I Am A Filthy Sinner Just Like You

I sometimes feel the urge to say If I were really a saint I would not still be a sinner. If I were doing this correctly my soul would be a clean white shirt. No stains. No wrinkles. A tidy success story for God.

Which is, in the end, a wonderfully pious way of saying something not Christian at all.

Pastor Matt Chandler calls this ache an over-realized eschatology. The belief that the promises of the Kingdom purity, wholeness, freedom from sin should be fully installed now, like a spiritual software update, if only I push the right buttons. Heaven early. Glory without death. Easter without Holy Saturday.

The Catholic tradition nods at the longing and then quietly corrects it. Justification really makes us right with God. Grace truly renews us and makes us his friends, not just a set of numbers in a ledger. Yet after Baptism, concupiscence remains, that slow tug of disordered desire, the heart reaching again for the shiny apple even after it knows the bitter core. Grace is real. So is the battlefield.

Holiness grows not by arrival, but by combat and repentance and sacrament and humility. The ordinary road to sainthood is paved with confession lines, awkward apologies, and a lifetime of beginning again. The spiritual life is less a victory lap than a long hike with a limp.

We confuse three words. Justification: God lifting a sinner into friendship as pure gift. Sanctification: the gradual healing of the interior world, new habits of charity formed over time. Glorification: the final state where charity is perfect and sin is no longer possible. The error Chandler names squeezes sanctification and glorification into one moment. If I am really justified, the thinking goes, then any continued struggle must mean failure.

The Church refuses this. Confession exists not for pre-Christians but for saints who still fall. Its very existence is a standing declaration that the justified will keep on sinning and repenting till they die.

Augustine knew this from the inside. After his conversion, the surface habits change, but his loves still jostle. He really loves God and yet still feels the pull of power, praise, and comfort. The Christian life becomes a duet in two keys. In one I love you Lord. In the other I also love being admired and safe and in control.

So a father can truly love his children and still lose his temper again. A woman can pour herself out for the poor and still nurse secret contempt for a rival. The love is not fake. The sin is not fake. They live together in uneasy tenancy. Aquinas would say old vices are grooves in the soul. Grace infuses new virtues, but the grooves remain until worn down by many small acts in a new direction. The saint is not the one who never falls, but the one who repents quickly and starts again.

John of the Cross says God even deepens sanctification by taking away consolations that made holiness feel easy. In the dark night he exposes not just loud sins but the fine dust of pride love of spiritual comfort, control, being right. Thérèse of Lisieux answers this night with littleness. Holiness for her is not graduating from need, but consenting to be carried. She does not say I am worthless, so holiness is impossible. She says I am small, so I fit in his arms.

This is why the fantasy of present perfection is not only mistaken but dangerous. Pride loves religious clothing. Pride is not just swagger. It is the refusal to be a creature, the quiet decision to dislike dependence and confession. To say I am beyond sin is to flirt with being beyond repentance. If I never fall, I never need to kneel. Mercy becomes a theory instead of a meal.

Catherine of Siena points to a low door marked knowledge of self. There we discover both our dignity and our poverty, our radiance held in being by his love and our rot in need of that love. Humility is not self-hatred. It is truth. Perfectionism is often a way of ducking that truth. Romano Guardini saw how our culture worships mastery and technique. No wonder we turn the soul into a project and the Gospel into a program. Ten steps to freedom. Five strategies for sinless living.

So how can the Church dare to call us saints? Because in Scripture, saint means one who belongs to God. One set apart. One consecrated to Christ. Saint Paul writes to unruly, compromised communities and still calls them saints. A saint is one alive in grace, oriented toward charity, claimed by Christ as his own. When the Church later canonizes someone, she is not saying they stopped sinning at thirty, but that grace had its way in them, and they died turned toward God.

To call an imperfect person a saint is not a lie. It is a recognition and a prophecy. Your story of sin and mercy already participates in the Kingdom that will one day be all in all.

Expecting sinlessness now leaves wreckage. Some collapse into despair, keeping secret scorecards and drifting from prayer because every attempt feels like proof they are broken beyond repair. Others slide into hypocrisy, hiding their struggles and turning the Church into a stage for performance instead of a hospital. Still others learn to judge, treating the Cross as a measuring stick and salvation as a technique for the competent.

By contrast, the Church builds an ordinary life for active sinners, daily examen, regular confession, concrete penance, spiritual direction, and seasons like Lent. These are not crutches for the hopeless, but tools for those who know holiness means staying in the fight. To kneel in confession is to reject the dream of perfection and embrace the harder hope that God loves us in process. To examine conscience is to enter Catherine’s cell and trust that the light revealing the stain is the same light that wipes it away. To return again and again is to walk Thérèses little way, a long road of small returns.

So when I tell someone in my life that she is a saint, I am not flattering her. I am naming her baptismal truth. She belongs to Christ. She is set apart by his choice, alive in his grace, and not yet finished. Sometimes sex driven and complicated. Capable of both grudges and doxology. God is not surprised.

The point is not to be beyond sin by now, or beyond repentance by now. The point is to keep dragging our sins to the One who is not tired of forgiving them.

To live as a saint in process is to refuse both despair and delusion. It is to say with your whole astonishing life I am not perfect. I am loved. I am not finished. I am his.