God.

We can’t understand the fragmentation we experience without expanding our language for the forces that fill the world and influence us.

This is the urgent reality we must contend with: The problem with the world is not just “in us”; it’s also “out there.”

Powers and principalities are spiritual forces that become hostile, taking root in individuals, ideologies, and institutions, with the goal of deception, division, and depersonalization.

In the biblical view, the powers and principalities are both invisible and visible, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and institutional.

for various reasons, usually brought on by human idolatry (including the idolatrous lust for power and money), the powers become twisted and capable of taking over the lives of everyday people.

through the perpetuation of deception, division, and ...

It’s quite easy to focus on individual morality to the exclusion of larger forces. It’s easy to painstakingly prioritize personal sins without engaging systemic injustice on a larger scale.

The biggest scheme is having us believe that our battle is against flesh and blood. Said another way, the Evil One’s great scheme is to convince us that the root problem is not with the Evil One but exclusively with ourselves, our circumstances, or our neighbors.

In their fallen state, the powers and principalities of the world are fueled by lies. It’s what sustains their presence in human institutions and societies.

In both religious and nonreligious circles, lying is one of the most recognizable sins and seen as a serious character defect.

The powers have one aim: to survive.

By naming division as one of the strategies of the powers, I mean to say that their intention is to have us participate in what pastor and theologian David Fitch called the “enemy-making machine.”[8]

Another strategy of the fallen powers is to form us to see generic groups of people rather than individuals. If the powers can have us relate to (and even hate, mock, or dismiss) categories of people instead of individuals—whom we all must acknowledge possess unique stories, pains, and gifts—it makes it easier to forget the humanity of those different from or disagreeing with us.

In his book Moral Man and Immoral Society,[9] twentieth-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described the downward ethical spiral that often happens when we gather in groups as opposed to when we are alone. Generally, when we are alone, our morality is higher than when we gather with others.

We must understand and acknowledge this reality or we run the risk of rationalizing or becoming blind to our own shortcomings or even sin.

One of the daily tasks of Christians and church leaders, denominations, and dioceses is to ask if and how we are being used by the powers and consider how we might better overcome them in the name of Jesus.

Whenever we name the powers, we pull back the curtain to see what’s really going on. In this way, naming is apocalyptic. It’s a revelatory act. It’s also liberating.

If deception, division, and depersonalization are hallmarks of the powers, righteousness (often looking like truth telling, unity, and affirming the sacredness of each person) is one of the redemptive strategies of God.

Practicing righteousness in the daily small ways that show we are not in bondage to the lies of the world and instead are living free is vital for us as followers of Christ. As we work for justice, no matter how large or small our influence feels, the powers are pushed back in his name.

The peace Paul spoke of is not only the interior, spiritual, and psychological peace made possible through the Spirit, but the commitment to carry the good news of peace (wholeness, shalom) in a world of fragmentation. We resist the powers by choosing peaceful, nonviolent resistance to their dominion—a peace that is active, not merely passive.

We withstand their influence by becoming an unanxious presence in a world marked by anxiety. We withstand their influence by becoming daily more like Jesus, who lived without sin in the shadow of their false dominion and conquered them through the Cross.

The powers are best resisted when we trust in the One who fights for us. We overcome the powers not through trust in our abilities but through confidence in God’s power. This is why prayer is such a powerful response to the powers.

The helmet of salvation should include liberation for others. We resist the powers not just by leading people to individually renounce them but by announcing salvation that extends to the larger social, economic,

and political spheres of life that imprison people.

Here the Word of God is about two things: a life oriented by the careful integration of God’s truth, and the victory already established in Jesus.