One Piece at a Time

Reflections on the devil, original sin, and embracing our spiritual poverty based on today's readings: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021425.cfm

There is a song by Johnny Cash called “One Piece at a Time” where he recounts the story of an assembly worker who realizes he will never drive one of the cars he is making so instead opts to steal one… by taking one piece at a time.

Throughout this song he imagines strolling into town with his Cadillac and all the people marveling at him the way he marvels at others in Cadillacs. But, instead, this hackneyed motor vehicle only receives laughs and jeers from the town people, and quite a bit of annoyance from the people with whom he tries to register it.

It always seemed to me that within this song was a subtle teaching on sin and a loose (maybe very loose) analogy to the scene in the garden at the fall.

It first shows how the temptation to sin becomes stronger as the hope that things can get better disappears. It also shows that one of the ways we justify our sins is by doing a series of really small sins rather than any of the “really big ones”.

Very few people “sell their souls” to the devil in a dramatic, singular moment of their lives like Faustus. It is much more common that one slowly gives their soul away, “one piece at a time”. In the end, however, the result is the same: one’s soul belongs to the evil one.

As far as the garden analogy, it may seem to be totally off from the beginning because the devil seems to be absent from the song but is the central character in the fall. However, I think the analogy only works (partially) if we view it from the perspective of the devil. It works if we realize that this is how he views us.

He was made to be something like an assembly worker, the greatest assembly worker, but an assembly worker nonetheless. He had a part to play in God’s cosmic operation. But it drives him mad not only that man is at the center of this operation God has in mind, but that the devil must work for man without ever being able to possess him for himself.

So, he gets an idea. What if he slowly starts stealing humans away from God, one piece at time, one person at a time?

The devil comes in with alluring promises and deceitful lies of all different flavors, but always seeking the same final end: to convince man that he can not trust God. And it is odd that he always seems to convince us that God is trying to oppress us, while he is able to make us like God.

This is obviously not the case. As the devil steals our souls, bit by bit, he gets a hackneyed image of God the way Johnny Cash gets a hackneyed Cadillac. It is still technically composed of human parts but it has lost all of the essence that makes it human.

The irony is that the devil allures us with promises of being like God and by falling for these promises we throw away that which makes us most like God. We trade in a living relationship with the God of the universe for the illusion of an exalted ego. We trade in life for death.

But then comes the part that drives the devil most mad. Despite his ability to tempt us, despite the misery that it brings upon us and the injustice it does to the Lord, God gives us life again. The greatest scandal for the devil is that even when he thinks he really has us, God always leaves a door open: the door of repentance and forgiveness.

And it is somehow that the relationship between God and His people is stronger after they have faced the temptations of the devil and returned to the Lord for forgiveness than it ever was before. It is to no longer one who chooses God by default, but by choice.

This, of course, is not a one-time choice, but there is often an initial about-face when one reorients their life towards the Lord and first sees the lies of the devil for what they are. This is not the end of the battle, but the beginning. Yet, somehow it is the most important step because after this initial “turning” one opens themselves to receive the grace of the Lord along the way.

The reading today describes that Adam and Eve see themselves as naked following their sin, something they were unaware of before, and that can help illuminate this picture of the turn-away and the return-to the Lord.

Sin brings about a certain consciousness of our own spiritual poverty, an interior nakedness. The devil seeks to turn this consciousness into a source of shame for us, something that ought to be covered up.

The nakedness reveals a certain dependence upon the goodness of the Lord, and the devil is intent on tricking us into the illusion of self-reliance. The need expressed in nakedness, or spiritual poverty, must be hidden. A prime sign of a soul that is distant from the Lord.

Yet, we see in today’s Gospel, and many other Gospel accounts, that the Lord heals precisely by coming into our areas of deepest spiritual poverty and not only seeing us but touching us in these places.

Today, Jesus spits and touches the eyes of the blind man and he sees. For us, if we open our hearts to the Lord he will see the deep needs and he will meet the deep needs with unfathomable grace.

He will help adjust our spiritual vision to not only see our own nakedness but to see how this too is part of His plan. He will help us see that our faults and failures, our limitations and inabilities, our fears and our doubts, all make it possible for us to live in greater communion with Him and our fellow sons and daughters of God.

The harmony in the garden existed not in small part because Adam and Eve were not embarrassed to depend on each other and the Lord for everything, and harmony is returned whenever we are able to do the same.

And perhaps the best part is that a person who sees their spiritual poverty as a source of joy rather than a threat to their ego becomes impervious to the attacks of the devil. He preys on the ego, but is unable to operate in a humble soul.