Everything Nice

Reading today Aen 6, Il 3, Cicero, Rev. 18, Is 45, Pascal, and finished The Thing.

The whole world seems rather smaller outside the window today, as if instead of looking out at it I'm in fact looking in on it, like someone peering into a dollhouse. J and I get our roommate back from Wind Ensemble tour this afternoon, which means today is a day of domestic works.

I've been considering recently the distinction between proper sin (oxymoron?) and rudeness, in the sense of bad manners or lack of social etiquette. I'm not quite sure there is an English word for the condition...perhaps inlepidus in Latin? It may be rude of me to track into a clean home with muddy boots, but it certainly isn't automatically sinful. (My will may be sinful while I do this, but the action follows my spiteful will which would have been sinful with or without action.) Similarly, there are a great number of coarse words I ought to avoid when angry, but these words themselves are not sinful. My anger may (in some circumstances) be sin against God and against my neighbor, but the word is only a sin against my Mother. (If there is sin in it, it is in the sense that it breaks the 5th Commandment) Smoking, if it is a sin, is something similar. It isn't sinful like real sins, pride or lust or envy, more just dirty than anything else...and to be dirty or coarse is not ipso facto a sin. I wish this distinction might also be applied to the undiscussed conversation about service styles. Indeed, I never heard a discussion not talked about so often. What my generation tends to aim for in a worship service is a particular atmosphere; but the atmosphere isn't really one of charity, nor joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, nor self-control. (Note, I would disrupt the atmosphere by using most of these words) but simply one of politeness; and not the politeness which places the forks and knives in the right order or says "thank-you" at the proper moments, but the politeness that is derived from the polis and simply seeks equilibrium in whatever measure of virtue or vice; it might even be called political correctness. And so do we shortchange ourselves on both sides, mistaking coarseness for vice and niceties for virtue?