the drama of forgiveness
I recently read The Crucible for the first time. It took my breath away, with its relentless portrayal of humanity and religion gone horribly, madly wrong.
The copy I read included some extended passages of commentary by Arthur Miller, and it was in one of those passages that I came on a sentence that has followed me around since I read it:
These people had no ritual for the washing away of sins.
Miller suggests that this lack of a ritual of forgiveness leads inevitably to hypocrisy. He was talking about the Puritans of New England, and in many ways they are the spiritual forefathers of our evangelical culture. Catholicism has at least two rituals for washing away sins – the mass and the confessional. But in Puritanism and evangelicalism, we’re not too keen on rituals.
We like to believe we have a higher view of forgiveness than in Catholicism. All our sins – past, present, future – are washed away at the moment of conversion, as an act of unconditional grace. It’s a wonderful, liberating idea, a grand and high and beautiful theology.
The problem is that in the course of day-to-day life we gather guilt and shame like moss, because our days are full of selfishness and pettiness, weakness of will, failures of love and courage and generosity. We feel the grubbiness of our hearts, and we long to be washed clean. We try valiantly to remember our high and beautiful theology, to remember that this, too, has already been forgiven. But it often doesn’t get past our heads and into our hearts, into our emotional and psychological felt experience. We don’t feel forgiven or clean or free. So we carry around a secret bundle of guilt and feel like the world’s biggest hypocrites.
I still believe in the beautiful idea of total and unconditional forgiveness. But I’m learning that forgiveness needs to be received as a fresh gift for the sins of this week, this day. It needs to be reaffirmed and renewed in our felt experience
Rituals are powerfully effective at reaching our deeper parts. They involve our bodies as well as our minds. They involve other people and not just our solitary introspective prayers. We confess our sins together and then kneel to receive fresh mercy for today as we taste the bread and wine and take them into the core of our being. We speak our guilt aloud to another person, and hear them speak words of absolution, announce in the name of Jesus that we are forgiven and free.
I’m enough of a puritanical evangelical to hold on with all my heart to the conviction that these rituals don’t have to happen in a set manner, in a church, under the watchful eye of a priest. They can happen in a thousand creative ways – we can write our sins on paper and pin them to a wooden cross, burn them in a fire, shred them in a shredder. Any of us can speak the words of absolution for each other, in any time and place.
But I wonder if we need to recover the place of ritual, of dramatising and acting out our confession and forgiveness. Communion needs to be a place where we not only remember a forgiveness received in the dim and distant past, but where we receive fresh grace for today. And we need to recover the practice of confession, not in a darkened confessional, but in homes and pubs and parks, wherever we can find enough time and peace to speak our guilt aloud and hear a friend speak words of freedom and grace. Then our hearts might have a chance to catch up with our heads, and we might actually start to feel and live and look like forgiven people.
Nelly And I says:
March 10th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
we do tend to overact a little to ritual, somehow smelling out some kind of papal heresy at the slightest hint of symbolism. I grew up in the C of I (which in our family we jokingly refer to as the thin green white and gold line between geneva and rome…)
the older i get the more i like the symbolism i think. sometimes the abstractions don’t seem quiet enough (to quote david bazan…)
Glenn says:
March 17th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
you’re enough of an evangelical to see confession happening in pubs etc….I’m still enough of a catholic to believe that specific religious ritual pronouncing the past, present and future forgiveness is necessary.
I wonder when Jesus said to Peter that the sins he loosed on earth were loosed in heaven is the pronouncement of a psychological truth that we need someone, human, in authority who will pronounce God’s forgiveness, because we need to hear it from another human being.
Remember Schindler’s List and the scene where the camp commandant looked at himself in the mirror in his bathroom, touched his reflection with his finger and said…I forgive you. There’s a pause and then he examines his nails, picks up a gun and kills the boy. Self-pronouncement doesn’t work. Nor I think, would an informal word from a mate over a guinness. Ritual formalises it.
Good post Jayber.
small corner says:
March 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I agree on the ritual stuff – apparently the majority of people always put their socks on starting with the same foot, brush their teeth in the same way, drink their tea from a favourite mug… We thrive on patterns.
Our problem is maybe that, once its named ‘in’ (eg pinning paper to cross, burning, shredding…), we get bored with it and move on; that nowadays we get much sicker, much quicker of ways of doing things – think how quickly worship songs go in and out of the ‘church charts’ these days. So, where a certain ritual once worked for a church for decades (centuries?!), today’s church might need to be more and more (and more) creative.
I’ve been thinking a bit about language (bear with me…) and how its becoming more and more slippery – words/phrases lose their power with overuse. This is similar I guess: do we stick with the word (or ritual) we’ve always used and help people rediscover what we mean by it, or do we rename (recreate/repackage) the concept in a way that is better understood/engaged with by others?
Am I making sense?!
Then…
“We speak our guilt aloud to another person, and hear them speak words of absolution, announce in the name of Jesus that we are forgiven and free.”
As a person increasingly aware of the helpfulness of verbal processing, this rings out clear and long and loud!
In the act of hearing someone ‘confess’ I suppose there’s a temptation (an uninvited inclination, even) to criticise, to judge, to love less… But how incredible would it be to acknowledge that the hearer – just as much as the one confessing – is, in the name of Jesus Christ, forgiven and free. Levelled at the foot of the cross.
Community, community, community!!! Let’s DO it!
jaybercrow says:
March 22nd, 2008 at 3:58 am
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Nelly – I’m realising more and more how much of our evangelical spirituality is still in reaction against medieval Catholicism. I guess we need to grow up and decide what we’re for, rather than what we’re against…
Glenn – I agree about the need to hear absolution from another human being. I still see the value of a more informal confession over a Guinness, but I think you’re right that sometimes we need the more specific, formalised ritual. Thanks for making me pause and reconsider.
Rachel – I’m all for finding creative ways to act out these rituals of forgiveness, and translating them into forms that work in our culture. At the same time, I’m nervous about the constant restlessness that always wants novelty and gets tired of the familiar. The constant desire for new songs is a good example. Creativity is vital, but a restless chasing after novelty is exhausting, and can be arrogant in its rejection of anything old. There can be real peace in humbly entering into an ancient ritual (or song) that’s been pretty much done that way for centuries. So I guess we need discernment to know when this thirst for new forms is creativity, and when it’s restless arrogance? I’d love to hear what you think. Great comment.
David Campton says:
March 24th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Ritual does not need to be repetitive… but the formalised, enacted nature of rituals helps to give concrete form to deeper, more inward truths. The mistake of some of the reformers was to throw the baby out with the bath-water… they didn’t need to erase ritual from our spiritual resources, but reform them… and continue to creatively reform them, so that they continue to come fresh to the hearts and minds of people. Saying that, from time to time I find it refreshing to share in a liturgy that is more than 15 minutes old.
But never was there a more important area for reflection than how we can make the concept of “forgiveness” more concrete in the hearts and minds of people.
Forgiveness is central to the process of breaking the cycle of recrimination and revenge, guilt and self-loathing. It is theoretically central to Christian thought and practice, yet whilst we may pontificate to people about it from pulpits, we haven’t done enough to offer people practical resources to make it a reality.
Thanks for this reflection.
Carrie O'Hara says:
March 28th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
A late comer to this particular post (and all things Jaybercrow: but you were given a huge reccomendation from Lily Todd and Smoothstones…)
As an times spiritually struggling agnostic (but a christened Presbyterian) I often feel the need to confess to my many sins, to feel absolution; can easily understand the merits of the Catholic confessional and yet have little understanding of the Catholic faith beyond sectarian jokes and politicised conversations.
The non-believer has no real concept of the ‘beautiful all-encompassing grace of forgiveness’ you so beautifully describe which leaves us all the further from forgiveness and perhaps faith.
small corner says:
April 1st, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I’m not ignoring the invitation for more thoughts – a half-written blog post response awaits completion… You’ve got me thinking bigger!
David Campton says:
April 1st, 2008 at 11:06 pm
On a related theme see
http://adamjcopeland.com/2008/04/01/er-theology-a-chaplain-and-post-modern-counseling/
QMonkey says:
April 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Jayber… happy April. I asked you a question once in a comment somewhere…. along the lines of … Did you acknowledge such a thing of ‘bad’ faith or over-faith? As in, is ‘faith’ always a good thing? Does it always lead to enlightenment re: existence/meaning. If not, then in what circumstances can someone have too much faith? I was interested in getting your answer -- or at least having the debate.
QMonkey says:
April 4th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
If I may be a cheeky monkey (its friday)… you do of course make the Chestertonite mistake of saying…. Sin is obvious and doesn’t need proved… now let’s talk about the consequences of that (forgiveness etc). You will be happy to be compared to GK
… you’re welcome (and forgiven)
jaybercrow says:
April 4th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Comparison to GK is the highest of compliments…
I love reading some of the accounts of Chesterton’s debates with well-known atheists like HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. They were neat, serious men, and would come out and read a very careful, logical, serious speech about their optimisitic, progressive view of human nature.
Chesterton would then come out, pull some crumpled notes out of his pocket, and proceed to not only tackle his opponents’ points with great intelligence, but also win over the audience with his immense childlike delight and humour and joy – all while talking about such things as sin and guilt and judgment and redemption.
Chesterton on Shaw: “He is like the Venus de Milo – everything there is of him is admirable.”
Apparently its officially cheekiness Friday…
QMonkey says:
April 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I was gonna make a sabre thrust along the lines of … “Hitler could hold a room pretty well, too!” Thus linking the jayber in ways depths never before plumbed. I must however confess to being a GKC fan -- I find him really really wrong (mostly in his assumptions and starting points) but forthright in spirit of humility and humour . I also admire his love, respect and friendship for the likes of Shaw -- learning from and entertaining rather than constantly converting. It’s a spirit and level of debate which is missing these days. In my recent non-faith state I find myself not being able to abide CS, but still enjoy and respect GK. Which is ironic because CS is pretty much a rehashing of GK for the (non catholic) masses (in my humble opinion)