Forgiveness (not the Rod Stewart song, God forbid, this is something else).

Recently I had a conversation with a friend in which we both raised a bunch of things that we’d been upset with each other about for a while.  It was really good to be heard and for him to apologize, but what surprised me is that the real healing for me came in hearing how I had hurt him, in apologizing and in him offering his forgiveness.

This struck me as really significant.  We all have the desire to be forgiven when we have done something wrong, and the desire to know when we’ve done something wrong so we can repent of it.  True repentance is very different from the sort of free-floating guilt and shame that all of us deal with to some level or another, and which can be quite debilitating.  This is a particularly significant delineation in the Christian concept of sin.  I am a sinner (original sin, which afflicts us from our birth into Adam and Eve’s legacy) and I have and do sin (specific sins of commission and ommission).  But Christ’s death for me has wiped away the stain of original sin, and all I must do to receive forgiveness for my own sin is to ask.  If we have repented of our known sin, and asked the Spirit to convict us of any sin we’re unaware of — or too stubborn to admit to ourselves and God — then we are all set!  i.e. clean, forgiven, justified and pure in the eyes of God.  That nagging feeling that we are bad, or that what we do is bad or, worse, not good enough is NOT the voice of God.  The conviction of the Spirit is a clear, specific voice, and resolves into joy when we repent.

Thank God for forgiveness.

And on a lighter note, I continue to enjoy Boston’s billboards:

I am here to kneel.

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel.

This is an exerpt from Eliot’s The Four Quartets, and it is a vivid description of the experience I have been having this past year, which I can also find described in books like The Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross.

The Latin for “dark” is obsura — obscure. We don’t understand why the removal of our joy, our peace, our dearly loved connection with our Lord is necessary, but we trust that it is. We have prayed to give Him everything, and it turns out that the taking away of everything includes the things we depended on for our faith. These things are not He. As a character in a Charles Williams novel says, “Neither is this Thou.”

We wanted to live for Him. We find we can barely live at all. We wanted to conquer the world for His Kingdom. We find we can not even conquer ourselves.

Even this is too much explanation. It is obscure. I am not here to instruct myself, nor to carry report. I am here to kneel.

*Thanks to Sleight of Hand for sending me to this passage.

Seen on a Boston billboard

“You are not bored.  You are boring.”

I don’t know what it was trying to sell, but I think it makes a good point.  I have always felt that the world is a fascinating enough place, and the human mind a vast enough plain for exploration that boredom is unreasonable.