On Forgiveness
Singing the Wakeful Anguish of the Soul
I could not feel like I was enough until I learned to ask for forgiveness.
About a month ago, in a conversation with Caleb Flores, I tried and failed to articulate a point. Several days later, I did the same thing in a conversation with my sister. I'm going to try to clear it up here.
I was trying to talk about the (Ortho)Catholic insistence on asking for forgiveness. Rather than being an obsession with feeling guilty, I argued, it was instead a constant practice of being forgiven.
That's true, but it's not the whole truth. Rather, what happens in working toward this Grace is the admission that I need forgiveness in the first place.
Before my ongoing conversion, I generally felt that all of my actions could more or less be contextualized as the rational behavior of a being in the world. (I still think the same thing now, albeit with kaleidoscopic color.) While I certainly lamented the negative effects of my ill behavior, I nevertheless fit in into a narrative of reasonable (but not radical) acceptance.
I was failing to do the internal work of transformation. Though I frequently had a coherent position of understanding who I was, how the behavior was bad, and what better behavior looked like going forward, I was not opening and surrendering to the fullness of the All-that-Is, Theos, my Source and End, in whom I live and move and have my Being.
About a week after said conversations, I was graced with this passage from Dr. Timothy Patitsas’ Ethics of Beauty:
"We are 'the sinner' not because we are worthless but because 'my brother is my life.' I want to take the fall for him because I love him. That's all; calling ourselves 'the sinner' has very little to do with how sinful we've actually been."
Positioning myself as an imperfect person in the company of all other imperfect people helps me to shed my Pride and stop performing as though I have something to prove. It helps me to see that the divinity within me, which is boundless and infinite, exhibits its perfection in this finite world not by being grand, but by being real.
A little later, Patitsas furthers this:
“Creation is repenting from its first moment, for repentance does not require the prerequisite of sin. It simply means that we put our attention still more deeply upon Christ, to love him much more than we have before. Of course, compared to that ‘more deeply,’ the prior state looks like sin, but this is partly relative.”
This turning toward the Person of the Trinity to ask for forgiveness takes my solitary ego and positions it in relation to the infinite. This turning positions my uniqueness within an incomprehensible vastness and contextualizes it as the incomprehensible tininess that it is, a single flower or snowflake blooming and disappearing in an instant of eternal time.
And it empowers me to share this consciousness in loving-kindness to all I meet or know.
At Mass every Sunday we pray:
I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned. In my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault; therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sister, to pray for me to the Lord our God.
As I ask for the prayers of the Blessed Mother and my fellow sapientes, I'm also praying for them, creating a feedback loop of beneficent participation in the divine, mystical body of the church.
Like a poem who finally finds a reader, I am, momentarily, absolutely complete.