Sins of Commission, Sins of Omission

I have written on this as recently as two years ago, but it bears repeating, because I don't think it is as noticed as it should be.  Perhaps your church community is different, but I seldom hear about this in mine.

We tend toward one or the other, I fear.  I tend more to sins of commission and annoying  the heck out of people.  My wife seldom has any sins of commission, save for interrupting her husband in his well-crafted and highly entertaining sentences. The difficulty is that we tend to judge our own style less harshly, but the style others more stringently. I will guess that there is a similar trend between males and females generally. Lewis speaks about it in Screwtape XXVI, “A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the Enemy’s service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.” Remember that even this is perhaps the wishful thinking of Hell that the stereotype is that simple, however. There are role reversals and surprises everywhere.

The Congregationalist (now UCC) church I grew up in had heavy stress on mentioning sins of omission by the time I went to Confirmation in 7th-8th grade in the mid-60s, likely because they wanted to stress social gospel issues. Other denominations stress sins of commission much more: No drinkin', no smokin', no dancin', no pinchin' the girls under their dresses. Then those sins get mentioned as things you used to do when it comes time to give your testimony.

So if you are in a church which uses this or similar wording, or use the Confiteor yourself in some private context, think next time that when you are thinking about your own sins in "...we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves..." that some generosity might be given to others when you are forgiving them as well. They might have a much stronger horror about committing sins against you than about leaving things undone that they might have done for you or the other way around, and this is particularly likely if they are of the opposite sex.