Typical comments range from "There's too much emphasis about sin", "my sins put Jesus on the Cross", "I'm unworthy", "I'm a sinner" to "it's all negative".

This guilt-based old religion mentality, ties us into a God who is tough as old boots and glares down from above noting our every wrong move.

Such held over views from childhood, disrupts us from responding to a God who lavishly loves us to bits, each other and ourselves.

Can you imagine that!

The reality

Sin is real. Grace is real.

The Hebrew understanding of sin translates into khata, which means a failure to fulfil to be truly human. To ‘miss the mark' in living and loving as God's image and likeness as fully human alive men and women.

Sin is about immaturity. The consequences of sin in its various levels of seriousness causes injury to another and to our natural world.

To sin therefore, is that behaviour where we have disrespected relationships, failed to act justly and trashed the environment.

So to dismiss sin, or replace the word altogether with "wrong choices", is to ignore an innate truth of our human condition.

St Paul "gets it"

St Paul gradually realises, as we all do at some point, that we are contradictory figures.

We do live in tension between what is truth or untruth, what is healthy or unhealthy or what is life giving or life draining. He names this an inward struggle.

He says "I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.

"When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me". (Romans 7:19-20)

Yet St Paul isn't on his own. I can identify with what he says - and reckon some of you can to.

Hard to believe that Paul, once named Saul, was a predator killer of Christians. Yet only owning his sin could he come to recognise that his behaviour originated from the Fall.

In the beginning

This Genesis story attempts to offer an explanation in how sin entered the world impacting on our beingness as women and men.

How Eve and Adam were in the very beginning living in right relationships with each other, comfortable in full view of God and in the garden called Eden.

All was blissfully heavenly.

Then antipathy entered breaking the friendship and leaving us all vulnerable to the inclination of sin.

But evil wasn't going to have the last say. God's plan of recovery restored this friendship when Jesus became the willing reconciliatory sacrifice.

It was sin that was destroyed by the cross. Grace never entered the world because grace always was.

Life and liberty

Back to St Paul. He so rightly says in Galatians 2:20. I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with life of Christ lives in me.

Easter changed absolutely everything. The Cross becoming a symbol of liberty enabling us to become our baptismal selves and not victims to this ancestral sin.

That's St Paul's point: - that God is good and not jealous as the serpent claims.

That is why we don't have to be joyless or slaves to our false selves.

As Pope Francis suggests, we don't have to look like we've come back from a funeral or live lives that seem like Lent without Easter (Evangelii Gaudium 6,10) and he is right.

It's often when we come to that place of self-truth, in recognising where we ‘missed the mark' do we encounter simultaneously God's giftedness in Jesus.

Can we name what hampers us from being truly human as women and men of God and being created solely to be God's own image? Can we name those occasions where we have ‘come up short' in our ‘being' the Glory of God.

Becoming our true selves

Pentecost Sunday holds the power to burst with life in our lives. To get excited about who we are.

"We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being." said Pope Francis in article 8 in Evangelii Gaudium.

The Redemption becomes the relationship to continually become a new creation converting over and over and over again to become our whole person.

That we don't have to choose sin. We can say no when critically pulling another down to boost ourselves up. We can so no to blaming another for our mistakes.

We don't have to lose our rag at another. We don't have to kill off those of little account. We can stop and attend to a need we see in front of us.

By integrating sin, by owning our ‘stuff' we are simultaneously claiming God's investment in us - God's intense hope and trust in us to be God's image.

You have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-11)

And that's worth getting excited about.

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• Sue Seconi (pictured) is a writer and a parishioner from the Catholic Parish of Whanganui - te Parihi katorika ki Whanganui.

He is encouraging Christians to create bridges of hope rather than hostility.

The comments were made by Pope Francis during his weekly general audience on November 6.

"Paul does not look at the city of Athens and the pagan world with hostility but with the eyes of faith," he said.

"And this makes us question our way of looking at our cities: Do we observe them with indifference? With contempt? Or with the faith that recognizes children of God in the midst of the anonymous crowds?"

Francis said the paganism of the Greeks did not cause St Paul to flee.

Instead, "Paul observes the culture and environment of Athens from a contemplative gaze that sees God dwelling in their homes, in their streets and squares."

"In the heart of one of the most famous institutions of the ancient world, the Areopagus, he realizes an extraordinary example of inculturation of the message of the faith," the pope said.

"He proclaims Jesus Christ to idol worshippers and doesn't do it by attacking them, but by making himself a 'pontiff,' a builder of bridges."

Francis said St Paul engages with empathy and it is in this way that he builds bridges of hope with culture, with those who do not believe or with those who have a different creed from ours.

Calling on tradition, Francis, cited Pope Benedict XVI, saying that acting with empathy is not proclaiming the unknown god, but rather "proclaiming him whom people do not know and yet do know - the unknown-known".

According to tradition, St. Paul preached to the Athenians at the Areopagus, an area that was not only a symbol of Greek political and cultural life but also the location of an altar to the "unknown god."

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Preaching at a Mass at the Saint Martha residence where he lives on September 2, the Pope said people were amazed at Jesus' preaching because his word "had authority".

Jesus' authority came from a "special anointing of the Holy Spirit", the Pope continued.

Turning to the first reading of the day, the Pope cited St Paul, saying that we do not speak of these things "with words evoked by human wisdom".

St Paul did not preach because he took a course at a pontifical university, such as the Lateran or the Gregorian, Pope Francis said.

The source of his preaching was "the Holy Spirit", not human wisdom.

A person might have five theology degrees, the Holy Father said, but not have the Spirit of God.

"Perhaps you will be a great theologian, but you are not a Christian, because you do not have the Spirit of God! That which gives authority, that which gives you your identity and the Holy Spirit, the anointing of the Holy Spirit."

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