Lately I’ve found it hard to write, or even to think clearly. I’ve felt disoriented and paralyzed, like a caver who’s lost the map of the caverns he’s been crawling through. I’ve been reading books about politics and history by authors like Howard Zinn and Robert Fisk, people who aren’t interested in re-telling the self-righteous fables that make up so much of our collective memory of the past. The problem is that when you strip history of its fables, you’re left with an abattoir, the unending story of “power without conscience” slaughtering “conscience without power.”

Of course, the mighty have always tried to confine the butchery of history to the neighbourhoods of the weak. In North America, that’s meant sacrificing the poor for the sake of the wealthy, especially the poor of colour, and of them, especially the Black and the Red. On a global level, it’s meant sacrificing the South for the sake of the North. This strategy was never sustainable, and now it’s faltering. The walls keeping history in its place, the walls of capitalism, are crumbling beneath the onslaught of peak oil and climate change, pollution and corruption, resource depletion and runaway population growth. In the face of this terror I find myself immobilized, but even if I wasn’t, where on Earth could I run? History isn’t just coming for us, it is us: it’s both our vulnerability to injustice and our complicity in it, and it’s the ease with which our vulnerability and complicity trade places. As the protagonist of the 1995 movie The Addiction put it, “Our addiction is evil. The propensity for this evil lies in our weakness before it.”

The problem of history is the problem of evil, or perhaps the problem of sin. Sin, as originally conceptualized in the major monotheistic traditions, isn’t about breaking rules or committing particular offenses; it’s about estrangement from God, which is religious-speak for estrangement from perfection. To be finite, to be contingent and limited, is to be imperfect. Whereas perfection is an eternal and unchanging ideal, creatures like you and I are but momentary eddies in vast currents of time and circumstance. To say that humanity is sinful is to say that humanity is entropic, that we are all irrational and ignorant, confused and unjust. Because sin is a defining feature of the human condition, sin necessarily saturates every human organization. Since history is the story of human organizations, of tribes and nations, states and classes, history is the story of sin.

The festival of Ashura is relevant here. Ashura is the annual Shi’i Muslim commemoration of the massacre of Husain and the family of the Prophet Mohammad by the forces of Caliph Yazid I on the plain of Kerbela in 680 CE. Shi’i Muslims have always believed that the Caliphate should have stayed within the Prophet’s family. In line with this belief, the Shi’i of the Kufah proclaimed Husain, the Prophet’s grandson, as the rightful Caliph and invited him to their city. As Husain and his family travelled to Kufah, however, the governor intimidated the Kufans into renouncing Husain. Hoping that the sight of the Prophet’s family on the march in service to Islamic ideals would re-unite the bitterly divided Muslim community, Husain decided not to turn back. He died with his infant son in his arms, after watching the rest of his family fall beneath Muslim swords. The point of Ashura is to remind Shi’i Muslims of the injustice, the sin, at the heart of history.

Ashura shows that Shi’i Islam and Christianity have much in common: Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe once said that the central doctrine of Christianity is that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Husain would likely concur.

If we refuse to recognize sin, we wrap ourselves in false innocence and abdicate our responsibility for the evil in our souls and in our world. In I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008), Chris Hedges writes, “To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic. . . . We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. Sin reminds us that all human beings are flawed—though not equally flawed. Sin is the acceptance that there will never be a final victory over evil, that the struggle for morality is a battle that will always have to be fought.”

Perceiving the fundamental nature of sin disrupts a person’s symbolic universe, the matrix of meanings and values that gives us a sense of identity and a consensual reality, the illusory mental world that Buddhists call “samsara.” Our symbolic universes are primarily designed to help us survive, not to help us discern truth. As a result, they’re heavily-laden with convenient fictions; in many ways, they’re nothing but convenient fictions. The revelation of sin smashes the thin ice of samsara, exposing the glorious abyss of the Real hidden below.

Where the monotheist sees sin, the Buddhist sees emptiness: the two terms may well be interchangeable. Perhaps this is why the revelation of sin so often leaves us feeling disconnected and unreal, as though our vitality has been drained away. In Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness (Broadway Books, 1998), Dr. Mark Epstein relates the way the Cambridge-educated lama Gelek Rinpoche described this experience. Gelek Rinpoche said, “These are like sparks of emptiness. . . . These are minds striking against emptiness, like a blacksmith strikes against his anvil. The hollowness you describe, the deficiency and distress, these are like sparks of emptiness, untrained minds trying to grasp emptiness.”

In A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack (State University of New York Press, 2002), philosophy professor David Roy argues that the history of Western civilization can be understood as an ongoing, futile search for salvation from sin, from emptiness, from our lack of perfection. Because sin defines us, the search for salvation continued long after the Enlightenment, when sin, as a religious concept, fell into disrepute. The Enlightenment simply relocated the arena of salvation from Heaven to Earth, and repositioned human reason as its agent in place of God. For the heirs of the Enlightenment, sin is merely a temporary state of ignorance, to be banished in our progress towards a secular utopia. As John Gray points out in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Doubleday 2007), the new millennium is strewn with the ruins of secular utopian projects. Roy, Gray, and Hedges suggest that because secular utopianism fails to understand the essential nature of sin, its projects are always doomed. The only salvation to be found is the realization that there is no salvation: we can no more escape our emptiness than we can escape space and time. Rather than trying to hide from what we are, it makes more sense to see our emptiness, to see the Real, for what it is.

Our major religious traditions all make the same essential case: we should recognize our sin, however it’s defined, and through this recognition cultivate caution, courage, and compassion. To recognize sin is to see the desert of history beneath every mirage, and to feel compelled to dig some wells for those who thirst. It’s foolish to try to flee the desert, for the desert is endless; and besides, no matter how barren and savage it is, it’s the natural habitat of the human spirit.

Because sin is a mind-shattering sight to behold, it’s best to train our minds to be able to gaze sanely upon it. I suspect that this is the true purpose of prayer, meditation, and ethical discipline: these practices aren’t meant to supplicate a deity, relax the body, or score points with heaven, but rather to help us perceive our own foundations and to act accordingly.

The practices don’t come easily. Instead, they take time and effort and care to master. During the process, the mind continues to hammer the anvil, throwing up sparks of emptiness, sparks of sin, sparks that illuminate the darkness, sparks that may themselves provide the enlightenment we seek.