Interesting blog post by Archbishop Durocher

As I am trying to avail myself of regular Sacramental Confession in preparation for doing so within the Catholic Church, I find this blog post by Gatineau Archbishop Paul-Andre Durocher intriguing.  At his blog Sing and Walk, he writes, in a post about Saint Paul's Understanding of Sexuality:

Read I Corinthians 6:12-20The Roman Catholic liturgy sometimes omits a verse or bit of a sentence from the public reading of a given text at Mass in order to facilitate its aural understanding. But it seems to me that this Sunday’s second reading can only be understood correctly when read in its totality, which I encourage you to do. For this text is essential if we are to correctly grasp Saint Paul’s sexual ethic and, eventually, the Church’s own teaching on sexuality. Let’s try to uncover the principles which undergird this ethic.

First, Paul’s morality is not about a list of permitted or forbidden actions. He is not interested in drawing up a series of rules which, if broken, would then be considered sins. Paul is more interested in answering this question: what human choices correspond best to the life that God is shaping in us through the Spirit? We are confronted, then, with a quest for freedom and growth, a morality which seeks the good because the good is what helps us grow in humanity. Life is not a test to determine who will be allowed into heaven: it is rather a process of unending growth which God invites us to embrace.

As I am learning how to make a proper Confession, in preparation for the time I have to book a priest for a solid two weeks for the Big One before coming into the Catholic Church, I am told I have to confess my sins in kind and number.  But before Christmas, when I was in a bad state, I felt like my whole being was sin, that I was in a carnally-minded, selfish state that made it impossible for me not to sin---that even if I tried to wrench myself to do something for someone else, my spirit was deeply in carnal mode.  And to be carnally-minded is death.  I felt that death.  It wasn't because of this or that thing I did wrong.  My sin-self, my old man, can not be prettified or mended.  He is stuck in Romans 7.  How then do I move to Romans 8?

So Archbishop Durocher writes:

First, Paul’s morality is not about a list of permitted or forbidden actions. He is not interested in drawing up a series of rules which, if broken, would then be considered sins. . . .Life is not a test to determine who will be allowed into heaven: it is rather a process of unending growth which God invites us to embrace.

Yes! Yes!  I want to pump my fist in the air.

Let's take a look 1 Corinthians 6.

6	But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers.
7	Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?
8	Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren.
9	Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
10	Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
11	And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
12	All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
13	Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.
14	And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power.
15	Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
16	What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. Gen 2:24 Matt 19:5 Mark 10:7 Eph 5:31
17	But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.
18	Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
19	What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
20	For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

Here's where I struggle.  I believe more in appropriation than in transformation---that is I don't think my Old Man, my fleshly nature, is transformable.  He/She/It must be nailed to the Cross, and Crucified with Christ, and the new nature that He has given me, totally by grace, must be appropriated.   Appropriation might look like transformation, as it is  "working out of our Salvation by fear and trembling."

What I need to work out theologically and spiritually is Galatians 3
(which was in our readings this morning):

1	O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?
2	This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
3	Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?
4	Have ye suffered so many things in vain? if it be yet in vain.
5	He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

Are we not to believe that Christ has already given us a new nature---that in the waters of Baptism, we died with him--our Old Man---and that He has given us a new nature, we are new creatures in Christ, so that it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me?

When I am stuck in my Old Man, carnally-minded and helplessly so, could it be because I am believing the wrong things?  That I am focusing on my inability rather than power of Redemption. That I am forgetting what Jesus has done on the Cross, ransoming me from not only my itemized sins, but from my sinful nature, too?    And, if I believe I have been given this new nature, does it not make it easier to walk by faith, to walk by the Spirit, to be spiritually-minded?