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Which of us has not imagined winning the lottery? If you were the lucky winner, and you chose to spend your millions in a week, you could do that. Dumb maybe, but you could do it: an outrageous mansion in California, a luxurious vacation, and some unbelievably huge donations –  poof, all gone!  Obviously, you committed no crime. If you had a son later on, he would have no legal or moral right to demand a part of the non-existent jackpot.

Well, perhaps you see where I’m going with this. God gave Adam and Eve a precious heritage of grace to pass on to the human race, and they chose to reject it. By committing the Original (or first) Sin, they lost the friendship of God and our inheritance of it, as well as our inheritance of their perfect, pain-free life. I don’t have to remind you how difficult things have been ever since. Why are our sufferings, from a spilled latte to the death of a loved one, so hard for us to accept?

It is the assumption that we are what we should be, or the assumption that we are basically good, that makes it hard for us to understand why God allows suffering. Everything seems “uphill” because we are wounded with Original Sin, not because God decided or arranged to make every little thing difficult. It is a consequence of the state of sin into which we are born. As St. Paul says, “The wages of sin is death” (Rmns 6, 23). The fact is, we have no strict right to any benefits, just like a son has no real right to his parent’s spent lottery winnings. It would have been grand if we had inherited Adam’s perfect state of life, but we can’t pretend that we earned it or that it was our right. Instead, the fact that we can call ourselves children of God after Baptism and still hope to attain Heaven is an astounding testament to God’s abiding mercy.

The fact that we are born into a state of sin is, by the way, the reason that the Catholic Church has always mandated infant Baptism. We have this heritage of sin from birth, and redemption is an opportunity, not a guarantee. We are not born as members of Christ; we are born in a state of Original Sin, which is washed away by the Sacrament of Baptism, but which leaves its stains and wounds on our souls.

It’s tempting to end on that note. Life is difficult, and we have to accept it. But what if we flipped the script? What if we thanked God, with our minds but maybe not with our feelings, for His lasting love for us, for the fact that He doesn’t abandon us, and for the fact that amid the unbelievable chaos and pain our poor human hearts are capable of causing, He still sends us His own beloved Son?

Br. Maximilian Watner is on the staff at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Buckingham County. He can be reached at webmaster@stas.org.