BREAKING BAD:  ORIGINAL SIN, ORIGINALLY DONE

In his definition of sin, Frederick Buechner gets quickly and gracefully to the heart of the matter:  “The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery.  Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing at all is left.” (Beyond Words, Harper Collins, 2004, p. 368-369)

“What’s so original about sin?” my old friend Dee Edwards used to ask. Nothing really. Sin is old stuff. It has been around a long time. Sin and its centrifugal power to scatter and decimate lives, communities, churches and nations is the oldest story there is. Its telling and retelling is the heart of much of our art and literature, though many would prefer to call it something else. Hubris, perhaps. Or amoral greed. Maybe unbridled ambition or the lust for power run amok. Fine.

I guess there is something a little distasteful in talking about sin, or, more precisely put, original sin. The power and relevance of the term gets lost in tides of shaming Sunday school lessons, stiff-collared pulpit rants, glad-handing character assassinations of our evangelical neighbors next door, and the tortuous brow beating of the life-killing Calvinist peckerwoods in white socks.

A much cooler and hipper version of the tale is found in AMC’s Breaking Bad whose fifth season finale launches here in a couple of weeks. Millions of us have watched the centrifugal meltdown of Walter White over the past four years, and it’s been hard for us to take our eyes off it. To say that it is compelling doesn’t even capture the half of it. Perhaps mesmerizing is a better term to describe it.

The emergence of Heisenberg out of the ashes of Walter White provokes an interesting issue: Has this character lost himself or found himself? Has he become the real Walter White by shedding his vestiges, or has someone altogether different evolved? Has Walter lost himself or found himself? Has he evolved or devolved? Aberration or self-realization?

The theologians of the Reformation coined the term ‘original’ in their consideration of presence and power of sin in the human condition, not to trap it in and endless and stupid debate about spiritual DNA, but to say simply, this crap goes deep. Whether it is present at the time of our conception and birth is not so much the issue. No matter how great our nurture, how loving our home, our instructive our religious training, how disciplined our moral instructions, how nice our disposition, how positive our role-modeling, we will more than likely, given half a chance, ‘centrifigate.’  Our spinout will probably not be on scale with Walter’s, but it may leave us asking, “Is this who I really am, or do I need to return to who I really am?”

Discuss.