One of the gifts of the Holy Ghost that we receive in Confirmation is fear of the Lord. Unfortunately, it's one of the least cultivated, the least known of all of the gifts of the Spirit and yet one of the most necessary for salvation. For fear of the Lord is nothing else than the recognition of the holiness of God.
The saint does not fear God because God can send him to hell. A saint in sin - if we dare use such an example - would prefer the desolation of hell rather than intrude his barren, sin-bearing soul on the all-holy presence of the Divine Majesty. But that's because he knows God - and only one who knows God can sense the outrage against Him that sin is.
In the life of Father Damien, the unforgettable hero of the Molokai lepers, the story is told of how he realized one day that he too had been set aside for death and banishment by the disease. While shaving one morning, he dropped a kettle of scalding water on his bare foot. The seared flesh felt no pain - but Father Damien's soul must have been filled with anguish when he realized that this was an unmistakable sign that he had contracted leprosy.
There is a parallel to this story in the world today; but we, unlike Father Damien, too often take the lack of pain to be a sign of health rather than of illness.
Our sins should sear our souls with shame, remorse, sorrow. If they did - if we were in anguish at the realization of the affront to God's sanctity our sins present - there would yet be hope for us. We would be sick perhaps, but with a chance for recovery. Once, however, we have contracted this leprosy of the soul - the loss of the sense of sin so that we no longer even understand what sin is in the eyes of God - it takes an extraordinary miracle of God's grace to touch our souls and cure us.
What is sin? What is the malice of sin? Only one who knows God can understand because mortal sin is an attempt to destroy God or to make Him less than He is. But sin is a fact of life for all of us. Temptation, sin, the need for penance and mortification are woven into the very fabric of our lives. That's one of the reasons why each year the Church sets aside the 40 days of Lent as a long retreat - so that by fasting, prayer and good works, we can strip off the layers of sin-crust from our souls and repeat our baptismal promises at the Easter Vigil with the innocence and fervor of a new beginning.
No one goes to hell by committing sin in the abstract, sin in general. Our character traits, talents and dispositions, our experiences - everything about us points out to us a particular road to hell - one of the seven that are called the capital sins. For us, this or that particular one is the fastest and easiest because of who we are, what we are, where we find ourselves. And the road sign will read either pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy or sloth.
The seven capital sins are called capital because they are the sins of primary importance and inevitably spawn a whole litter of Other sins. Pride leads to boasting, ostentation, hypocrisy; envy is followed by hatred, discord, a restless quest for riches and honors, and constant turmoil of soul. The slothful man is idle, aimless, neglects his spiritual duties and the obligations of his state in life. And so on for the other capital sins. They all lead to other sins. They're all roads to hell. Most important, we must find out whether we're traveling one of these roads.
- from the book Seven Roads to Hell and 'Ave Maria' magazine