(This post is part of a short series we’re chronicling based on the individual points of the JTN manifesto. It is also material that may be familiar to some readers, as it contains a large section of material I published elsewhere on the importance of allowing ourselves to “sit in our sin.”)
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The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I’ll be honest.
I can’t say I’ve spent much time in my life owning up to the things I have done wrong.
Yes, there are things I wasn’t proud to have done (many things!). But somehow I always found a way to quickly explain away my having done them.
Usually I did this by believing myself to be the victim. If another person brought some wrong against me, then I believed anything I did — either to retaliate or to participate in the wrongdoing, too — exempted me from judgment.
I had a culpability problem.
What’s more, I believed God saw things my way in this, too. He could see the root causes motivating all I did. He could see my sins as mere attempts to survive in an environment. In my mind, God understood, took pity on me, and gladly let me off the hook.
I believed all these things — sometimes consciously, but mostly unconsciously — for almost the whole of my life. Then last summer I had an opportunity to begin facing my sin for what it really was (and is).
It all began with Gandhi.
As part of a two-day silent retreat I took for a school requirement, I cracked open Gandhi’s mammoth-size autobiography and began to read.
I was not even 10 pages into the book when I came to a section describing his early marriage. Nestled inside these few pages of description, he made a passing comment about an incident that had happened between him and his father that he said he would describe in greater detail later in the book. He used the word “shame” in connection with this incident, and he said he still felt the flooding of this shame each time he recalled the incident to mind.
Such strong language for a small, passing comment caught my attention.
Then, about 20 pages later, he related the specifics of this incident. It concerned a way he had behaved on the night of his father’s death. He was not proud at all of what he’d done. He called it his “double shame” and said it was “a blot [he had] never been able to efface or forget.”
Gandhi’s genuine, enduring remorse for his sins astounded me. Here was a man, arguably one of the most holy men ever to have walked this earth, who genuinely grieved the ways his humanity had ever brought harm to another or dishonored another person in some way.
I found myself touched in a very deep place by this story, too, because of the similarity this incident carried to an incident I faced in my own life on the night of my grandfather’s death. (I wrote about this incident here.)
Then slowly, as I sat with this memory surrounding the night of my grandfather’s death, another memory of something I’d done even earlier in my life began to surface.
I was eight or nine years old, and I’d done something really cruel to someone I loved. I’d inflicted a rare breed of physical pain on this person, and in the split-second that followed my having done it, I remember reeling in a bit of shock that I could possibly have done such a thing. But after that initial moment of shock, I resolutely shook the remorse away and reared up in self-righteous justification: this person had wronged me, so they deserved what I had done to them.
Slowly, more and more memories of my wrongdoings rose to the surface. I started scrawling them in a list in my journal. A long, specific list. A dreadfully incomplete list. A list that could have filled an entire journal if I’d gone on long enough to let it.
A bit later, somewhat spent, I turned to a clean page and wrote the following:
I have only just begun, but this feels like a purging process and also an exercise in truth. Gandhi would approve, I’m sure.
I will probably continue adding to this list — continue “sitting with my sin” — for the next period of time. It feels important to do so. Perhaps when I am finished I will sit with each instance and try to ascertain what motive lay at their roots. Perhaps there are common threads. Perhaps they all share the same thread. Perhaps I will learn much about human nature and original sin by examining my own catalog of sin.
I’ve come to believe the road to nonviolence must be marked by an honest reckoning with our own sin. This is what helps us see that we, too, have contributed to the sin, chaos, and devastation of this world. I remember being profoundly arrested by this truth after I spent time listing my own catalog of sins. I began to see how much I, too, have been part of the problem.
In the near future, after we finish exploring each point of the JTN manifesto in greater detail, we will begin a recurring feature here called Repentance Thursdays. This is going to be a place for us to repent of our own violences of heart, to the extent each of us is comfortable doing so. More details to come on this, but I wanted to give you a heads-up that it’s in our future.
In the meantime, let’s hear your thoughts on the subject:
How in touch have you been with your sin and violence of heart over the years?
Ooohf. This one is tough. This goes well beyond the hypothetical, the theoretical, and touches on the mess in my own heart.
I once made a similar list. It was difficult to begin but I found that once I recalled one sin, one act of violence, it seemed that dozens of others crowed in on the heels of the first ones I thought of. I filled pages and pages. And the list was still a completely incomplete rendering of the wrongdoing I had done in my life. Toward others. Toward myself.
I suddenly felt like the prodigal son: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.
I find myself in a similar place now, preparing for the sacrament confession (also called the sacrament of reconciliation, a term which I like a good deal) and having more sins to add to my list: big, red-letter ones. I have inflicted harm, I have done violence, and no matter what excuses I might have lined up, no matter what the mitigating circumstances were … I bear the responsibility for those. Recollecting these moments, I remember feeling justified in having done what I did; now, I feel as though I would have lost nothing if I had refrained from doing the wrong thing, or in some cases, doing the right thing that in the moment, I had failed to do.
Hearing our pastor talk about the parable of the prodigal son yesterday, it hit me in a way altogether fresh and real and new so that I couldn’t stop weeping: I need forgiveness. And I need to forgive. The Holy Spirit was digging way deep and I realized how badly I needed the experience of both: to be forgiven and to forgive. To sit with my sin, but then to hand it over, let it go, and ask for God’s help to amend my ways.
The thought of being reconciled? To God? To my brother/my sister? Now that … that’s altogether amazing. And worth sitting in a pile of dust and ashes for awhile.
I love the way you see things, feel things, process things, live things, my friend. Thanks for sharing this part of your journey here.
I really appreciate that perspective you share in retrospect: that you wouldn’t have lost anything if you’d refrained from doing the wrong thing or had reached out to do the right thing in a particular moment. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how closely we clutch to whatever we think we need to save in the moments we do wrong or fail to do right? There’s something there in that moment we’re trying valiantly to protect inside ourselves … but when we have an inner strength and surety that only God can provide, somehow we loosen our clutch on those things and it becomes easier to regard others in love or to extend our hand more readily to help or lift up.
I’d like to live from that place more often. That’s what this journey is about, after all.
Thank you for sharing the deeply personal experience you had in church yesterday and the revelation of needing to be forgiven and forgive. It sounds like it was a powerful moment for you.
Love you.
Hey Christianne
I am just now making it over here. So, this blog is not for the faint of heart. Actually it cuts right to the heart, bypassing all the superficial nonsense that we entertain from day to day. Maybe I should have used the word trivial rather than nonsense, but you get my point.
Honesty I can’t go here right now, Christianne. I have too much going on in my mind. I will tell you one drastic way that this blog (your life) has changed me though. Yesterday in my speech class the instructor passed out a sheet of 10 different scenarios each having a persuasive argument.
This is for a speech assignment and we had to take a stand on each of those things. One was about killing a prisoner after 3 yrs on death row and stopping the yrs of appeal. It suggested a 3 yr max limit. As much as last yr I would have said I agree. Fry them.
Now, I would never say that. You have given me a whole new perspective on the value for each human life. I don’t believe we (as humans) have the right to violate the sanctity of human life no matter what another person has done. Thank you.
Wow, Tammy. That is a really powerful story, the way your perspective has changed over this past year. Thank you for sharing that.
*sigh* so many thoughts and so little time to say them all. Sufficient, at this point (since I’ve had the window open for 2 days now!) to say that I’m pondering quite a lot here. Thank you for putting all of this into words.
I’m glad it’s given you much to think about, Sarah! No worries on having little time to share many thoughts. You’re quite busy growing new life around that household of yours these days! :)
Honestly, I’ve probably barely scratched the surface. When feelings of shame come up for me, I literally cringe.
I hear you, Swirly. My experience with “journalling out my sins” last summer was my first real reckoning with the darkness inside me. It was too easy to cringe and look away before then because it was too painful to face.
It takes time, gentleness, courage. I am still learning this, and have a long way to go yet.