WHY IS IT THAT OUR CRIME RATE SOARS and our prisons are packed, and the rate of mental illness has soared to such an extent that the mentally ill now occupy one out of every six hospital beds? Dr Karl Menninger, psychiatrist and the founder of the famous Menninger Clinic, answers in Whatever became of sin? that our prisons and mental institutions are bulging because the modern man and woman cannot discover their sin. Menninger pleads that we again make the healthy discovery that we are sinners, because a sinner is one who says, “I am responsible for my unloving actions and I can change.” When we hurt ourselves or another, we have the choice of ignoring it and letting the destructive pattern continue, or of recognizing the evil and correcting it.  Menninger lays out three options for altering a destructive pattern of behaviour:

• Imprisonment. Imprisonment is based on the assumption that we are responsible, but that we can’t change. We need to be incarcerated to contain our destructive patterns of behaviour.
• Mental hospitalisation. Mental hospitalisation is based on the assumption that we are mentally ill, and that we don’t know the evil that we are doing.
• Responsible sinners. The third, and only healthy option, is to see ourselves as healthy and responsible sinners who want to change and who can, with God’s grace, change. The power to change comes when, as healthy sinners, we hate the sin and love the sinner. If we do not hate our sin, we become insensitive to our sin rather than anxious to correct it. If we do not love the sinner, we become depressed and scrupulous with no power to correct our destructiveness.

How can we discover our sin?

It is healthy but difficult to discover our sin. One way to get in touch with our sinfulness—and especially that which we cannot forgive in ourselves—is to note where we overreact to others. Often we overreact to the evil in another because the evil is in us. As Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel,

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Mt. 7:3-5)

You might spend some time prayerfully considering where you overreact to others.