Grace is the unconditional gift of God's self to us. That gift comes in the creation, the redemption, and the fulfillment of the world. Today we can receive this gift only by trust. Faith is our unconditional receiving of God's love. Faith is trust.
Faith is the delicate balance between giving and receiving.
And the destruction of that delicate balance is sin. Nothing more trivializes sin than our thinking that sin is a particular act. But in understanding the faith we must be more concerned with that condition we call sin before we deal with the acts of sin. Sin is the condition which produces sins as individual acts. It is important that you realize that this distinction is at work in our tradition every day.